When Summit Entertainment brought Chris Nolan’s Memento to the American Film Market in 2000, the British- born director was unknown.

The screenplay Nolan wrote for his second feature proved puzzling as it wove together two timelines, one in reverse chronological order, to tell the story of a man with short-term memory loss trying to piece together the truth behind his wife’s murder.

Producer Aaron Ryder, calling it “perhaps the most innovative script I had ever seen,” brought it to Newmarket Films, which agreed to finance the project on a budget that was reported as around $5 million.

Newmarket failed to interest an American distributor, and so the company decided to release it itself domestically, with Summit handling international sales.

“The thing was that even though on some level it felt like gobbledegook as I was reading it, because you got the sense that things were all over the place, what was really clear was the emotional journey of the character,” Pearce later told GQ. “

As the actor that’s the only thing I need to latch onto in order to do my job. … Once it all made sense to me, I then had to put it all away and let it all go and just treat every scene as its own little thing because I wasn’t supposed to remember what had happened before and obviously had no clue.”

When Memento debuted at the Venice International Film Festival later in 2000, an enthusiastic buzz began building, which continued through the film’s appearances at Deauville, Toronto and Sundance. When it opened

theatrically, Memento went on to gross $25.5 million in North America and $40 million worldwide, serving notice that Nolan was a rule-breaking director on the rise.

It was an original movie but not many could predict that Nolan would become one of the greatest and most successful filmmakers ever.