![]() ![]() Then the killer disposes of evidence in equally frenzied fashion, washing the victim’s hair, scrubbing his DNA from under her fingernails, etc. Skjoldbjærg opens his movie with raw, grainy footage of the crime in question, hands reaching from behind frame to throttle a terrified woman until her head slams on a protruding nail and she goes stiff. Stylistically, however, the two films sharply diverge. The most meaningful moral change, involves making the protagonist’s partner an old friend complicit in his transgression, introducing the tacit possibility that Pacino’s detective fulfills a subconscious desire when he accidentally kills the other cop. Only a few tweaks change the plot in any way, mainly to add or expand action, differentiate the story. Slowly, the titular insomnia caused by the never-setting sun and suffocating guilt drive both men to the brink of mental collapse. When they try to spring a trap for the killer, each detectives accidentally kills his partner and finds himself drawn into a nerve-wracking blackmail scheme with the murderer who witnesses the inadvertent manslaughter. The filmmaker was Christopher Nolan, and his work on Insomnia (2002), when taken with Memento, set him on the path to becoming a blockbuster juggernaut.īut how does Nolan’s film compare to Skjoldbjærg’s original? In some ways, the two match almost exactly: both movies concern a disgraced forensics expert (Stellan Skarsgård’s Engström in the original, Al Pacino’s Dormer in Insomnia 2002) helping a murder investigation in a northern tundra during the excessively long daylight hours of summer. Five years later, a filmmaker looking for a crossover hit after a critical breakthrough used a remake of this picture to establish his cred with studios. Its protagonist’s guilt manifests itself in harsh, unending light, always there, always in the open and preventing any kind of rest. In the case of "Insomnia," he knew he was somewhat beholden to the original film, and showed some tasteful restraint in directing it the way he did.Erik Skjoldbjærg’s 1997 thriller Insomnia did for film noir what Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining did for horror: wrest the genre from the night into the harsh glare of daylight to prove that the same basic elements could be just as atmospheric and unsettling in plain view as they are hidden in shadow. He's previously said that regardless of what movie he's making, "the process itself has always been fundamentally the same: You stand there and look at what the scene is going to be and then everything else falls away." In that sense, the director has always been insightful enough to not interject his own sensibilities where they're not needed. In fact, the director spoke about making "an advantage out of the pressure we were under" on the film and basically rehearsing scenes on-site while filming.īut what's interesting is that when Nolan speaks about "Insomnia," he doesn't see it as all that different from his other work. Whereas Nolan and his cast and crew rehearsed "Memento" fairly extensively, Pacino said that they didn't have time to do that with "Insomnia," so the typically well-prepared Nolan was immediately shooting in a different mode to that of his previous effort. Oddly, when the follow-up did arrive it wasn't anything like "Memento." In fact, if you ask Nolan, it wasn't even really a follow-up at all. The young director had caused quite a stir with his inventive $4 million movie, and naturally, everyone was excited to see what he came up with next. With all the basics down, the budding director set about subverting most of them with his breakout movie, the 2000 independent film " Memento." This Guy Pearce-led effort had all the unorthodox elements that would become standard in future Nolan movies: an original idea shot on film with a non-linear narrative and plenty of twists and turns. As Nolan pointed out, he was "a member of probably the last generation who cut film on a Steenbeck flatbed." This led to what he called in a DGA interview a "very organic approach to understanding all the different bits of the craft," which clearly contributed to his appreciation for conventional filmmaking methods. ![]() Having skipped a film school education, the British auteur had to teach himself all the elements that go into making a film, becoming intimately familiar with them all. Hey, you can only break the rules well if you know what they are, and that's exactly the case with Nolan.
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