A film about forgetting, Christopher Nolan’s Memento is also a movie to remember. The now Oscar-winning director’s sophomore feature and initial breakout hit boasts a stunning lead performance by Australian actor Guy Pearce, and turns its vengeance-fuelled narrative into an immersive puzzle.
That it’s a film about perspective, and how what we see and hear shapes it, might just be Memento’s most important element though. It certainly helps make the 2000 masterpiece a particularly perfect candidate for the Hear My Eyes treatment.
For more than a decade, the event series founded by Haydn Green has also mused on the same topic, whatever the title whirring through the projector while a musician, or several, plays a brand-new score live for the watching, listening audience.
Does experiencing a movie with completely fresh ears, thanks to that bold switch of tunes, change how a viewer engages with it? That’s one of Hear My Eyes’ fundamental questions.
With Memento, Melburnians and Sydneysiders can discover the answer throughout August – at three performances during the Melbourne International Film Festival, followed by a one-night-only date in the Harbour City – as King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard drummer Michael ‘Cavs’ Cavanagh sonically reframes the cult-favourite thriller.
Memento and Hear My Eyes – quick links
One artist, one instrument
This isn’t the first time that Green and Cavanagh have collaborated. The latter joined his King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard bandmates in a supergroup of talents – including Carolyn Schofield aka Fia Fiell, Leah Senior and Cold Hands Warm Heart’s Genevieve Fry – for Hear My Eyes’ take on giallo great Suspiria in 2020.
Cavanagh is still notching up a first, though, as the only musician to initially grace the event’s stage as part of an ensemble and then return solo. He’s also one of just two acts to do the honours twice so far, after Sleep D’s Eraserhead and Pan’s Labyrinth performances.
Green says the ‘Antonio Sánchez, Birdman, percussive-driven score’ equally stands out for Hear My Eyes. ‘To have it solely dedicated to essentially one instrument, the drum kit, is a big challenge.’
Then there’s the fact that when Green suggested Memento as the next movie that Cavanagh should apply his skills to, the latter hadn’t yet watched it. ‘I think this is the first time I’ve approached someone with a fairly notable film and they had never seen it,’ says Green.
Everyone has gaps in their viewing, no matter how many movies they’ve viewed. For Cavanagh and Hear My Eyes, though, the situation presented a rare opportunity to pose another question: how does a film sound to a musician and composer in their head the very first time that they watch it?
Cue another interrogation of perspective, with Hear My Eyes’ Memento project boasting almost as many layers as the film itself.
When a reimagining is also an introduction
Cavanagh appreciates that he was in a unique position, even if ‘when Hayden asked me to do it, I was like, “Oh shit, I haven’t seen it. Sorry man”,’ he says.
He leaned in. ‘Then I started watching it, and then I was like, “No, I’m going to wait until I get given the film with the score taken out”. And then I just started writing instantly, from the second I pressed play,’ Cavanagh says. ‘So I think that makes it very unique, rather than if I’d seen it 10 or 15 times.’
Aptly, as Hear My Eyes focuses on a film with amnesia at its core, it sidesteps a potential problem: being unable to erase the original score from the artist’s mind.
‘That first impression was without music at all, which is, I think, a pretty fabulous way to approach the project – because often musicians are trying to unlearn the film or the film’s composition, or not be influenced too much by it,’ explains Green.
‘But if you haven’t seen it at all with that original composition, then you’re not going to be pulled in that direction.’
What does a musician hear in their head when they watch a film?
Memento follows Pearce’s Leonard Shelby as he attempts to track down his wife’s killer despite his own lack of short-term memory. As the film unfolds, Hear My Eyes patrons will learn exactly how Cavanagh initially heard the character’s journey, and Nolan’s film.
As Green says, Cavanagh’s response ‘ends up being closer to the core concept of Hear My Eyes and the name Hear My Eyes, which is the cyclical nature of a musician watching something. They’re creating sonics for an audience. That’s essentially what the phrase “hear my eyes” is trying to describe.’
Green recognises there was another danger in ‘accidentally writing something that’s very similar to the original’, but that’s where his own role as Hear My Eyes’ artistic director is pivotal.
‘I guess that’s where I come in, knowing the original score very well, in case we accidentally just fall into a pattern or rhythms or textures that are too close,’ he says. ‘But thankfully that didn’t happen.’
Cavanagh might be performing the end result alone, but he also recognises that the project is firmly a creative partnership between himself and Green, who he thinks ‘doesn’t get the credit that he deserves a lot of the time’.
‘Even though I’ve been writing the score, he’s also really helped guide me through it, as this is the first time I’ve done this solo,’ says Cavanagh. ‘I’m not a solo artist – I like collaborating.’
Watch the trailer
From Nolan to Tarantino and Birdman
How does Memento sound to Cavanagh? In parts, ‘I am playing some really sad, ambient, melodic stuff,’ he says, ‘which is music that I’ve had in my head for a while. I’m glad I’ve gotten to use it.’
Audiences can also expect a mix of styles, Green says. ‘We’re trying to be sensible with the pivot of genres, but there is definitely some jazz, there is some rock.’
‘Compositions don’t usually have so many different genres all together, unless you’re relying on soundtrack pieces of music,’ he notes, while also mentioning that it ‘ends up feeling a bit like a Pulp Fiction or Jackie Brown’ in the beginning.
‘It feels like it’s got a bit of a Tarantino edge to it. There’s this LA coolness to it, which I think really works, especially in the first third when it still emotionally makes sense.’
It might seem an unlikely choice, replacing the score by four-time Nolan composer David Julyan – who also worked on the filmmaker’s Following, Insomnia and The Prestige – by taking inspiration from Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman, but both Cavanagh and Green welcomed the challenge.
‘Memento has so much emotional weight and grief and heartbreak in it, in a way that Birdman doesn’t – and doing that purely on acoustic drums might be hard to achieve,’ says Green.
‘But Michael reassured me and said ‘I can use some of these electronic pads, and I can compose a piece or two that would really work. And he did, and it’s a very, very powerful piece of music. I’m really excited to share it.’
‘I think audiences will be very taken aback by the simplicity of it – but, like any good, haunting theme, the simplicity but the power of it.’
Emotion, experimentation and accessibility
Whether applying Hear My Eyes’ screening-meets-concert blend to Australian classics (Wake in Fright, Two Hands, Chopper), horror favourites (Hellraiser), action/sci-fi greats (Terminator 2: Judgment Day), neo-noirs (Drive), coming-of-age tales (Girlhood) or heist flicks (Good Time), Green has witnessed how attendees respond to the event’s aural reimaginings. That aim to let viewers experience films anew? Consider it well and truly achieved.
He cites one audience member’s reaction to ‘their favourite film of all time’, Pan’s Labyrinth, which they wrote to Green about afterwards. ‘They were a little bit worried or nervous about this Hear My Eyes presentation, but then when they experienced it, they were able to access the scenes and the narrative in a new way that they haven’t been able to since their first watching.’
‘And they actually cried a lot in it – and they said they’d never cried in any of their viewings before, so it was their most powerful emotional viewing of the film.’
For Memento, for a new score that Green describes as ‘really ambitious to make’, he expects that ‘audiences are going to be really wowed’. That includes Nolan diehards, of which there were already plenty before The Odyssey became one of 2026’s box-office sensations. (And yes, following the release of the director’s latest film with Hear My Eyes’ Memento screenings felt like ideal timing.)
‘Often, I’m a little bit wary of the hardcore fans that might be coming, because the film’s presented in a different way with a new composition, and the new composition might be pushing the film in a direction that doesn’t feel nostalgic. It feels very new or experimental,’ Green says.
‘Whereas this score, it’s still very accessible. He’s written the whole thing in D-sharp minor, and Hans Zimmer writes in D often. And there will be some Nolan-esque feeling to the score, because he has written some pieces on cello and grand piano and violin combos that have a Nolan-esque angle to them.’
‘So they’re still very new and unique, but I think Memento fans and Nolan fans will have a really good time.’
The joys and the stakes
Is it the ultimate act of love, giving something already so cherished a different spin and, in the process, gifting viewers – fond and fresh alike – the ability to enjoy it anew? ‘I do really see it that way,’ says Green.
In putting one single musician front and centre, Hear My Eyes’ Memento performances are also a love letter to Cavanagh’s talents. He’s relishing it. ‘It’s also given me a lot of freedom and to just experiment – and a lot of control,’ he says.
Asked if being the sole artist in the spotlight increases the stakes, he answers ‘yes and no’. ‘When I’m drumming with the band, the drums is always the loudest instrument. That’s what everyone hears. And if you make a mistake, everyone’s going to hear it – and I make mistakes all the time,’ Cavanagh says.
Still, ‘there’s something about me just on stage by myself,’ he continues. ‘I mean, I’m trying not to think about that, but I’m feeling pretty comfortable about it. I feel like I probably should be a bit nervous or something, but I think it’s also because these are all my compositions, so I’m very close to them.’
‘Also, I’m improvising a lot. So I can’t really make a mistake, because I’m improvising and it’s all just straight from straight from my brain to my hands to the drums.’
And when it does feel scary, that’s ‘also just a part of the challenge, part of the project,’ says Cavanagh. ‘It’s what Haydn does, he gets artists out of their comfort zones, which is really cool.’
‘Even with King Gizzard, I’m always getting pushed out of my comfort zone, so I’m kind of used to it.’
Driven by affection
There’s no doubting that this is an act of love for Cavanagh as well. ‘I’ve always wanted to score a film on the drums, even before Birdman and Antonio Sánchez doing all this,’ he says.
Indeed, during Covid’s early days, he found himself filling time by embracing the same format that’s now at the heart of the Memento project.
‘I was actually just in my studio at home, putting on old black-and-white films and playing drums to them and recording it – just because it was really fun and it’s like, I’m bored, it’s something to do. So I think there’s definitely a part of me that’s always wanted to do this. It’s filling some kind of itch.’
This is the project that’s pushed him the most, he says, although he was clearly also inspired the first go around. The time he worked with Hear My Eyes on Suspiria, it was among the last live events of March 2020 before pandemic lockdowns began.
‘Maybe that’s why I went and did more, started putting on some films and playing drums to them,’ says Cavanagh. ‘I think Haydn and Hear My Eyes has really inspired me. You know, it has.’
His perspective the second time around? ‘It’s such a great project and I’m just so honoured and stoked to be a part of it, and to be asked and trusted with this beast.’
