A second viewing of a great movie is never quite like the first. You know the twists. You’re braced for the climax. The surprise factor is diminished.

Christopher Nolan’s Memento has long danced with that certainty. Built around a man incapable of forming new memories, the film forces audiences to reconstruct events from fragments, piecing together its backwards narrative one scene at a time.

Now, 25 years after its release, Melbourne collective Hear My Eyes is offering audiences another chance to experience Memento as though for the first time by erasing one of the film’s distinctive elements. David Julyan’s haunting original score has been stripped away and will be replaced with an entirely new live soundtrack by King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard drummer Michael “CAVS” Cavanagh, performed beneath the film in real time.

Michael “CAVS” Cavanagh. Photo © Sarah Findlay

For more than a decade, Melbourne-based Hear My Eyes has carved out a unique niche in Australian performance. Rather than recreating beloved film scores with orchestral precision, it treats cinema as something mutable and open to reinterpretation. Each project removes the original music entirely, commissioning contemporary musicians to build a new emotional landscape beneath familiar images.

“It’s really an art experiment,” says Hear My Eyes founder Haydn Green.

“You don’t know what you’re getting. You’ve never heard the score. You don’t know exactly what direction the musicians are taking it. You have to be excited by that adventure.”

That uncertainty sits at the heart of the company’s philosophy. Traditional live film concerts celebrate nostalgia, faithfully recreating scores audiences already know by heart. Hear My Eyes counters that familiarity, inviting viewers to discover something new inside films they thought they knew.

The process begins long before anyone takes their seat.

Obtaining permission to remove a film’s soundtrack is rarely straightforward, Green says. Rights holders are understandably protective of works whose music forms part of their identity. Once approval is secured, the technical work can become something resembling archaeology.

Sometimes original audio stems make separating dialogue and sound effects relatively straightforward. Other films demand painstaking restoration. Green recalls the Australian classic Two Hands, whose original audio elements had never been digitised until Hear My Eyes partnered with the National Film and Sound Archive to do so.

Only then can the creative work begin.

A still from Christopher Nolan’s Memento

For Cavanagh, whose reputation rests on his remarkable technical precision with King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard, Memento offered an irresistible challenge. To avoid being influenced by David Julyan’s original work, he deliberately kept his distance from it.

“I listened to it, and it’s awesome,” he says. “But I didn’t want to listen to it too much. I hadn’t actually seen the film before Haydn suggested it, and I got partway through and thought, ‘I’m just going to wait until they give me the version without the score.'”

Instead of responding to another composer’s musical language, Cavanagh wanted to discover the film on its own terms.

That sense of discovery extends to every performance.

Although each cue is carefully planned around visual landmarks, much of what audiences hear is improvised.

“The cues – where I come in and where I finish – are planned,” he explains. “But the actual playing is never going to be the same twice.”

Improvisation might seem an unlikely companion to one of cinema’s most meticulously constructed narratives. Yet Cavanagh found that Nolan’s famously fractured structure – it’s black-and-white sequences run forward in time; while the colour sequences run backward, eventually meeting near the end – demanded its own musical logic.

His instinct, the explains, was to build dramatic momentum as though the story unfolded conventionally. “I’m approaching it more chronologically,” he says. “That’s just what came naturally.”

A still from Christopher Nolan’s Memento

For Cavanagh, the film’s alternating black-and-white sequences became essential navigational markers.

“They’re really good anchors,” he says. “I can build tempo, build dynamics, then everything suddenly drops into black and white. Those moments really helped map out the score.”

His musical palette is equally unconventional. Drawing on progressive rock, jazz fusion and electronic percussion, Cavanagh cites the melodic drumming of King Crimson’s Bill Bruford as an influence. For the screenings, he’ll be seated at an early-1960s Ludwig kit whose jazz pedigree serves as a nod to the film noir genre that Memento references.

And rather than facing the audience, Cavanagh, adds, he will perform with his back to them, allowing viewers to watch both Nolan’s film and the choreography of his four limbs moving. “It makes it even more interactive,” he says. “You’ll be able to see my whole body instead of just my face.”

Hear My Eyes presents Memento at Hamer Hall, Melbourne, 8-9 August and City Recital Hall, Sydney on 29 August.