Watching Christopher Nolan's First Film Following (1998) for the First Time

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Everyone who is a fan of the films of Christopher Nolan should watch his first feature, Following. I say this even though seeking out the first film isn’t a requirement for all directors, even great ones. 

While some filmmakers burst onto the scene with great success and in signature form—think Tarantino with 1992’s Reservoir Dogs, and, most famously, Orson Welles with 1941’s Citizen Kane—others start more slowly, honing their craft over time. For instance, although Alfred Hitchcock’s directorial debut is the British-German silent film The Pleasure Garden (1925), The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1927) was his first success, and it is the film that critics such as François Truffaut and Hitchcock himself would identify as the first true Hitchcock movie. Other first films are solid but not essential, such as Scorsese’s Who’s That Knocking at My Door (1967) and Spielberg’s Duel (1971). Both films, in spite of their merits, do not get a lot of attention, even from admirers of those directors, largely because they don’t encapsulate the director’s most famous characteristics. (Rather, I would argue that 1973’s Mean Streets and 1975’s Jaws set the template for Scorsese and Spielberg, respectively). In contrast, Following just might be the key that picks the lock of Nolan.

It’s ironic that I’m writing this, since it took me until 2024 to finally watch Following, even though I’ve followed and admired Nolan since watching Nolan’s second, breakout movie Memento, when it first came out on DVD in the early 2000s. It took Nolan’s grand coup of 2023, the atom bomb biopic blockbuster and Best Picture winner Oppenheimer, to shame me into completing Nolan’s filmography.

In a way, I’m glad I waited. After thinking about and talking about and writing about Nolan for years, watching his first feature so freshly at this stage in his career allowed Following, in my mind, to perfectly slip into Nolan’s filmography like the last piece of a jigsaw puzzle.

Following tells the story of a character identified in the credits as the Young Man (and occasionally in the film as Bill), a loner and wannabe writer who follows people because he is bored and out of work and it’s a way to break out of his tiny solipsistic world. One day, a man in a suit carrying a bag that the Young Man has been following turns the tables on him and demands to know why he has been following him, and the Young Man soon finds himself caught up into the world of this burglar named Cobb.

Attentive Nolan fans will recognize that Cobb is also the name of another cunning thief in a film by Nolan: Leonardo DiCaprio’s protagonist in Inception (2010). The two characters even dress similarly. In Following, Cobb usually wears black suits and ties, and, at one point, he sports a leather jacket that resembles Leo’s costume in the first dream level of the climactic heist in Inception (the rainy city dream). 

Apart from Cobb, most characters in Following are not assigned names, rather being identified by their roles: the Young Man, the Blonde, the Bald Guy. Again, this anticipates a later Nolan film, specifically Tenet with the Protagonist (John David Washington).

More importantly, Nolan fragments the narrative of Following, showing that from the get-go he has been interested in telling stories in unusual ways. I couldn’t agree more with the late, great David Bordwell’s argument that Nolan’s films are marked by a formal project invested in innovative narrative structures.

Following divides its story into three main parts, and then intercuts the different timelines. Unlike Memento, which alternates between black-and-white and colour to aid the viewer, Following is all black-and-white. Nolan still helps the viewer, however, chiefly by using the different visual states of the Young Man to indicate which timeline we are in: is he dishevelled, well-dressed, or with a bruised face? How exactly the different timelines relate to each other, and what their order is, I will let you discover. But you can expect some satisfying twists and turns. 

In essence, Following is a clever little neo-noir, the kind of film that in some ways could be forgettable. The acting is fine. Tension is adequately built and sustained. The film’s appeal, however, is primarily based on how Nolan freshens up familiar character types and plots through innovative storytelling. As a neo-noir, the film also proves Nolan’s persistent engagement with well-defined genres from his very start.

All this isn’t to say there is nothing that differentiates Following from Nolan’s later films. Or, to put it another way, we could consider the film in its historical context rather than its place in Nolan’s filmography. Along these lines, Following is a low-budget 90s indie flick, recalling other daring indies of the period, such as Darren Aronofsky’s Pi, which also came out in 1998, and which is also shot in raw black-and-white and tells a choppy, intriguing narrative. To consider Following against the backdrop of independent filmmaking in the late 1990s and early 2000s makes Nolan seem more of a piece with the experiments in narrative that many budding filmmakers were using to make their mark at the time.

Today, Nolan is our blockbuster king. He’s no longer a filmmaker you can discover. But, in spite of being a household name and a cinematic brand, he’s a filmmaker you can explore, and Following is probably his least charted territory.

Following is also worth watching as it shows how, in spite of the massive success Nolan has achieved, and the massive canvases he now works on, he is often interested in telling a story with a narrow focus. The world of the Young Man is incredibly small, like those found in many indie films, but placed against Nolan’s filmography we see that limiting the story’s points-of-view to those of a few people is a narrative approach that governs many of his films, even his sprawling, epic Oppenheimer. 

In Following, the thief Cobb describes, in various comments, how burgling grants access to a victim’s private, inner life. He comments, for example, that everyone has a special box. As a kind of maxim for his method of crime, Cobb tells the Young Man that “You take it away…to show them what they had.” Discovering one has been robbed and then going through the whole process of insurance and replacing the stolen goods makes people consider their possessions and their lives. Thus, the burglar’s intrusion facilitates self-reflection in the victim, in Cobb’s view. 

Through following the Young Man and Cobb, we do get to peek into a few private homes, but the life we really go inside of is the Young Man’s. Importantly, the glimpses are also being manipulated, sometimes by the Young Man, sometimes by Cobb, and, of course, always by Nolan, the person directing the camera and cutting between the images. We shouldn’t be surprised that people have also noted connections between Nolan and his later Cobb, in Inception, who creates shared dreams within which to steal, or plant, ideas. Both Cobbs, as well as Nolan the filmmaker, grant access to inward subjective worlds, often their own.

Following opens with voice-over narration, spoken by the Young Man, that is a moment of self-reflexivity. The Young Man frames the whole film as a story: “The following is my explanation. Well, more of an account of what happened.” This is true of Following, and every film, for that matter. This opening meta-moment, at the very start of Nolan’s feature career, underscores Nolan’s dominating interest in the subjective nature of film and its possibilities—how a unique storytelling perspective can not only please an audience but also tell us something about the inner worlds of characters. Following shows that Nolan is not just a director of tricks and spectacle; his films also reveal something about human nature and individual personalities, an observation I think is too often lost on his detractors as well as many fans. 

In a way, Following is a glimpse inside the private room of a household name. Its revelations are worthwhile for the general filmgoer as well as the obsessive fan.

Following (UK, 1998)

Written and directed by Christopher Nolan; starring Jeremy Theobald, Alex Haw, Lucy Russell, and John Nolan.

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