David Cronenberg once said in an interview: "When you look at Fellini's first film, you can see the origin of all his films." The same applies to Nolan. "Following" he created in 1998 is only a low-cost black and white film, but it reflects the core and motif of many of his remaining works.
Shortage of funds still creates Nolan's personal peak
Nolan has never studied film-related majors , but he has tried filming since he was six or seven years old. He was very fond of action films when he was young. The cost of filming from short films to feature films increases with age.
The 70-minute black-and-white thriller, shot on 16mm film and costing just $6,000, compares favorably with low-budget productions of the same period, "Killer Elegy" (Rodriguez, $7,225) and "Crazy Clerk" (Kevin Smith). , cost $27,575), the film's budget was even lower.
Nolan does not shy away from this lack of funds and conditions, but actively uses all resources to shoot his first album. Therefore, he also called this film "the pinnacle of the individual, the pinnacle of collaboration with others". He single-handedly helmed the film, serving as the director, screenwriter, photography, and editing.
Nolan, who was only 28 at the time, could only shoot a few minutes of footage with a handheld camera on weekends. As the president of the University Film Association, Nolan was also conducting related training at the film company while filming the film. In this intermittent shooting method, the entire shooting time reached a year.
Due to financial reasons, Nolan was unable to set up a grand studio and needed to write a script that could actually be filmed. He borrowed everything around him: filmed the opening part of the film at UCL's film club, borrowed a parent or friend's room to shoot, and edited it to create the illusion of moving around the room. The coffee shop where Cobb and Bill had their first conversation used the editor's company kitchen-cum-coffee shop.
In the middle of the movie where the safe is opened, the safe is too old to actually be opened, and the money used in the movie is also printed on black and white paper.
In terms of imaging, Nolan believes that the camera is the most important. Because color film requires more lighting, color correction, etc., choose to use black and white film to build a style cheaply and quickly. When shooting street scenes, you can only adjust the camera position according to the environment, but cannot adjust the environment for the camera position. Nolan also rejoices in the commentary track: thankfully there are no extra people blocking the shot. Therefore, Nolan's favorite location in this film is the balcony on the roof: away from the noise, able to capture the street scene of London, except for the occasional plane sound, the other is almost perfect.
Because of limited funding, Nolan has also scaled back on other aspects of the film. A hammer is used as the tool of killing in the film, because a decent gun cannot be bought with the money available. And because there wasn't enough money for the mix, Nolan chose to draw attention to the dialogue at the beginning of the film: the environment was relatively quiet, allowing the audience to immerse themselves in the film and ignore the poor mix that followed.
However, even with all the hard work, there are still inevitable scenes in the movie. There are four inconsistent piercing shots listed on IMDB.
Full of suspense, 31 edits are just the icing on the cake
The film originated from an experience Nolan had with a broken door , which got him thinking: When people break in and look around for items, what are they thinking? The film tells the story of a trap: Bill, a loafer writer, attracted by the private lives of others, begins to stalk them frequently. After breaking his own "never stalk the same person twice" principle, he was discovered and exploited by Cobb. Cobb rationalized his own theft, and he seemed to be able to know someone's identity, habits, and even personality by entering someone's home. Of course, in the end we know it's all just a hoax, but Bill goes one step at a time, unknowingly falling into a trap that's been set up for him.
Such a story is disassembled in Nolan's editing scissors, and the entire film has 31 transitions between different times. He breaks down the story briefly and then reorganizes it further. In Nolan's own words, he presents the story in a three-dimensional way. However, although the sequence is disrupted, the emotions felt by the audience are still sequential.
In Bill's conversation with the police at the beginning of the film, Nolan demonstrates steady shooting skills with a handheld camera. Here, Nolan deliberately hides the true intentions of the film, which gradually becomes clear in the subsequent clips. In the narration, Bill explained his experience. It's somewhat similar to The Usual Suspects, but he doesn't take the lead in the story.
Cobb's appearance undoubtedly makes people feel his evil and cunning. Cobb's breaking into other people's homes reflects his "professionalism" as a thief, and his violence by knocking things over is also shocking. Through the aggressive shot of the handheld camera, Cobb's malice towards Bill can be seen while emphasizing the sense of disarray.
Nolan has included multiple small objects in the film to attract attention. Small objects became the new visual objects, setting the style of the film on a budget. In the film, Nolan repeatedly refers to the characteristic door of the bar, which appears repeatedly in the film as a symbol to remind the audience. This also proves that the disruption of the timeline is not a deliberate challenge to the audience, and he even uses some obvious visual signs to reduce the difficulty of understanding.
At the end of the film, Nolan brings together multiple timelines for the first time to facilitate the audience to understand the plot. At this point, the audience will also realize that Cobb's malice towards Bill is not without reason.
The standard collector's edition of "Following" comes with movies in normal chronological order. In this film, Cobb and Bill first break into different houses three times. Bill accepts Cobb's cues one by one and even changes his own. The appearance also laid the groundwork for his final arrest.
Even in normal chronological order, you can still follow Nolan's perspective and feel the feeling of falling into a trap step by step. When Bill gradually assimilated with Cobb in appearance, the audience began to feel the true intention of this suspenseful story. The chronologically out of order version provides only a formal enhancement to the suspense. The story is more three-dimensional, and the audience is forced to piece the film together in the temporal dimension.
Peeping the Leopard in the Tube, Perspecting the Motif of Nolan's Works Through "Following"
"Are you watching closely?" Nolan asked in "Deadly Magic". This quote also applies to every one of his films. "Following" disrupts time and presents a dark story in a multi-dimensional way. Many wondered if this was just a cheap way to create suspense.
In fact, it is not uncommon to use time scheduling to narrate, and the common flashback is a kind of time scheduling. The timing of Quentin's well-known Pulp Fiction is regarded as a classic, and in Kubrick's The Shining (whose poster appears in the film), past, present, and future time and space are mixed into one. Good at this skill also includes David Lynch.
In "Following", Nolan reveals the characters' characters step by step through flashbacks and interludes that span the entire film, and only reveals the mystery at the end. This time-scheduling skill culminates in Memento. Sometimes you wonder, does Nolan himself have the gift of being able to sense time? There is a sticker of Batman on the door of the second house Bill and Cobb broke into, and he happened to direct the "Batman" trilogy after that; he also visualized time in "Interstellar" and reached the past Interact with the present.
In "Following", you can see not only Nolan's time scheduling skills, but also his master posture. He is often compared to Hitchcock: both British and obsessed with visual language. Hitchcock pursued a well-designed storyboard before the film was shot. Even without editing rights, those only materials could be pieced together into the film Hitchcock wanted.
Nolan adopted the same strategy: edit in his head as he shoots; envisaged shots should not be cut out but kept as much as possible; he likes to observe actors from the camera rather than the monitor, which he thinks will affect the relationship between them. Judgment of distance between actors. The conversation in the cafe includes two shots of Cobb and Bill, and Nolan shot those two shots in total.
You even feel the same voyeurism that Nolan shares with Hitchcock. Hitchcock's interest in the privacy of others is on full display in Rear Window. Nolan is not inferior. Bill forcibly has a relationship with other people's lives by stalking others. Although Cobb is pretending to intrude, it is a more direct disclosure of other people's privacy.
This sense of voyeurism is at its peak in Inception, where Leonardo DiCaprio plays a character also called Cobb. In Inception, this kind of burglary has been upgraded to a spiritual level, presented in the form of a dream, which is the ultimate psychological version of "Following".
The whole film seems to have no theme, but it buries a motif that runs through Nolan's other works : the struggle with identity. In the film, Bill was never sure which character he was until the very last minute. In Memento, the protagonist simply doesn't know who he is. Insomniac is a bad cop who wants to be better; Batman in Batman wants to transcend the fearful boy and choose between good and evil. This theme can also be found in Nolan's other films.
Epilogue
Nolan was only 28 years old when the film was made. The "Following" he shot with $6,000 became the epitome and coordinates of his subsequent films. Some say he was fullyformed by then. Compared with the development trajectories of other directors, his maturity is earlier than others. Although the budget is limited and the conditions are difficult, he has produced a rich and widely discussed "Following" with 70 minutes of content, so that each of his subsequent works has become an extension of his first work. .
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