The Class of 1999: 'Following'
Little-known filmmaker Christopher Nolan never went on to make anything of note ever again.
1999 was a historically-great year for film and dramatic narrative as a whole. I’m using my 2024 to look back at, reconsider, and celebrate these stories as they all celebrate their 25th anniversaries. I recently re-reviewed The Matrix; next up on the docket is Go. But first… it’s time for…
Following - written and directed by Christopher Nolan - April 2, 1999
Following is the feature writing/directing debut of the little-known filmmaker Christopher Nolan. Nolan never went on to make anything of note ever again, which is too bad, because Following is pretty good.
I am, of course, kidding. About Nolan fading into obscurity - not about Following being pretty good.
Following was made on a shoestring budget of just £3,000 (roughly $5,000, by the exchange rates at that time), shot on black and white 16mm film exclusively on weekends over the course of an entire year, because the 28-year-old Nolan and his equally-young small cast and even smaller crew all had day jobs they needed to pay their bills. Once it was finally complete, it hit the festival circuit, where it was extremely well-received and ultimately landed a small distribution deal. That was success enough for Nolan to raise a substantially larger, although by no means large, budget for his next film, Memento. That movie caught the attention of one Mr. Steven Soderbergh, who got Nolan in the door to direct Warner Bros.’ remake of the Scandinavian thriller Insomnia, and that did well enough to land Nolan the gig directing Batman Begins, and then his career skyrocketed, making him the A-list director we all know and admire today.
What’s striking about watching Following now is both how entertaining it is compared to almost any other of the countless indie crime movies produced in the ‘90s, and how weak it is compared to almost any other Nolan movie. That’s how good Nolan is. Goddamn bastard.
Following is a noir thriller which, in classic Nolan fashion, unfolds non-linearly. For reasons we don’t find out until late in the film, most of it is conveyed as confession made by the film’s protagonist - only ever known to us as ‘The Young Man’ (Jeremy Theobald, also a co-producer on the project) - to a detective (John Nolan, the director’s uncle).
The Young Man is an aspiring writer who takes to following random people around London, in part because he hopes they’ll provide inspiration for his work, in part because he’s lonely. But one day, one of his subjects becomes aware that they’re being followed, and they confront the Young Man. This turns out to be Cobb (Alex Haw), a thief who breaks into people’s homes and steals whatever untraceable knick-knacks he can sell to the local pawn shop. Cobb invites the Young Man to join him, and the Young Man finds engaging in illegal activity to be thrilling. They end up becoming something of a burgling partnership.
One of the apartments they break into belongs to a beautiful young woman, credited simply as ‘The Blonde’ (Lucy Russell). The Young Man decides to follow the Blonde, and they begin a relationship. It turns out that she’s the former moll of a violent gangster, known as ‘The Bald Guy’ (Dick Bradsell), who keeps her under his thumb by threatening to release pornographic photos of her. The Young Man takes it upon himself to retrieve those photos from the Bald Guy’s safe, but in so doing is forced to murder one of the Bald Guy’s goons with a hammer.
The Young Man quickly realizes he’s been tricked - there are no compromising photos. The Blonde is, in fact, working with Cobb, who led the Young Man to the Blonde’s apartment in the first place. Cobb, you see, recently came across a dead body during one of his break-ins, and is afraid the murder will be pinned on him, so he’s trying to get the murder pinned on someone else - specifically, the Young Man.
The Young Man runs to the police to preemptively turn himself in, figuring if he comes clean now Cobb won’t be able to frame him for the murder. What neither he nor the Blonde know, however, is that Cobb actually works for the Bald Guy. It turns out that the Blonde has been blackmailing the Bald Guy with evidence of a different murder she witnessed, so Cobb’s assignment was to kill her and pin it on someone else - which he does, by murdering her with the Young Man’s hammer.
Based on the Young Man’s testimony, the police go to check on the Blonde, and find her dead body along with the hammer - which still bears the Young Man’s fingerprints. The Young Man thus goes down for the Blonde’s murder - whoopsie! - while Cobb disappears into a crowd on the streets of London.
As is often the case with the early output of a soon-to-be great auteur, Following is both completely recognizable and completely unrecognizable as the work of its famous creator.
The dialogue is very much of its era both (it’s hard to imagine Nolan utilizing some of the slurs against gays and women that he uses in this movie today), there’s more overt sexuality than in any other Nolan film save for Oppenheimer, and the non-linear narrative leaps between timelines somewhat haphazardly - Nolan had not quite figured out how to marry form, function, and meaning the way he would with Memento just a couple of years later. Put another way: Memento unfolds in reverse chronological order so that the audience can identify with the protagonist’s short-term memory loss, and The Prestige and Inception always pass back and forth through their multiple timelines in a particular order, but Following just kinda hops around whenever it feels like it. It still works because Nolan, who also co-edited the movie with Gareth Heal, nails the pacing - it’s just not as disciplined as in Nolan’s later films.
On the other hand, not only does the film illustrate Nolan’s ongoing interest in the ways cinema can play with time, but it demonstrates that he already understood the importance of visual cues vis-à-vis ensuring the audience can instantly identify which of the story’s multiple timelines they’re currently watching (in both Memento and Oppenheimer, he achieves this by switching between color and black-and-white photography; in Inception, it’s done by giving each level of the dream its own distinct look that is completely different from the other levels of the dream; here, it’s the Young Man’s haircut, which is longer in sections that occur first chronologically and shorter in sections that occur later chronologically).
Furthermore, the film has the same philosophical bent as Nolan’s other work, as demonstrated by Cobb’s whole "You take it away, and show them what they had" speech (which is admittedly kinda hacky - having Cobb do that thing with his hand twice was a real mistake).
To that same end, Following also displays Nolan’s now-recurring themes of isolation and questions of prioritizing one’s work over one’s personal life: the Young Man’s failure to make a genuine, healthy, authentic connection with another human being is the whole reason he gets sucked into Cobb’s web in the first place (not-dissimilarly from the manner in which the protagonist of fellow Class of ‘99 alum Fight Club ultimately gets into hot water). He’s of a kind with Bruce Wayne, who can’t maintain a real relationship so long as he’s determined to be Batman; or the magicians in The Prestige, who repeatedly sacrifice, literally and figuratively, the people they love in order to pursue fame; or Leonardo DiCaprio’s character in Inception, who has to confront the constant clash between his personal and professional lives.
More superficially, Nolan went collaborate with the cast and crew of Following many more times in the future. He and producer Emma Thomas started dating in college and were married in 1997 (she’s also visible sitting behind the Young Man in the cafe when he first meets Cobb); composer David Julyan also scored Memento, Insomnia, and The Prestige; Russell and John Nolan appear in some of the director’s later films, including the Bat-movies and Dunkirk; and Theobald, who also starred in Nolan’s 1997 short film, Doodlebug, went on to have small roles in Batman Begins and Tenet.
Even more superficially, the Young Man’s apartment door has a Batman sticker on it (weirder still, the Bat-logo appears again in Memento).
The connection between Following and Nolan’s later work that I personally find most intriguing, however, comes from the character of Cobb. Even if Nolan had never made another film again, Cobb’s import to him would be readily apparent: he’s literally the only character in Following who gets an actual name, which was certainly a deliberate choice (he could just as easily have been known solely as ‘The Thief’ or ‘The Burglar’ or ‘The Mentor’ or whatever).
But what makes him even more noteworthy is that the protagonist in Nolan’s mega-hit Inception is also named Cobb.
As far as I can tell, Nolan has never addressed the issue directly, but theories as to why Nolan may have reused the name abound in both critical analysis and fan discussion. Some of these theories hinge on an interpretation of Inception as a metaphor for filmmaking, asserting that Nolan reuses the name as a means of cluing the audience in on Inception’s allegedly meta intentions… but I don’t quite buy that, because the number of audience members who will ever make the connection is minuscule at best: Following grossed $126,052 worldwide TOTAL in theaters, while Inception made more than $60 million at the U.S. box office alone in its opening weekend. Even if Following’s notoriety has increased since Nolan became a big name, the number of people who have seen it is a teeny-tiny fraction of the number of people who have seen Inception, and number of people who have seen both and remember the name ‘Cobb’ is surely even smaller.
Other theories highlight the ways in which both Cobbs are similar - they’re both thieves, they’re both manipulative to varying degrees, and they both favor suits, I guess? - but they’re inverse opposites more than they’re twins: one is a protagonist and the other is an antagonist, one is overcome with remorse and the other is a stone-cold killer, one is capable of charm and the other is mostly blunt and tactless, one is American and the other is British (Nolan, FYI, is both), one is blonde (and may very well be an avatar for Nolan himself) and one is brunette.
My own hypothesis is considerably less juicy, in that it doesn’t rely on Pepe Silvia-levels of hidden meaning: I think Nolan’s relationship to the name is personal, and I don’t think we’ll ever know its actual significance, or why he chose to reuse it, unless he decides to tell us. Which - spoiler alert - he’s never going to do, because’s he’s a staunch believer in allowing the audience to have their own interpretations of his work, as explained in a 2015 Business Insider piece:
He told a story about when his mind-bender Memento premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2000.
"We got a very, very excited reaction to it," Nolan said. "Somebody had asked about my interpretation of the ending and I said 'Well, it's all up to the audience but this is what it means to me,' and I gave them in great detail what exactly the ambiguities of the film meant to me," Nolan said.
The press conference was never recorded, so his Memento explanation never got out. However, Jonathan Nolan, Christopher's brother, who wrote the short story on which Memento was based, advised him against ever explaining the ending of one of his films again.
According to Nolan, his brother told him, "You don't understand, nobody hears that first bit where you say it's really up to the viewers if you then give your interpretation."
"It's the last time I ever opened my mouth," Nolan said.
With that in mind, there is one last thing about the recycling of the name that I think is noteworthy: Alex Haw, the actor who played Cobb, has no other credited film roles - he quit acting altogether after making Following, and went on to become an architect.
And the Cobb from Inception? His original profession, before becoming a dream thief? The entire reason he became involved in dream-sharing in the first place?
He was an architect.