Christopher Nolan has had a plethora of iconic movies to his name throughout his iconically successful Hollywood career. From movies like The Prestige and Interstellar to The Dark Knight Trilogy, Nolan seems to have done it all.
But it wasn’t the same when he was out in the world trying to make his debut as a director. Before he became famous, Nolan revealed that he had a very tough time creating his first independent film, and how he found one thing frustrating about the whole affair.
Christopher Nolan Had A Frustrating Point About His Movie’s Release
It was the year of 1998 when Christopher Nolan managed to release his first independent film titled Following. Since the director was not famous at the time, Nolan revealed how tough it was to create the said movie on a tight budget.
Taking money out of his own expenses, Nolan revealed in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter that he and the cast would only shoot 10 minutes of footage every Saturday spread over a year and that is how the director developed a 70-minute film.
“Following is a film we shot on 16 mm in black-and-white with a group of friends. We would shoot every Saturday. I worked out that I could pay, out of my own money, for about 10 minutes of footage each Saturday, for a certain number of Saturdays, spread over a year.”
He further continued,
“We only did one or two takes, and we would have a 70-minute film at the end. In the end, we got accepted to the San Francisco Film Festival, and that was sort of the beginning of it for us. We took the film from San Francisco to Toronto to Slamdance. We got distribution through a company called Zeitgeist,”
Although making the film was already a grueling task, Christopher Nolan revealed that one thing that he got very frustrated over was hearing people’s reviews of his film!
Christopher Nolan Was Frustrated Over The Reviews!
With Nolan making his way to the San Francisco Film Festival, Following had started getting some spotlight for being quite brilliant. One thing that Nolan hated, however, was that people were calling his film “a calling card film”!
“When I was going around the festival circuit with Following, very often people would refer to my film as ‘a calling card film,’ and I found that very frustrating. “My comment at the time was, ‘If you want to make a calling card, you go to Kinkos. You don’t spend three years of your life putting a film together.’”
Although the film did not receive global attention, it was enough to get Christopher Nolan the job of directing the 2000 film Memento. As for his 1998 film, Following received a rating of 7.5/10 on IMDB and 84% on Rotten Tomatoes. The 1998 film is available to stream on AMC+ Apple TV in the U.S.
