Nolan Countdown Part 1 - Following

Hello everyone and welcome to Some Like It Scott's latest limited series: Nolan Countdown. Each week in the lead up to Christopher Nolan's latest film, Tenet, the two Scotts and countdown special guest, Jay Habib, will be working their way through Christopher Nolan's full filmography in chronological order, starting from his humble beginnings making "budget" films like Following and Memento, all the way to his most recent days making mega-blockbusters like his Dark Knight trilogy, Inception, Interstellar, and Dunkirk. This time, Jay Habib has actually seen these films (quite a few of them, quite a few times actually), but there will be fresh takes, crazy theories, and deep conversations about one of the most interesting auteur filmmakers of this generation all along the way. Join us each week!

On the first part of the countdown, Scott, Scott, and Jay generate a first impression of the oft overlooked first film from Christopher Nolan: Following. Shot in black-and-white and made on the most shoestrings of budgets for a meager $6,000, Christopher Nolan made his mark on the festival scene in 1998 with his first pass at a neo-noir crime drama (it's possible that he might have made another a few years later). Split across several different timelines, Following follows the nameless "Young Man" (Jeremy Theobald) as he sinks into a life of petty crime after meeting a serial burglar, named Cobb (Alex Haw). As he falls deeper into the lifestyle, Following shows an early Nolan tinkering with and refining his now-famous bag of tricks in a story full of twists and turns and then even more turns, all in a tight 69 minutes. The countdown trio give their thoughts on Nolan's first outing as director, the story, the characters, the performances, and the twists, and talk about how Following sets the stage in interesting (and on-the-nose) ways for what Nolan will do in the future.