“I’m a self-taught filmmaker. I never went to film school. I never studied filmmaking. . . . I think Following was the peak of what I was able to do on my own or just with friends using our own resources.”
—Christopher Nolan
“I got my English degree and I couldn’t get into film school, and I just started making my own films on 16mm. And I think that was fortunate for me. I think I was better suited to just making films and leaning from that, than I would have been to learning in a more formal structure.”
—Producer/writer/director Christopher Nolan (The Dark Knight, Dunkirk)
On top of making his own low-budget films, he got a day job to pay the bills.
“I was working in the field of corporate videos. I was doing camera work and sound work for media training sessions. And I actually learned a lot doing that kind of camerawork. Going into an environment, using a couple of lights and setting up fast. You’d figure out how to do something that looked pretty good pretty quickly. That was very much the production methodology that we transferred to film.”
—Christopher Nolan
In one interview he said he started making 8mm films when he was 7 year old. That’s more than 20 years before his breakout success with Memento in 2000. Just making making and honing his filmmaking craft—despite not getting into film school. A couple years before Memento he finished the 69-minute film Following. It cost $6,000 (mostly for film stock and developing) and took a year to make because the unpaid cast and crew could only shoot on Saturdays because of their other jobs. And they couldn’t even shoot every Saturday because he didn’t have enough money for film.
Step by step.
Here’s the full film.
Related posts:
Lulu Wang’s Day Job Before ‘The Farwell’ (Producing videos for lawyers to be used in legal cases. At the end of that post is also a quote from writer/director Sean Baker who talks about the benefit he got working on corporate and wedding videos after NYU film school.)
Scott W. Smith is the author of Screenwriting with Brass Knuckles
Screenwriting from Iowa 