Christopher Nolan Was Inspired to Make 1 of His Films After Being a Crime Victim

Movie maker Christopher Nolan made his first feature with little to no money before hitting it big with Memento. But the director shared his debut film was inspired by a real life crime.

The crime that inspired Christopher Nolan’s noir thriller

Nolan’s cinematic debut was the 1998 indie flick Following. As its title suggests, the film was about a writer who stalks people to use their lives as material for his work. The Oppenheimer director first came up with the idea just by being around people. But the idea further grew after Nolan found himself the victim of a random and unexpected crime.

“You’d go out of your flat and you’d be surrounded by people,” Nolan once told Mental Floss. “I became interested in the idea of looking at individuals and saying, ‘What’s that person’s story?’ Right around that time, somebody broke into the flat.”

A younger Nolan came to a realization about the crime that would further inform Following’s story.

“I realized that the door was just plywood, and that was never keeping anybody out,” he said. “What was keeping people out was the social protocols that we have that allow us to live together. I was interested in the certain types of people who would stop observing those protocols, and why that would be.”

Why Christopher Nolan hated ‘Following’ being called his ‘calling card’

Nolan went through great lengths to realize his vision for Following. Since he wasn’t yet one of Hollywood’s biggest directors, he had to work on a very modest budget to accommodate his finances back then. The Tenet filmmaker was also only able to shoot the movie sparingly.

“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. We only did one or two takes, and we would have a 70-minute film at the end,” Nolan once told The Hollywood Reporter.

After completing the feature, Nolan and his wife Emma Thompson floated the movie around film festivals.

“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,” he said.

This led to Following being accessible for a much broader audience, and Nolan gaining more recognition as a filmmaker. But during that time, he started noticing a common phrase people would use when describing his debut feature.

“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,” Nolan said. “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.’ The act of making that film was ‘filmmaking,’ to me, and it was as valid and still is as valid as everything I do today.”

Christopher Nolan considered the biggest leap of his character to be between ‘Following’ and ‘Memento’

Nolan has made some high budget features since his Following days. Films like The Dark Knight, Inception, and recently Oppenheimer, all cost hundreds of millions of dollars to make. But even after all his experience, Nolan felt the transition between doing Following and doing Memento was his most startling.

“People will often ask me about taking on Batman or whatever, but the truth is that the biggest leap I ever made in my career was from Following to Memento,” he said. “It was from working with friends, spending my own money, and then risking our time and effort, to spending millions of dollars of somebody else’s money and having a proper crew there with trucks and trailers and all sorts of things going on.”