Following

Christopher Nolan's Following opened in 1998 and won the Tiger Award at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, alongside the Best First Feature prize at the San Francisco International Film Festival. The film was Nolan's debut feature, made on a budget of approximately $6,000 with a cast of three friends and a 16mm Bolex camera, shot at weekends across nearly a year while Nolan held a day job. The film established the structural-time-fragmentation approach that would carry through Memento, The Prestige, Inception, Interstellar, and Tenet.

An unemployed young writer (Jeremy Theobald), telling himself he is doing research for a novel, begins to wander the streets of London following strangers, at first observing them, then occasionally trailing them home. When he targets a charismatic, expensively dressed man named Cobb (Alex Haw), the two men form an unexpected and uneven mentor-pupil relationship that escalates the writer's research methodology beyond what he originally intended. Lucy Russell plays the central woman whose Notting Hill flat plays a key part in the events. John Nolan, the director's uncle, plays the antagonist.

The film is shot in stark monochrome by Nolan himself (he was his own cinematographer on the production) and is structured around three intercut timelines that the audience must reassemble. The 70-minute runtime makes it the shortest of Nolan's features by some distance. The film's reception was modest on initial release; its current standing is partly retrospective, partly a function of how clearly the director's later major-budget work descends from these original methodological commitments.