Blockbusters and Birdwalks

1999: BEST. MOVIE. YEAR. EVER., a conversation – Episode 1: “Following”

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0:00 | 15:49

Garrett Chaffin-Quiray and Ed Rosa regard small joys in Christopher Nolan’s debut.

This is part of a series that overlaps with, and extends, Brian Raftery’s 2020 book “Best. Movie. Year. Ever.: How 1999 Blew Up the Big Screen”. Screenings include: “Following” (Christopher Nolan, 1998), “Varsity Blues” (Brian Robbins, 1999), “The Blair Witch Project” (Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez, 1999), “The Matrix” (The Wachowskis, 1999), “Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace” (George Lucas, 1999), “South Park - Bigger, Longer and Uncut” (Trey Parker, 1999), “Free Enterprise” (Robert Meyer Burnett, 1999), “Eyes Wide Shut” (Stanely Kubrick, 1999), “Twin Falls Idaho” (Michael Polish, 1999), “American Beauty” (Sam Mendes, 1999), “Three Kings” (David O. Russell, 1999), “Boys Don't Cry” (Kimberly Peirce, 1999), “Topsy-Turvy” (Mike Leigh, 1999), “Magnolia” (Paul Thomas Anderson, 1999), and “Wadd: The Life & Times of John C. Holmes” (Cass Paley, 1998).

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Referenced media:

  • “The Odyssey” (Christopher Nolan, 2026)
  • “Oklahoma!” (1943) by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II based on the play “Green Grow the Lilacs” (1930) by Lynn Riggs
  • “Memento” (Christopher Nolan, 2000)
  • “Batman Begins” (Christopher Nolan, 2005)
  • “The Dark Knight” (Christopher Nolan, 2008)
  • “The Dark Knight Rises” (Christopher Nolan, 2012)
  • “Man Bites Dog” (Rémy Belvaux, André Bonzel, and Benoît Poelvoorde, 1992)
  • “Noir Alley” (Eddie Muller, 2017-now)
  • “El Mariachi” (Robert Rodriguez, 1993)
  • “Pi” (Darren Aronofsky, 1998)
  • “Best. Movie. Year. Ever.: How 1999 Blew Up the Big Screen” (2020) by Brian Raftery
  • “Cruel Intentions” (Roger Kumble, 1999), 
  • “EDtv” (Ron Howard, 1999)
  • “The Truman Show” (Peter Weir, 1998)
  • “The Matrix” (The Wachowskis, 1999)
  • “10 Things I Hate About You” (Gil Junger, 1999)
  • “Never Been Kissed” (Raga Gosnell, 1999)
  • “Go” (Doug Liman, 1999)
  • “eXistenZ” (David Cronenberg, 1999)
  • “The Mummy” (Stephen Sommers, 1999)
  • “Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace” (George Lucas, 1999)

Audio quotation:

 

Cold Open And Big Claim

SPEAKER_04

It feels very student-ish.

SPEAKER_01

But the last five minutes on whoa.

SPEAKER_04

1999, best movie year ever, episode one, following.

Meet Nolan’s $6,000 Debut

SPEAKER_01

Welcome to the Blockbusters and Birdwalks podcast. I am the curator, Garrett Tavankirai. Today we have a conversation with a friend, Ed Rosa.

SPEAKER_04

That's me. Hi. My filmmaking partner and I have a YouTube channel, Toothless Richard Productions, where you can see a number of our short films.

SPEAKER_01

We've begun our study of 1999 by focusing on a movie from 1998 because we're contrary. Following is Christopher Nolan's debut feature film. And it was made around the edges of cast and crew who were otherwise full-time employed people, donating time to their buddy Chris, who wants to make a movie, partly through the help of his then new wife, Emma Thomas, who's continued to be both his wife and his producing partner in the years ever since, to initiate the potential of a career in movies. It's shot in and around London, and it's shot in spaces and in places that I assume they have specific individual control over, so therefore you have no overhead. There is no rent, and the cast is extremely small. The point This movie was shot across one year's worth of Saturdays, have Sunday off to just be leisurely people who have time to rest and then go back to work all week long and come back together again on that Saturday. It is an object example of how you could make good art with thoughtful planning and consideration for what you can and what you cannot

Plot Setup And The Twist Promise

SPEAKER_01

do. The trouble I have with watching movies is that I'm often watching them on my laptop.

SPEAKER_03

Did you ever hear that clip of David Lynch where he's like It's a such a sadness that you think you've seen a film on your fucking telephone? Get real.

SPEAKER_04

These are supposed to be larger-than-life images, larger-than-life stories, characters. So to take all of this larger-than-lifeness and squish it down into like a tiny screen.

SPEAKER_01

This is a very 2026 way of thinking of things. It's a very middle-aged way of thinking of things for people like us, born from an earlier era, who remember going to the show a lot. And we've probably logged tens of thousands of hours between us in darkened theaters. The other thing to realize is that uh in 1998, very few people saw this movie. Yeah. My notes showed that it debuted at the San Francisco International Film Festival in April of 1998. One year later, in April of 1999, it opened on one screen. It earned $4,000 that opening weekend. In one theater. In North American Hall of $48,000. And then it had a double that, or roughly double that, in foreign and international markets, which means it earned above $120,000 against a budget of get this, $6,000. Wow. One of the things that sets Christopher Nolan apart from his ilk, other emerging filmmakers at the end of the 1990s, is he's been able to do nothing but watch his career climb. The budgets he's been given, the returns he's produced for his producers. And later this month, July of 26th, we're gonna get the Odyssey. This movie Following is about a young man who's a writer living in a hovel, lonely, who begins following people. And he begins following a man who teaches him about petty crime, breaking and entering. But what our young man, Bill, what Bill doesn't understand is that he is a mark by a more experienced con named Cobb, who teaches him how to burgle because Cobb wants to pin a crime on Bill and he is successful. That's a linear way of describing this movie. That earlier point about seeing it on my laptop, I felt distracted by noises out my front door, by my wanting to have a little snack. Right. All of those things.

SPEAKER_04

And then and then if it jumps and you weren't looking, am I looking at it? Oh well, yeah. Now now I gotta back it up. I swear to God, this movie should have been called uh, yeah, it's uh Oklahoma with an exclamation point. This should have been this movie should have been called Following with a question mark because are you following?

SPEAKER_01

I became a fan of Nolan, like a lot of us did, because Memento just blew my socks off.

SPEAKER_04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

The thing is always chopped into pieces that force you back on heel to assemble what it is that you're experiencing. Sometimes it's more clear. It's pretty clear what the Batman trilogy is about. But even so, there are moments like, what am I looking at? What is happening? And that becomes all the more of a sort of stamp of what this director, who's now also his writer, director, producer, and in this movie it's cinematographer Christopher Nolan, his business is doing chopsui to your brain, right, and then shoveling right through the middle of it, a relatively straightforward story once

Nonlinear Storytelling And Performance

SPEAKER_01

you see the whole thing. But there are reversals. 69 minutes long, for 64, 65 minutes, like you, I thought this is a really elevated, very, very thoughtful version of a low-rent thing I've I've seen called a student film. But it can tolerate, and I can tolerate its long, long length. But then at the end it reverses and you suddenly have a lot of things clarified, and you're like you lift your chin up and go, wow, this movie succeeds, because that's the point when Bill realizes Cobb has been treating him as a mark the whole way through.

SPEAKER_04

That sort of nonlinear style of storytelling that seems to be so much his kind of, you know, his métier. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_01

You develop a genre you're going to attach to which has benchmarks, it must be achieved, or you'll disappoint everybody. But you can achieve them in different ways than are expected. And among the the quote, easiest unquote, is to reverse chronology, do things without a linear order, to confound motivations, and to make people who are normally beautiful, ugly, ugly, beautiful, the heel, the hero, the hero, the heel, and so on. That challenge seems to be his whole thing. That's what he really digs.

SPEAKER_04

I can only imagine how long he agonized over that script.

SPEAKER_01

Sure. There's some chewy, chunky dialogue in this, and the actors are doing their work pretty well. I have to admit, I found Cobb, the bad guy. He's played by an actor named Alex Haw, and I believe this is his only credit.

SPEAKER_04

Right.

SPEAKER_01

As I was watching the movie, I thought, my God, this is just Rupert Everett all over again. He's very handsome. I find him attractive. He's charismatic and knowing. He's put together. He's a step ahead of Bill. Bill takes lessons from him.

SPEAKER_04

Yeah, he's like he's likable, but yet like sinister. Yeah, you know.

SPEAKER_01

He's not trustworthy. Our lead is Jeremy Theobald, and he is a co-producer of the movie. I think he's edited things with and for Christopher Nolan and done some other private works a few times as an actor. He's an appealing guy as the basic lead. In fact, at a certain point when Cobb is making his acquaintance, Cobb takes apart our guy Bill. No, we're not going to take it. And that appealed to me because in my middle twenties, I was a Bill. The difference between me and Bill, aside from his pinchant for a career criminal activity, which I did not undertake, was I had a missus who was willing to keep up a job and keep us in our rent. But I was hanging out at home, trying to write each day, waking up to the cursor on my computer saying, do something, fool. Right. Because you could at least be pulling coffee down at the coffee shop. But instead you're here, you're letting your hair grow long, you're wearing flannels, right? You're just kind of milking the fact that there's this teat called life, which you have the ability to suck from, but you can't really do anything with yourself right now. You're kind of stuck. And so Bill gets attached to this whole criminal enterprise. There's a woman, The Blonde, played by Lucy Russell, and she is another person who Cobb is manipulating to make Bill do things, and ultimately for Bill to be the fall guy for several crimes and murders. There is this one line that Cobb drops on Bill. They found somebody's spare key and they've entered an apartment to steal things. Not big things. They want easily cash sellable stuff, jewelry, CDs, things they can put in a single bag and walk away quickly. And Bill struggles, well, why are we doing this? And Cobb has this explanation.

SPEAKER_02

Interrupting someone's life, making them see all the things that they took for granted. Like when they go back and buy all this stuff from the shelves of insurance money, they'll have to think for the first time in a long time why they wanted all this stuff, what it's for. Take it away. Show them what they had.

SPEAKER_04

You know, it's funny because at this point in the film, I'm not thinking it's going to go where it's going to go. And now I'm thinking this is more of like a man bites dog thing. Where you know what I mean? Where we're gonna get like into sort of some philosophical examination of like criminality or the underworld or something where you know this guy from you know, presumably the right side of the tracks winds up on the wrong side of the tracks

Noir Style And Smart Production Tricks

SPEAKER_04

with this guy in you know typical noir fashion.

SPEAKER_01

And that noir connection. I'm uncomfortable with noir as anything more than a stylistic strategy. I don't give it the weight of being a narrative form. Right. I know that a lot of people get hung up on that and they want to go to blows and have arguments and whole books and dissertations and friendships have been won in line.

SPEAKER_04

Oh yeah, no, yeah. The devout uh attendee of the church of Noir Alley. I would totally fight about it.

SPEAKER_00

Welcome to a new year in Noir Alley. I'm Eddie Muller, your dedicated docent of the dark.

SPEAKER_01

There's a femme fatale figure, there's this dalliance with criminal enterprise, there is goodness that is crushed beneath the weight of guilt and fraud and true evil. There's a lot of black and white. It comes from paucity. It was developed as a style during the war years in the 1940s because color film stock was expensive. You know what? If you're a struggling wannabe filmmaker in a pre-digital age called Christopher Nolan and you want to make a movie on film, color film stock is expensive. Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_04

And I think it's more costly to develop as well. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_01

This movie's choice to do things in black and white lends itself to the feel, the touch, the tropes, the stylistic penache of the noir thing. But it also allows the black and white spectrum to cover up flaws and color matching. Right. And also to just blast things with light with less control than a professional film set might employ. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_04

Right. Which is really smart.

SPEAKER_01

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: A lot of the big chewy scenes of people monologuing or conversing with one another, it's it's in mid and close-up, which means the mic is just right there. It's a foot away from the mouth to get quality audio. Yes. When they're lit indoors, it's coming from one direction, so it's very high contrast, throwing a hell of a shadow. But because they're very closely framed, that camera's not far away from the face. You that's fine. I don't really care about the shadow. It's on the left, it's out of the frame.

SPEAKER_04

Right. Like, okay, we got two takes, tops guys, because this because the the meter's running, you know what I mean? But if we really nail it before we're rolling.

SPEAKER_01

We all go and have some bangers and mash early. Right. We get a pint and we call it a day, and I'll see you next Saturday. Right. So there's much to recommend in this movie along all of these lines of economy, of reaching the goal of surprising an audience, and I'm a guy raising my hand here in this studio. I was surprised by this movie. Smash cuts, and Garrick finally gets to fulfill being a fan, a super fan, who's more thoughtful and grandfatherly now because of my age and white hair. I can reflect back on all of this and sort of acknowledge this is a special thing that Christopher Nolan was able to achieve with the help of all of his casting crew. And there are various people listed in the thank yous and so on in the end credits. His uncle is one of the supporting characters. He's a police sergeant investigating the crime that Bill eventually's hung out

The Ending Reversal And 1999 Context

SPEAKER_01

to dry for. His brothers in the background is one of the crew members. So this is not altogether a family affair, but it sort of is. Yeah. And I like the notion of that.

SPEAKER_04

Yeah, well, I mean, uh, you know, at that stage in your career when That's all you got. Right, and you gotta use it.

SPEAKER_01

The comparable movie that bubbled up to my mind was El Mariachi. Okay. I thought pie. Yeah, okay, okay, right. And and these these are all debut features by important filmmakers who were still with us doing sometimes important work, sometimes not, but they got their start like just basically emptying their couch cushions and turning that in for enough film stock to make a movie on an astonishingly small scale. Now, I say that because I'm Mariachi, I know less about Pi's background, except that it was a small movie by Aronofsky, and then of course we're talking about following. That was done for six grand. I know that in my middle twenties, if you'd said, if you give me six grand, I will give you a year of my devoted service and we will make a movie. Could have been six million for all the money I had.

SPEAKER_04

Right, right. Yeah, I might as well have been.

SPEAKER_01

I never had the nerve. I never had the creative wherewithal. I never had the project in mind. I didn't have the follow-through. Yeah. And as I've aged, I've come to realize while I have written books, so I know what it is to spend longitudinal hours and hours and hours working on a project. I know what that is. But I have not done that in collaboration with various people. And you gotta keep all of them happy for weeks, months, even maybe a couple of years, while also trying to figure out on your near poverty dial lifestyle, how can I get $10 out of this recycling return? Right. Because if I can get another 10 and another 10, I might have just enough to make the sacred object that launches my career. And boom, following Christopher Nolan. But when this movie shows up on that one screen, presumably in a large city like New York, other things that were around it, Cruel Intentions was in theaters, Ron Howard's Ed TV, The Truman Show Knockoff. The biggest thing happening though in the springtime when this was released was The Matrix. Ten Things I Hate About You was in theaters, never been kissed. These were mentioned in the Raf 3 book. So was Go, David Cronenberg's Existence, and then kicking off the summer season while Following was on its way out of theaters was The Money. I was going to try to include that in this series because I was curious about revisiting it, but I'm convinced that if I go back and see.

SPEAKER_04

Yeah, don't do it.

SPEAKER_01

Because I have a warm memory of going to see the circumstances were really nice. I just I don't want to blow it.

SPEAKER_04

Phantom Menace really ruled that like entire year of 1999, basically.

SPEAKER_01

It really did. It was the commercial killer of all killers. It was the biggest thing out there. And right around the edge is this debut feature by Christopher Nolan following, which earned less in its global box office run than George Lucas probably spent on one day of rendering Jar Jar Paddy.

SPEAKER_04

Yeah, right.

SPEAKER_01

And I think historically, considering the value of these movies and their virtues as aesthetic objects, you can celebrate to the nth degree the technology of the Phantom Menace. But there's something just thoughtful about some dude blowing six grand and all of the goodwill of all of his friends and family making something unusual that works in that final five minutes. It really comes together. I guess the jury's still out.