What to do if you can’t get into film school? Follow in Christopher Nolan‘s footsteps and invest in your own education by making your own movie.

In this video, Christopher Nolan describes how he made his first film, a 70 minute neo-noir called “Following.”

Rather than ask all his friends to make themselves available for a continuous stretch of time, he decided to shoot on Saturdays only for a whole year:

“It was a no-budget film and in the true sense. We spent about $6,000 on the entire movie so it was all myself and Emma and a group of our friends getting together each Saturday to shoot about 15 minutes worth of footage. We did that for about a year and put the thing together that way. It was a very good learning experience to be able to spread it out over that time. A lot of no budget filmmakers take exactly the opposite approach and are really fast and furious to get these people together and say okay you have to just do this for three weeks. I wasn’t able to do that because we all had to work full time during the week and couldn’t really take much time off.”

Other takeaways:

1. Corporate video work taught Nolan how to light and shoot quickly.
2. He cast stage actors because they can learn lines.
3. They rehearsed for six months.
4. They found amazing locations that would be expensive to recreate.
5. He shot the 16mm film handheld.
6. Black and white means you can create a more distinctive look.
7. Shoot singles on each actor and then only limited master shot coverage.
8. Do sound-only takes on set first to warm up the actors and to capture great location audio.
9. Because not all your crew will turn up each day, you will learn to do every job on set.

The key to ultra-low budget filmmaking?

“One of the keys to getting an ultra low budget film actually finished is definitely to have in mind what kind of film you can make with the resources available to you.”

See Following on Youtube.

My take: lol, I did both. My suggestion is to join a film co-operative and invest your money in your own film projects. You can learn everything you need to from fellow filmmakers, and Google.