The Hire: The Follow is the fourth installment in the The Hire series by BMW films, written by Andrew Kevin Walker

Andrew Kevin Walker

Andrew Kevin Walker is an American BAFTA-nominated screenwriter. He is known for having written the Academy Award-nominated film Seven , for which he earned a nomination for the BAFTA Award for Best Original Screenplay, as well as several other films, including 8mm , Sleepy Hollow and many...

 and directed by Wong Kar-wai

Wong Kar-wai

Wong Kar-wai BBS is a Hong Kong Second Wave filmmaker, internationally renowned as an auteur for his visually unique, highly stylized, emotionally resonant work, including Days of Being Wild , Ashes of Time , Chungking Express , Fallen Angels , Happy Together and 2046...

. It stars Clive Owen

Clive Owen

Clive Owen is an English actor, who has worked on television, stage and film. He first gained recognition in the United Kingdom for portraying the lead in the ITV series Chancer from 1990 to 1991...

, Forest Whitaker

Forest Whitaker

Forest Steven Whitaker is an American actor, producer, and director. He has earned a reputation for intensive character study work for films such as Bird and Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, and for his recurring role as ex-LAPD Lieutenant Jon Kavanaugh on the gritty, award-winning television...

, Adriana Lima

Adriana Lima

Adriana Lima is a Brazilian model, best known as a Victoria's Secret Angel since 2000, and as a spokesmodel for Maybelline cosmetics from 2003 to 2009...

 and Mickey Rourke

Mickey Rourke

Philip Andre "Mickey" Rourke, Jr. is an American actor, screenwriter and retired boxer, who has appeared primarily as a leading man in action, drama, and thriller films....

. The Driver (Owen) is hired to follow an ageing movie star's (Rourke) young wife (Lima), whom he suspects of infidelity.

Synopsis

The Driver is hired by a nervous movie manager to spy on a paranoid actor's wife. During his tailing of the wife, the Driver describes the right way to tail someone. As he follows her he begins to fear what he might learn of her apparently tragic life. He discovers the wife is fleeing the country and returning to her mother's, and that she's been given a black eye, likely by her husband. He returns the money for the job, refusing to tell where the wife is, and drives off telling the manager never to call him again.

Release

The BMW Films were originally intended to be webcast

Webcast

A webcast is a media presentation distributed over the Internet using streaming media technology to distribute a single content source to many simultaneous listeners/viewers. A webcast may either be distributed live or on demand...

 only. A promotional DVD

DVD

A DVD is an optical disc storage media format, invented and developed by Philips, Sony, Toshiba, and Panasonic in 1995. DVDs offer higher storage capacity than Compact Discs while having the same dimensions....

 was made for in-house circulation, and its ensuing popularity (and emergence on eBay

EBay

eBay Inc. is an American internet consumer-to-consumer corporation that manages eBay.com, an online auction and shopping website in which people and businesses buy and sell a broad variety of goods and services worldwide...

) convinced parties involved to distribute the collection in hard copy. The original pressing did not include The Follow; the film was removed from the BMW Films website. Internet rumours attributed the cause to a contract dispute with Whitaker, who had only signed to do an online promotional film, and who exercised a contractual right to remove The Follow from wide circulation promotional DVDs for personal reasons.

The Follow is no longer available via webcast or DVD.

External links

• BMW Films