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More now than ever it seems, watch companies fight their way onto the big screen through influencer programs or partnership deals with film production companies. Sometimes the partnership feels natural and complements the film, though the savvy enthusiast can still spot a brand deal when it is played out in front of them. However, there are the rare occasions where a watch is chosen by the actor, the director, costume designer, or even the writer. Those instances are special as they better integrate into the final piece and add a bit of fun watch spotting for the enthusiast. I recently had the opportunity to join the Blancpain team in Santa Fe, NM for a special world premier screening of the new George R.R. Martin story directed by Paul W.S. Anderson, In The Lost Land. The film takes place in a dystopian reality and stars Milla Jovovich and Dave Bautista with the Blancpain Carrousel Répétition Minutes Chronographe Flyback taking center stage with a prominent feature as an ancient and coveted relic. Watching the movie, the casual enthusiast may be left with questions such as why they chose this particular watch, how did Blancpain work their way on set, and was it a real watch at all? Well, we had the opportunity to sit down for a roundtable interview with George R.R. Martin, Paul W.S. Anderson, and Milla Jovovich to try and answer these questions ourselves.
Perhaps most interestingly, this partnership is one that reaches back quite a long time ago while the film was very much in development. According to the team, roughly seven years ago, after Martin’s short story had been fully fleshed out into a feature film script, the process of world building began. Carefully selecting costumes, sets, weaponry, and other items, Anderson was presented with several options for what would take the place of the central relic payment made to Gray Alycs (Jovovich’s character). Luckily for us, Anderson is a watch nerd. In an interview, he reflected, “My producing partner Jeremy Bolt is like an uber watch aficionado, like he lives for it. And we have a lot of very kind of funny watch stories.” One story, relayed by Anderson, involved Jeremy spending much of his free time on a shoot in China trying to hunt down one specific piece for his collection, only to realize later that the crew had gone out and purchased knock offs of the very same watch just to rib him.
Anderson explained to Bolt what was needed for In the Lost Land when it came to this particular relic. “It’s a kind of a long lost relic of the old world. So it’s like one of the last remaining and it’s kind of almost mythical.” Understanding the significance the artifact would play in the movie, Bolt presented Anderson with his top ten options for watches that he thought bore an impressive enough appearance to play the pivotal role. “I went, that one. and he’s like, really?” Anderson recounted in making the immediate selection of the Blancpain Carrousel Répétition Minutes Chronographe Flyback, a watch that he said “looked like that magical artifact. It looked so special.”
Despite the intricate appearance of the chosen Blancpain watch and current pop culture hype of high end watch spotting in Hollywood, it was an interesting choice by the team to make the change in relic from the source materials. In the original script, Martin mentioned that he had originally chosen a large sapphire as the relic. Regarding the change to a watch, co-producer and writer Constantin Werner recalled, “Paul had the idea to use it through the film, also to show time passing, which is just the narrative structure” with Jovovich adding “Yeah, that was a great idea to show the watch face and the face of the moon.” The cohesive blending of a narrative timing structure along with visual representation is one that Anderson is quite proud of. “The movie is very circular,” Anderson said, “it starts with the close up of Dave [Bautista], it ends with the close up of Dave, and you realize that the start of the movie is actually the end of the movie. So I felt like the watch face kind of in the circularity of that really reflected the structure of the film.”
Throughout the movie, the Blancpain Carrousel Répétition Minutes Chronographe Flyback makes several appearances in meaningful interactions with the characters. “There’s a lot of incredible fine detail in [the watch],” Anderson explained, “which I wanted because there are shots in the movie where we go inside the workings of the watch. We go underneath the second hand and we’re skirting above the face of the watch, underneath the glass. And I thought, you know, when we go in there and we go close, there has to be an immense amount of detail in the watch for that shot to go and hold up on a really big screen.” It was a well thought out choice, not guided by price or agreed upon placement. A strikingly complicated piece well cared after in the apocalyptic waste land.
I asked Anderson if he struggled weaving this delicate and intricate watch into a story filled with gruesome and dark imagery, but for him, it was an additional detail that pulled the film together. “At the end of the day, it’s clean, shiny, we’re all dirty and with bags under our eyes, and that was when the watch would come and take center stage,” Anderson said. It was important to connect the two aspects together to help build the world. “You know, you have so much sort of random product placement these days that seems meaningless, so it’s always nice to have a bit of placement that actually helps the story move along as it’s kind of in it, it doesn’t take you out of the film.” Speaking further on the placement of the watch and visual branding, he continued, “I find that with a lot of, especially in American movies, they’ll be a bit close up with it in the foreground. And you know, what I like about working with Blancpain is that there was never any kind of demand that the watch had to be seen in a certain way or there had to be a certain shot. It was all very, very organic.”
Wrapping up our conversation the subject turned to our earliest watch memories. Sparking a longer conversation, George R.R. Martin began sharing a story from early in life about wearing a kitty character watch. It was after he had hit his wrist on a surface cracking the crystal that he began wearing his watches with the dial on the underside of his wrist, a habit he continues to this day. Paul W.S. Anderson, who could not recount his first watch, laughed at this. “That’s funny,” he said, “that’s exactly how I wear a watch on a movie set, because I’m very clumsy. I’m always bumping into things, into the crane, into whatever. So you know, the watchers would just get damaged too easily, so I turn it around.”
For my fellow George R.R. Martin and Game of Thrones fans, we did ask the all important question: when is the next book coming? “People keep reminding me that I’m old, I don’t feel old,” Martin exclaimed. He wants to continue his stories, including the Gray Alys series, but realizes that he has a lot of irons in the fire. “Who knows, maybe one of these days. I unfortunately have two gigantic novels that I have to finish and if I ever start writing anything else my fans would come to my house.” Blancpain
Portions of this interview have been edited for clarity
