A Rare Blancpain is the “Artifact” In George R.R. Martin and Paul W.S. Anderson’s "In The Lost Lands"

Earlier this month I travelled to Santa Fe, New Mexico for the premier of Paul W.S. Anderson’s latest film In The Lost Lands. Based off a short story from none other than "Game of Thrones" creator George R.R. Martin, the movie stars Milla Jovovich and a very prominent, rare, and complicated Blancpain watch.

Director Paul W.S. Anderson was looking for the ultimate MacGuffin: something invaluable that hearkens back to the world before society crumbled. He said “…it’s a long lost relic of the old world – almost mythical. It’s like a legendary magical artifact. Dave Bautista has a great line where Milla’s trying to bribe him with the watch. And he says, ‘I’ve heard of these, but I’ve never seen one,’ which lets you know how rare it is. So we needed something that looked extraordinary.” Anderson’s partner Jeremy Bolt (a huge watch enthusiast) sprinted to action when the search for a watch began, “Jeremy presented what he felt were like the top ten possibilities for the watch, and I went, ‘that one’. And he’s like, ‘Really?’ because he knew it was the most expensive. He was hoping I was going to go for one of the cheaper options. I think he shuffled it towards the back of the pile, hoping I wouldn’t choose it anyway. I just felt the Blancpain looked like that magical artifact. It looked so special.”

So, what better object than a magnificently complicated watch that somehow survived the apocalypse? Sure, I doubt there is anyone in this wasteland who could service the Blancpain Carrousel Répétition Minutes Chronographe Flyback, but we’re not really worrying about that kind of minutiae here. This majestic half-million-dollar watch packs so much high watchmaking in one package it’s kind of surprising that Blancpain was able to fit it all in one 45mm-wide case (though it is a substantial 17.8mm thick). Combining a minute repeater, flyback chronograph, and spinning one-minute carrousel (a novel escapement system similar to a tourbillon) definitely makes for a highly valuable and sophisticated watch in the real world, let alone a dystopian future. In the story, the artifact is actually a gemstone, but the movie adaptation opts for something with a bit more, let’s say, tie-in potential.

And I’m not just gassing the watch up for no reason here: the movie really does get into a lot of detail and not just a passing scan. When I asked Anderson about why this watch was chosen, he got into it further, saying, “it really does have a mythic, Old World feel. You could almost imagine it being discovered, you know, 10,000 years into the future…there's a lot of incredible fine detail in it, 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 underneath, you know, 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 that close, there has to be an immense amount of detail in the watch for that shot to kind of hold up on a really big screen. So... those were all the kind of motivations for why this watch was chosen.”

Movies and watches are two of my favorite things in the world and I’m sure I’m not alone in the feeling. Add George R.R. Martin to it and I think the lion’s share of my interests are covered. It’s refreshing to see an older watch (this one was released all the way back in 2013) with not much commercial appeal chosen for the movie, which is something Blancpain certainly deserves credit for. You can catch In The Lost Lands in theaters right now and learn more at blancpain.com.