Why Bertrand Tavernier chose Romy as his first central female protagonist…, and Glasgow as location for his only film set in the future

Romy Schneider and Harvey Keitel in “Death Watch”, 1980, Gaumont International

I have watched Bertrand Tavernier’s films and I have read his book, Bertrand Tavernier’s Amis Américains: Entretiens avec les grands auteurs d’Hollywood, where he talks about so many films and so many filmmakers with the sheer enthusiasm of a cinephile, almost a childish enthusiasm, and also with the broad and deep knowledge of a filmmaker, but he wears that knowledge lightly. His dialogues about movies are like dialogues between friends, which, I believe, are always, always better than any official, critical review. Tavernier made his movies with that same sheer childish enthusiasm, in each new film driven more by the amazement of the unknown than by the confidence in his own craft or past experiences.

And now let’s get back four decades and to the director’s film about the future, Death Watch. Tavernier was part of a generation who read a lot of science fiction, but he could hardly find a novel he wanted to adapt. He was at a time in his career when he was seeking to attach more importance to characters than he had previously done, and to have them shape the narrative more than any other element. Sci-fi novels and films rarely did that, and they certainly didn’t do that with female characters. He found that character in David G. Compton’s The Unsleeping Eye, from 1974. A welfare world in the near future, when almost all diseases have been cured, except very few. Catherine Mortenhoe – who writes books obeying the orders of a computer – is one suffering from such disease, and becomes the object of media fascination. She tries to escape that, shutting off from the world and media attention in the green countryside, only to find herself filmed without her knowledge by a stranger whom she comes to trust, a reporter, Harvey Keitel, who had a camera implanted in his brain. More than a sci-fi, it is a cautionary tale for the future, our future, which has become our present today. The film’s reality TV voyeurism concept that has, in the meantime, taken a new shape, creeping into everyone’s lives with our own will and with the simple touch of our fingertips, is terrifyingly prescient.

But who could play “a woman who not only carried the drama’s moral outrage, but formed its emotional center as well”?

It was Romy. Romy Schneider opened up this opportunity for Bertrand Tavernier. Romy, who had taught another great French director, Claude Sautet, how to direct actresses and had awoken in him an interest in female characters. Romy, who possessed like no other a photogenic power and a radiant, mysterious and poetic beauty that was only made human by the vulnerability that she was never afraid to show. Incandescent, implacable, imperious, fiercely independent, Romy was the image of feminine beauty, power, freedom and frailty the way nobody else had ever had the courage to be.

Tavernier said, as quoted in the book Bertrand Tavernier: The filmmaker of Lyon, by Stephen Hay: “For me, she was like Antigone. She had everything that I could relate to. I needed to take a star – somebody very powerful, very lyrical; all those qualities which I found in Romy. She taught me not to cut too quickly, because she was always giving me moments at the end of the scenes which were so striking, so beautiful, so I let the camera roll. I think I opened up working with her. I already had the feeling, with Noiret or Galabru or Christine, of working with somebody inspired, and with Romy you could really touch it – the sense of somebody who was inspired during a take, and was suddenly going beyond what has been written. I had the feeling of exploring unknown places with her.”

As for the actual location of the film, the director, once again, went against the grain, eschewing all futuristic metropolis ideas and settings used in science fiction and simply placing his story and characters, and us, in Scotland, and Glasgow just as it was, in its battered look, dim reality and special light.

“I remember practically everybody in England saying that we were totally mad to shoot a film in Glasgow – that it was like going into the worst areas of the Bronx – and it was one of the happiest shoots I’ve ever had in my life; we never had any problems with people in the streets. I was going against most of the futuristic films of the time which always took place in very modern buildings, and which I felt were kind of cliché. I think you can have a story taking place twenty years from now where people are still living in a nineteenth century house. Why should they be destroyed? Why, as soon as you are writing something in the near future does everything have to be changed? You already have all the change contained in the story – technological change, social and scientific change – but certain things are still stable and it’s very interesting to oppose those two things. I love the look of Glasgow – I liked the look of the light in the streets. It’s the same thing that attracted me to Lyon – that it’s a mysterious city, that it has a certain look, and you have to go beneath the look and you discover many ideas.”