How Bertrand Tavernier turned Glasgow into a living, breathing film set

By Alistair Harkness
Published on 29/05/2012 17:01

Long before filming on World War Z brought Brad Pitt to George Square to fight Philadelphian zombies, and location work on Cloud Atlas had Halle Berry traversing vertiginous San Franciscan streets near Blythswood Square, Glasgow’s true cinematic potential was recognised and capitalized upon by a visionary sci-fi drama starring Harvey Keitel that is only just starting to get the recognition it deserves.

Set in a near future scarred by a voyeuristic need to experience death and suffering on a reality TV show, Bertrand Tavernier’s prescient 1980 film Death Watch has long been unavailable in the UK, but with a new digitally restored print on general release from this weekend, audiences can once again see Scotland’s biggest city used on screen in a unique way.

What’s immediately striking about watching the 32-year-old film in a modern context is just how significantly its use of Glasgow diverges from what has become the cinematic norm.

In Death Watch, Glasgow is neither a cheap substitute for another city, nor an early example of the kind of gutter-wallowing poverty trap favoured by some of the filmmakers who have chosen to shoot movies here in the years since.

Instead, from its opening crane shot rising high over the Necropolis, the film makes use of lush and expansive widescreen cinematography (it was shot in Cinemascope) to accentuate the drama of a city in which classical architecture sits alongside decaying buildings, tower blocks are offset by the Art Nouveau designs of Charles Rennie Mackintosh, and lush green space contrasts wildly with the industrial wastelands lining the Clyde.

It was precisely this diversity that made Tavernier – who premiered the new print of the film at this year’s Glasgow Film Festival – so resolute in his decision to shoot the film in and around the city.

In fact, after he acquired the rights to David G Compton’s 1974 source novel The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe – about a terminally ill woman (played in the film by Romy Schneider) whose dying days are surreptitiously tracked by a TV station employee (Keitel) with video cameras fitted inside his eyes – he insists that Glasgow, rather than a city in his native France or America, was the only location he considered using.

That ability to think outside the box is reflected in the way Glasgow functions in the film as a living, breathing set, one that not only looks astonishing, but holds up, even now, as a credible futuristic environment.

Aspiring Scottish filmmakers with ambitions to do something more imaginative with their surroundings are advised to get themselves to a screening tout suite.

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