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[Percival Blanco]

WheneverI watch a movie, I try to get a glimpse of what watches are on the wrists of various characters, and I am certain that I am not alone in this. But, more than just spotting watches on screen, I wanted to find out what goes behind the selection of a watch for a film or television show. Recently, I sat down for an interesting conversation with Ritchie Kremer, who is currently working as the Prop Master on the HBO series, Westworld, but has also worked on such productions as Interstellar, National Treasure: Book of Secrets, and Being John Malkovich to name just a few. I talked to him about his experiences in the film industry, and, especially, about his experience working on Interstellar, the development of the now-famous "Murph" watch, and how watches are selected and used on film.

"Essentially, we take the script and break it down per scene and basically look at every single thing an actor touches or holds in the script," Kremer says. "That's pretty much what my job is, to offer up options to the actor and director for a particular prop. No matter what it is, I have to give options for it. So my job is kind of characterizing each character, or helping them characterize themselves."

Like many occupations, film production has a certain hierarchical structure, at the top of which sits the director. A film is the director's vision, so while the Prop Master relies on their own experience, they must also ensure that it jives with the director's creative process. To this end, open communication is key.

"It's funny because Chris and his wife, who's a producer on Westworld, approached Hamilton on their end, and I approached Hamilton on my end during prep, and I walked into Chris and I go, 'Hey Chris, I've got this great idea of using Hamilton watches, and here's their catalog.' 'Oh, we've already been in touch with them.' It's so weird, the two of us just kind of came up with the thing, and it worked out perfectly."

The Hamilton Khaki Pilot Day-Date "fit Cooper's character perfectly, and it is the watch he wore throughout the movie." Kremer says. "For [The Murph], we basically put together something that was a simpler watch; it wasn't this big giant man's pilot watch on her."

The selection process of the Murph watch involved studying Hamilton catalogs and going back and forth with Hamilton to devise a series of sketches for potential watches, and then obtaining prototypes for the production crew to choose from.

"We took the parts of three different watches and put them into the design. Then, at the last minute, I saw that there was some word like 'magnetic' or something written on the dial. So I talked to Chris, and said, 'It doesn't make any sense to have this writing on there when we have this whole tesseract thing and the film is talking about the magnetic force and all that.' So I had [Hamilton] take that off at the last minute."

"The people at Hamilton kept putting prototypes together on a really timely basis, sending them from Switzerland, and we just kept fine-tuning it. Finally, Chris liked the look of it, and then I took it to my guys, and I redid the whole freaking thing. The only stressful thing was making sure we actually got the watches back from Switzerland in time for filming. There's that pressure, but it's just fun. Once we got that final prototype in, it was a done deal, and I ordered 10 of them."

I asked Kremer if he had access to photos of any of the early Murph prototype watches, or early sketches of the watch. Surprisingly, he said that during pre-production, nobody takes photos of props or materials which are not cleared for final production. I reached out to Hamilton, and they indicated they don't have such materials or early prototypes either. Luckily, we at least have some sketches of the Murph which were used as part of the promotion for Interstellar in 2014. For now, it looks like the "magnetic Murph" might just become one of those lost pieces of watch lore.

"Murph's watch was one of the most difficult things, just because of the timeline of trying to put it together and all the different aspects of that. I had three or four different watches made, and then I had to take Hamilton's watch and rip it apart and manually operate it off of a cable system that you can't see to make it do that little ticking thing. [The seconds hand of the watch is the key to Cooper's being able to communicate with his daughter.] So I manually operated that, and I showed that to Chris on a bus on location scout one day, and I got it all together, and it was good. It was awesome because it was an issue of taking that fine piece of art and not screwing it up so that we could actually make it do that ticking on camera."

The sequence that Kremer references is a pivotal scene in the film involving the Murph watch, in which the hands of the watch are vibrating at such a frequency as to transmit Morse code messages across multiple dimensions. While this could have been easily achieved through the use of CGI, it is cool to see the commitment to practical effects here and that the operation was controlled by Nolan himself. As it turns out, he is an extremely hands-on director in more ways than one.

"Chris really likes doing that. He did a bunch of the dust too. The very opening shot of the movie where we're shooting down the bookshelf, he's got a fishing rod with a pounce bag [a small, dust-filled bag used for a drawing technique called pouncing] on it, and he's got the little stick. He's handing that right over the cameras as he's going along, and he's pouncing the dust on the bookshelf. He likes doing that kind of stuff. You just had to be delicate with it. I mean, obviously, tearing that watch apart and redoing it with a cable, that was the only potential for problems."

Currently, Kremer serves as Prop Master on Westworld, now in its third season. The show has famously straddled the line between Western period drama and science fiction, which is an interesting grey area when it comes to watches. Nonetheless, that has not stopped the show from being great fodder for watch spotting.

"It's definitely different moving from the first season into the second and now the third, so it's just a completely different experience. There was a whole storyline on Westworld that we were going to do from season one to season two involving an Omega watch. I bought a Seamaster for the show, and I was going to modify it. There is also a rose-gold antique pocket watch on a long gold chain used by Maeve in season two that I own personally. Period pieces are my forte. That's what I love doing, so I have a bunch of period stuff. I have about 150 watches in my own kit."

"In the third season, there's another watch that's a huge part of an entire five or six episodes. This watch, I didn't really make it, but we added stuff to the face of the watch. It becomes a huge integral part of the show. You would never know the make of the watch because I totally dismantled it, but it was basically a Movado that we just took the guts out of, and then replaced the face for strictly on-camera use, and then visual effects in post-production embellished what my original piece was. I gave them a placeholder, basically, just so that they could start with something."

"I did National Treasure: Book of Secrets too, and that was a really good experience. I'd also worked on Being John Malkovich. That was really fun, because that's such a weird quirky kind of movie, and I don't know, there's just a lot of them that I have enjoyed."

The original National Treasure has a scene in which Nicholas Cage's character uses his Rolex Submariner as collateral to borrow a $100 bill from a cashier in a clothing store. The watch even gets its own close-up. Until speaking with Kremer, I had no idea the watch was again used in the sequel.

"I personally bought the Submariner for National Treasure 2, I believe, but to be honest with you, I don't even remember how I got it. It was so long ago. I don't recall that at all. I know that the studio has it at this point, but I don't remember how that went about exactly."

Watch guy or not, Kremer certainly has the inside scoop on some little known facets of watch history when it comes to movies. These are the types of secrets only insiders have, and you don't get more inside than the Prop Master.

In Interstellar, after young Murph places the watch on the bookshelf in her bedroom, her father - in the same bedroom but from another dimension - moved the second hand and recorded data in a Morse-signal message on it. Many years later, the second hand still signals the message, grown-up Murph finds the watch and takes it with her to NASA and there she translates the message back into the data needed.

Normally I would answer this myself by saying that it is film, it is science fiction, everything is possible, and there is no need to question things we cannot explain. But this movie certainly has the intention of being truthful to science, to explain what is going on and this particular director has a reputation of telling stories that in one way or another always has plausible explanations for plot-hole-like aspects.

For the first question about how gravity could move the watch sideways, apparently the idea was that gravitational waves were being transmitted into the past. In Chapter 30 of The Science of Interstellar by Kip Thorne, the physicist who was the scientific consultant for the movie, it's said that Cooper is scooped out of the black hole by the tesseract, which is a four-dimensional cube in a higher spatial dimension known as "the bulk"--the tesseract seems to be a piece of advanced technology created by the beings living in that dimension, which they used to allow Cooper to transmit the "quantum data" about the black hole singularity to Murph in the past. When he's inside the tesseract, the book says that he can see the "world tubes" of various objects (their paths through spacetime, a sort of 4D tube where each cross-section is the 3D object at a particular instant in time, analogous to the world line of a point particle), and that:

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