• Text size
  • Send this article to a friend
  • Print this article

When Harvey Keitel strode the streets of Glasgow

When French director Bertrand Tavernier was trying to find British backers for a futuristic film he wanted to make in Glasgow, he found a chorus of disapproval and dire warnings about the fate that would await him.

Custom byline text: 
Filmed in Glasgow with a first-rate cast in 1979, Death Watch languished in relative obscurity – until now. Director Bertrand Tavernier recalls the shoot with Richard Mowe

As he scouted locations for Death Watch in the winter of 1979, he was told by UK producers David Puttnam and Sandy Lieberson, among others, that he would be attacked and his equipment stolen.

"What they were describing sounded 10 times worse than the Bronx," says Tavernier, reclining with arms gesticulating in all directions in a capacious armchair in the Grand Hotel in Paris – an apt setting for any filmmaker, this being where the inventors of cinema, Auguste and Louis Lumiere, premiered their early silent films in 1895 at the Cafe De La Paix.