A man for his time

IWC ambassador Ewan McGregor has an emotional connection to watchmaking and old timepieces.

IN the watch world they are called "friends." Or more precisely, "friends of the brand". For some brands they grace the company's advertisements and, more often than not, they're drawn from one of two camps: sport and the performing arts.

No other watch brand has, arguably, more friends than IWC and we're not talking social media friends here. We're talking about a list of brand ambassadors - paid ambassadors, that is - so long it would take up too much space to mention here but which includes Ewan McGregor, pictured left, Cate Blanchett, Kevin Spacey, Boris Becker, Bryan Ferry, Zinedine Zidane, Ronan Keating and Paulo Coelho. And the list goes on.

It's an impressive list of celebrities, many of whom were in attendance at a dinner in Geneva in Switzerland in January to celebrate the launch of the brand's new collection of pilot's watches and who rarely appear in above the line advertising for IWC. Their association with the brand is a more subtle one.

Subtlety aside, when you're given the opportunity of interviewing one of these brand ambassadors, the initial excitement is often tempered by the realisation that you will have to, at some point in the interview at least, talk to said celebrity about watchmaking. Wearing a watch or even being hired to promote one doesn't mean you're actually interested in the subject of fine watchmaking and you can only go so far in an interview admiring how nice the watches look. And then it hits you, what if they know nothing about watches, what are we going to talk about?

WISH met with Ewan McGregor, one of IWC's newest ambassadors, at La Reserve hotel on Lake Geneva the morning after the launch event for the pilot's watches and just before McGregor was to leave for New York. His answer to my question about his interest in watchmaking surprised even the IWC executives sitting within earshot.

McGregor is well known as an enthusiast of vintage motorbikes and cars, so it's not a stretch to think that he might also be interested in mechanical timepieces. "I'm not a collector of watches as such but I own a few nice watches," he says when asked how the relationship with IWC started. "But my grandfather was a watchmaker. He died when I was quite young, when I was nine or 10, but my fondest memories of him are of him sitting in his workshop in Crieff in Scotland, where I grew up, as he was fixing people's watches. He was the only watchmaker in the town and he looked after the big clock in the town hall. It's a very rural area with lots of farmers and he would keep everybody's standard clocks going. So I have a great love of watches and timepieces. He died of cancer and as he was dying he restored a timepiece for each of his grandchildren; he left me a beautiful pocket-watch that I still have.

"My passion is motorcycles - and old motorcycles - and this watchface remind me of looking down at my speedo on one of my British bikes," he says as he smiles down at the IWC watch he's sporting. "It's very me, this watch."

As this year is all about pilot's watches for IWC, which the Schaffhausen-based company has been producing since the mid-1930s, the dinner the night before took place in an exhibition hall that was decked out to resemble the flight deck of an aircraft carrier, complete with flight control tower and runway markings on the ground. At the end of the large room a huge movie screen played video shot from the prow of a ship.

Despite being in the middle of landlocked Switzerland, the effect was rather convincing, especially when you added in the Swiss military band, long trestle tables and food served in steel compartmentalised trays, a cockpit-view video of what it's like to land a plane on an aircraft carrier and an onstage interview with actor Tom Skerritt (another friend of the brand and one who played the chief instructor in the 1986 film Top Gun) and a real Top Gun pilot. To bring us back to reality, the evening was rounded off with a performance by Bryan Ferry.

As it happens, McGregor's choice as an ambassador for IWC was well timed. As well as a connection with watchmaking, the Scottish actor also has a family connection in the field of fighter pilots. His older brother Colin is a former Tornado GR4 pilot in the Royal Air Force. "He flew Tornadoes in the RAF for many years and retired two years ago," says McGregor. "Yesterday, when we were watching the film of the American Top Gun pilots, I was thinking, well, I got a trip in the back seat of my brother's Tornado and he did a trip around Scotland, the whole of it in an hour and a half. So I was very familiar with all these images of fast jets."

It turns out that McGregor once entertained ideas about learning to fly a plane, an old-style plane rather than a modern jet, of course. "About two years, ago I did about 15 hours of my pilot's training in the US in Santa Monica but it's something you're not allowed to do when you're making a film. There's a list and all the things I really like to do, like riding a motorcycle or learning to fly, are not allowed for insurance purposes on a movie. I still drive a motorcycle because sometimes a film is five months long and I can't not ride a bike for five month. So I got 15 hours done and then I had to go to work and I haven't gotten back to it. But I would like to one day and, again, it's older aircraft that I'm drawn to. I like looking down and seeing old-fashioned dials rather than a computer screen. I guess I'm just drawn to that aesthetic. I've always had a passion for old cars, my first car was a 1954 Volkswagen Beetle bought for �500 when I was 17 and now I drive a 1954 VW, so all of my vehicles are old, most of my bikes are from the '50s and '60s. I've never regretted buying an old motorcycle but I've certainly regretted selling a few."

If there was any doubt as to whether McGregor was a good choice of brand ambassador for IWC they were now well and truly erased. What brands get out of celebrity associations is relatively clear, what the celebrity gets out of it is less obvious (apart from a watch, travel and a fee). "What I was really excited about [when they approached me] is that IWC is active in different charity projects and when you are a friend of the company you can get involved in many different ways.

"I've done great deal of work with UNICEF and the idea of maybe teaming up to make a documentary or have a fundraising event is exciting to me. I will wear their watches, of course, but that's not a chore, and appear at a number of events, but it's a nice relationship where you think, if I was trying to put something together and you needed a partner or somebody to help me out, then you could work on something together."

McGregor recently completed a two-part documentary for BBC2 called Ewan McGregor: Cold Chain Mission.

It follows him as he travels to three different countries and looks in detail at one strand of UNICEF's work - the vaccine trail, or the cold chain as it's known. It's the perfect kind of match, says McGregor, "of furthering my work with UNICEF and, at the same time, going on an adventure, which I really like to do".

"It was incredibly interesting and moving," he says. "And when we got to the last village in India, at the end of this river, I imagined there would be a sense of satisfaction that we had got the vaccines there [they need to be stored at a constant temperature throughout the journey] and the children were being immunised and protected against diseases that we take for granted [we won't contract].

I looked around and thought these children now have a future but when I looked at the future that lay ahead of them I realised it was still such a difficult life."

McGregor, who is married to Eve Mavrakis, a French production designer, has four children including a one-year-old, and says that doing another television series like the two he did with Charley Boorman, Long Way Round in 2004 and Long Way Down in 2007 is not on the cards in the foreseeable future. "I feel that we sort of did that," he says about the prospect of a third series.

"We did two very interesting trips and they were unbelievable and experiences I will never forget. The most obvious next trip would be coming up from South America to North America and I think South America would be extraordinary to explore, but it would be a five or six-month trip ... and I would find it hard to spend that time away from my family. But travelling with them is something that I would like to do in the future. When you've got this race against time it is easier to blast through countries and maybe not see as much as you would like to, so maybe I'd do it and spend more time on the trip next time."

Before that happens McGregor is on an adventure of a different kind. Like a lot of accomplished film actors have done in recent years - Glenn Close, Dustin Hoffman, Claire Danes to name a few - he is making the leap into television drama. McGregor has signed on to appear in HBO's serialisation of Jonathan Franzen's 2001 novel The Corrections and says it was the quality of the script, written by Franzen and Noah Baumbach, that got him in. Baumbach, who wrote and directed the 2005 film The Squid and the Whale, will also direct The Corrections.

"I was sent the first three scripts and then I met with them and for quite a while I ummed and aahed about it because I'm not used to working in television and it's quite a big commitment. It's four years for four months each year but at the end of it we should have a 40-hour story. The idea is to shoot 10 hours a year. I said yes because the writing is of such a high standard, I'm frustrated by bad writing. Sometimes you can read a script and feel like the writer is winking at you, he makes reference to 'our hero this' and 'our hero that'. If I find myself reading a script and not wanting it to end, and if I start to see myself in the character as I'm reading it, then that's a really good sign.