Nightwatch is a 1997 American thriller film directed by Ole Bornedal, written by Bornedal and Steven Soderbergh, and starring Ewan McGregor, Patricia Arquette, Josh Brolin, Lauren Graham and Nick Nolte. It was written by Bornedal and Steven Soderbergh. It is a remake of the 1994 Danish film of the same name, which was also directed by Bornedal.
Plot Law student Martin Bells is hired as a night watchman at a hospital morgue. A string of gruesome prostitute murders committed by a necrophiliac serial killer quickly point to him as the lead suspect in the investigation carried out by Inspector Thomas Cray. At the same time, Martin slowly discovers clues that point to the real perpetrator.
Cast Ewan McGregor as Martin Bells Patricia Arquette as Katherine Josh Brolin as James Gallman Lauren Graham as Marie Nick Nolte as Inspector Thomas Cray Brad Dourif as Duty Doctor Alix Koromzay as Joyce Anais Evans as Leanne Lonny Chapman as Old Watchman Robert LaSardo as Pub Thug Mongo Brownlee as Pub Thug Larry Cedar as Waiter (uncredited) Sandra Hess as Student (uncredited) John C. Reilly as Deputy Inspector Bill Davis (uncredited)
Production After the original Nattevagten found critical acclaim in 1994, Danish director Ole Bornedal was hired by Dimension Films (who had recently purchased the distribution rights for Nattevagten) to come to the United States and remake the film. The remake was intended to be the first of three films Bornedal would direct for Miramax, the parent company of Dimension.
Principal photography for the remake took place in Los Angeles, California, in the localities of Culver City and UCLA. It was the first American film made by Scottish actor Ewan McGregor, who used a fake American accent for the role of Martin Bells. At the time, he wanted to appear in off-beat, modestly budgeted American films, rather than typical Hollywood blockbusters, with McGregor even openly criticizing American films such as Independence Day in a June 1997 Entertainment Weekly interview. He told the publication, "when I met with agents in L.A., they would tell me you had to do two movies for yourself and then two for the business. And I thought, ‘F— off. No, you don’t. You do every film because you want to do good work. Because you’re interested in making good movies and working with good people.’ To do a crappy event movie for a lot of money, like Independence Day — I would never taint my soul with that crap." In another interview from this period, McGregor claimed, "I went to L.A. to make Nightwatch because I wanted to have the kind of exposure that would allow me to pick and choose my films. You can't do that if you just make little independent British features."Jones, Veda Boyd. Ewan McGregor. United States, Chelsea House Publishers, 2000.
McGregor's initial impression of Los Angeles upon flying to the city was that It "looked like the world's biggest caravan park." McGregor said he started to miss the "plants and birds and rocks" of the Scottish countryside while making Nightwatch, which led to him frequently watching golf on television. In a September 1997 interview, Josh Brolin reflected on his role as Martin's best friend James, saying "my character has interior problems. He's dealing with lost identity, almost like an adolescent would in later life. He's constantly going outside himself, trying to fix that with alcohol, drugs, prostitution, whatever." Lauren Graham's character Marie, the girlfriend of James, works as a minister at a church, although all of these scenes depicting her in this job would end up being removed in the final cut. In an interview on the set of the film, Graham said, "it was interesting because when I interviewed a woman who's a minister at the Episcopal Church, I said 'you know I don't want to be representing the church here because it's a character who uses foul language, it's a person who's in a relationship with a guy who's doing terrible things', and she sort of said to me 'well especially as a young person involved in the church, the idealism is that you want to save everybody, the hope is that you can bring a community together', so it actually helps make sense the difficulties of their relationship and why she stays with him." Around the time Nightwatch was being made, Brolin and fellow cast member Alix Koromzay both got roles in the Dimension/Miramax sci-fi horror film Mimic. Bornedal and cinematographer Dan Laustsen (from the original Nattevagten crew) also worked on Mimic. Laustsen got hired for Mimic after his work on Nightwatch caught the attention of the film's director Guillermo del Toro, and Laustsen has since gone on to have a successful career in the United States.
Nightwatch took much longer to complete than originally expected, due to a series of test screenings and reshoots Miramax ordered. According to McGregor, one of these reshoots forced him to fly back to Los Angeles and cancel a two day holiday he had set aside for his wife and baby daughter. Changes made by Dimension to the finished cut included reducing the role of Marie, and adding a "more satisfying final scene". Bornedal went on to state that "the actual shooting of Nightwatch was terrific, everything was totally wonderful, and I was free to do as I pleased, but everything suddenly became extremely complicated during the post-production phase".
The co-writer of the film's script, Steven Soderbergh, is described as having "sanitized" the original 1994 script. For example, in the Danish version, there is a scene at a restaurant where the character Jens orders a prostitute to give Martin a blowjob. In the remake, Jens (now known as James) instead orders the prostitute to give Martin a handjob. Also added by Soderbergh were American pop culture references, including a scene where Martin mutters: "It's just like one of those movies on the USA Network, the hero sees something weird and no one will believe him". In another scene, James suggests to a thug at a bar that he could get him on a daytime talk show, and proceeds to reference Oprah, Phil Donahue, Ricki Lake and Sally Jessy Raphael. Soderbergh himself noted his frustrations at being forced to provide new script pages for reshoots that were going to be detrimental to the quality of the film. Bornedal said he, Soderbergh and David Bowie all saw the original cut of Nightwatch together and enjoyed it. Bornedal adds that the final version was the "fourth cut" of the film, and that "the American Nightwatch I did was not the Nightwatch that was released".
An opening credit sequence was designed by Kyle Cooper, who had also worked on the opening credits for other films, such as Mimic and Seven. It contained a photo montage of women with their eyes scratched out; as the killer's trademark in the film was to remove the eyes of his victims. Cooper then shot these images submerged in water, to give them an added layer of distance and make them ripple spectrally on the screen.
Music Nightwatch'''s background score was written by Danish composer Joachim Holbek, who, like many of the crew, was also involved in the original version. When Nightwatch was in the process of being re-edited by Dimension, Mimic and Scream composer Marco Beltrami was brought in to rescore several scenes. He also composed the score for a newly shot scene at the beginning of the film, involving the killer and a prostitute.Film Score Monthly. Volume 2 (August 1997). Beltrami went on to score several of Bornedal's Danish films once he left the United States. While Martin is working at the morgue, there are sequences where he listens to licensed songs from alternative rock/electronic artists The Chemical Brothers, R.E.M. and Transister. The closing credits featured the song "Pain" by Super 8, an alternative rock band briefly signed to Hollywood Records in the mid-90s. Originally, songs by the band Garbage also appeared throughout, but they were later removed in post-production. To coincide with the film's debut, an accompanying soundtrack album was going to be released by Hollywood Records, a subdivision of Disney, which then owned Dimension/Miramax.Nightwatch poster. Dimension Films, c. 1997 However, plans for the soundtrack album were ultimately abandoned by Hollywood Records (though future plans for an archival soundtrack album may not be abandoned by Buena Vista Records).
Release and home mediaNightwatch was first shown at film festivals, premiering at the 1997 Málaga International Week of Fantastic Cinema in Spain, where Bornedal won the Best Director prize. It was also screened at the 1997 American Film Market in Santa Monica, California. After several delays, the film then received an American theatrical run in April 1998, where it underperformed. Nightwatch was meant to build off the success of the Dimension/Miramax slasher film Scream, and was mainly promoted as a horror picture, with trailers for Nightwatch appearing on the original 1997 Scream VHS.
In 1998, Dimension and Buena Vista Home Entertainment released it to VHS, and then to DVD in 2000. It also received a Japan-only LaserDisc release in 1999, shortly before the discontinuation of the format. In 2005, Disney sold off Dimension, before selling off Miramax itself in 2010. That year, private equity firm Filmyard Holdings took over Miramax, in addition to gaining control of Dimension's pre-October 2005 library. A high definition print of the film was created around this time, being used on a Blu-ray released in Germany on June 21, 2012 and on a Blu-ray released in Spain on August 28, 2013. These European Blu-ray releases were handled by StudioCanal, on license from Filmyard Holdings. During March 2016, it was announced that Qatari company beIN Media Group had purchased Miramax from Filmyard Holdings. In April 2020, ViacomCBS (now known as Paramount Skydance) bought a 49% stake in Miramax from beIN, which gave them the rights to the Miramax library and the pre-October 2005 Dimension library, including Nightwatch. They made the film available on their streaming service Paramount+, and on February 23, 2021, Paramount Home Entertainment reissued the film on DVD, with this being one of many Dimension/Miramax titles that they reissued in 2020–21. In the 2020 deal, Paramount also acquired the rights to release future projects based on Dimension/Miramax properties, and have since distributed several new Scream films. However, these future film rights do not extend to the Nattevagten/Nightwatch property, presumably due to its Danish origins. In 2023, Bornedal went on to create a sequel to the 1994 Danish version titled Nightwatch: Demons Are Forever, which was done entirely in his native Denmark. In 2025, both the 1994 Danish version and Nightwatch: Demons Are Forever were bundled together on a Blu-ray release titled The Nightwatch Collection. This release was done by Arrow Video, and did not include the American remake.
Alternate versions