Ryan Gosling wears a Patek Philippe Calatrava (custom prop)

The first thing you learn about the Driver in Drive is that he keeps to a schedule. Ryan Gosling's nameless wheelman offers his clients a five-minute window, no more, and in the film's opening robbery he gets out a watch, straps it to the steering wheel, and waits, listening to a Lakers game and a police scanner while the men he is driving rob a building. The watch is a Patek Philippe Calatrava, slim and gold on a brown leather strap. Except it isn't a Patek at all.

It is a fake, and a deliberate one. Prop master Will Blount built a small run of replicas styled after a vintage Calatrava, oversized so they would read on camera, because a real Patek would not have survived the shoot. By one account of the production, the fight scenes alone would have kept it breaking, at a cost the props department could not absorb. Esquire, writing about the film, counted five replicas; other accounts say five or six. After the shoot wrapped, the magazine notes, "the only piece of memorabilia that Gosling asked to keep was the watch."

The care taken over a prop most viewers never examine closely comes from the book. In James Sallis's novel, the Driver owns almost nothing, and the one thing he does own is a watch his father gave him. Blount said that was the brief: it had to be "something memorable, something iconic." So the watch on the steering wheel is doing two jobs. It times the heist, and it is the one piece of the man's history he carries, even if the film, which gives him no name and barely any dialogue, never stops to explain it.