Is The Only Living Pickpocket Immediately the Best Watch Movie Ever?

There are plenty of great movie watches: James Bond’s OG Rolex Submariner, Hans Gruber’s Cartier Tank, or even Hamilton’s made-for-Interstellar Murph. But there are very few great watch movies that dig into the myriad layers of meaning that compel real-world collectors. In that way, The Only Living Pickpocket in New York, which rolled out to theaters nationwide on October 30, is a timepiece-lover’s dream movie.In the film, John Turturro gives an Oscar-buzzy performance as Harry Lehman, an aging New York hustler who has scraped by for decades without evolving with the world around him. He doesn’t have a phone, dances to vinyl records, pays at diners with cash, and rents Barbara Stanwych movies (“tapes,” he calls them) from the public library for his wife.Naturally, Harry is drawn toward watches, both for his personal use as items to steal. Along the way of The Only Living Pickpocket in New York, there’s a cornucopia of watches and Easter eggs for collectors to appreciate: Director Noah Segan meticulously selected a watch to fit every character’s personality. It matters deeply to Segan whether a character is wearing a vintage Rolex Explorer 1016 or a modern Hublot; and the movie even gets deep into the inner workings of timepieces. A pawn shop owner, played by Steve Buscemi, deems a Patek Philippe “fugazi” and shows Harry the lack of jewels in the movement. Watches, as totems of an analog world imbued with personal and cultural history, aren’t just a detail, but a vital motif.It’s clear that The Only Living Pickpocket in New York could only come from a writer-director embedded in the hobby themselves. And, in the future, Segan, along with the dealer Adam Golden who sourced the pieces for the film, plans to bring these essential watches to auction for charity. GQ talked with Segan about how he chose the film’s array of timepieces, the state of his own collection, and why he would make a terrible watch salesman.GQ: After I watched your film, I found myself thinking that I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a better watch movie. I’m curious if anything comes to mind for you?Noah Segan: That’s a great question. I wouldn’t presume to jump on anybody else’s intent in terms of watches. I think obviously there are a lot of watches in movies that have become iconic. The first kind-of-nice watch I ever got myself was a TAG Heuer Monaco because I was such a huge fan of Steve McQueen and Le Mans. There are obviously a lot of watches that are worn. I don’t know how often they get woven into a story, but in our case, our story is not just about time, but time changing, time running out, and that in combination with very physical things, tactile things. We’ve got a pickpocket, he’s tactile. He touches you. The idea of a totem and an object representing those things started feeling very important to me, and watches do that for me.You have said that you would be selling watches if you weren’t a filmmaker. What is your personal connection to the hobby?I would probably be a very bad watch salesman simply because I would want to keep all my favorites. So I think maybe collector is where I should stay, but I’ve always been a very, for lack of a better term, sort of analog guy. I still shoot film with a camera. I spin records. I live in an old house. The classic car in the movie is my old car.I was lucky enough to grow up in an environment that appreciates the marriage of engineering and art and history. To me, that Venn diagram is a solid circle when it comes to wristwatches. These are objects that can be beautiful, they can be sophisticated, they can represent personal historic endeavors and also the macrocosm of historic feats.The idea of what a watch means when you think of it in terms of The Dirty Dozen [a WWII-era field watch for soldiers commissioned by Britain from 12 iconic Swiss watchmakers] being there for the military or [Paul] Newman’s Rolex Daytona and its engraving on the back that says, “Drive Carefully Me.” All of a sudden you’re talking about something bigger than us, a celebrity, probably one of the biggest celebrities of all time who did something absolutely crazy, which was not being a movie star, but being a race car driver. And yet his wife still said, “Drive Carefully Me.” So there’s the personal, there’s the promotional, there’s the macro and the micro, and they all are fascinating to me.In your film, there’s a very personal connection that the character of Harry has with his Rolex Explorer 1016, considered one of the great vintage watches among collectors. What led you to choose that as Harry’s watch?Well, a close friend of mine is Adam Golden, who has a company called Menta, is actually a watch dealer who deals in very specific, unique vintage watches of great provenance.In considering the watch for Harry, I really wanted something that could bridge the gap between a very useful tool and something of value. And that watch represents a lot for people in that respect. There was a time when Harry was a younger man, and that would have been a really good, valuable, useful tool for him to have. It’s an understated watch. It’s easy to read. It can last through whatever you throw at it on the streets in New York.And yet today it’s something of incredible value financially and also incredible value to him because it is his watch. It has been a tool for him. And I couldn’t think of a better example than that Rolex 1016 to represent that combination of factors. And so Adam found us that watch and loaned it to us to wear.Did that level of thought go into other characters’ watches?We built the other watches in the movie around [the 1016]. Giancarlo Esposito plays Detective Warren, [Harry’s] foil and mirror image. He both helps Harry and is keeping an eye on him. He wears a Tudor Tuxedo, which shares a lot of, as we say in the watch game, DNA with something like a Rolex Explorer. In fact, it was made by the same company, and yet it’s just a little different.Steve [Buscemi’s character] wears a thin, gold Rolex Cellini on a gold bracelet that, again, is something that would have been definitely a luxury item back in the day and is an even bigger luxury item today, but still represents something of an older time. Meanwhile, the watch Dylan [a young mobster played by Will Price] has, the Hublot, is considered today to be a very flashy, modern watch. It has a modern chronograph movement. It’s made with very present-day materials. And in fact, he’s not wearing it. It’s stuffed into his gym bag, and he says, “I only wear that when I go out to flex,” because it doesn’t represent a daily tool to him.All of these things were designed and lent to us by Adam Golden to talk about who these characters were and to reflect something about the characters in a world where the physical items and the physical representation matter.Looking back on the movie and looking ahead to talking to you, I was thinking, I am sure there are watches I missed.I can walk you through all of it! We also had some interesting newer watches. We worked with an incredible team at Oris, a brand that’s been around forever, but remains really relevant. Victoria Morolis, who plays Eve, wears Oris. She’s a sort of younger hero in the movie and a punk computer hacker. She’s wearing the Oris Roberto Clemente, which is a watch that is very old-school in a lot of ways, but made with very 2026 technology.Was Moira (a surprise cameo from Jamie Lee Curtis) wearing a watch?She was wearing her very own gold Cartier tank. She said, “I am going to do this.” And we all said, “Of course you are, because you are the boss.”The character of Dylan makes a very explicit comparison in the movie between Harry’s Rolex Explorer 1016 and his Hublot. How do you see the spiritual and aesthetic differences between a vintage watch and a very hyper-modern watch?Well, I have a personal feeling about that because I have a lot of knowledge of this stuff. This is my hobby, right? So to me, when I look at a 1016, I see history, I see Tenzing Norgay summiting Everest, whether that’s the actual truth or not. I am applying that to my perspective. And I’m also thinking about elegance in terms of what I like to wear. I’m thinking about how it sits on my wrist. I’m thinking about the simplicity in the design. And I can also see how someone else would appreciate the exact same thing about the Hublot: the work that went into skeletonizing that dial, the complication of a chronograph movement, and the mixture of metals and materials to make it. So I see both sides of it. I think because it is something so personal, it goes on your body. I think what ends up mattering is how you interpret that and whether you believe that one is of more value to you than the other stylistically.In one scene, Harry pickpockets a Patek Philippe that turns out to be fake. We don’t spend tons of time with the character who owned that piece, but enough to understand he is a wealthy businessman “with platinum cards,” as Harry says. What does it mean for that character to have a fake watch?Well, I think it sort of speaks to Harry’s world quite a bit. Harry comes from a world where if someone looked like they had money, they probably had money, right? And if they had nice shoes, they probably had a nice watch. And if they had a nice watch, they probably had money in their pocket. And you could do that math, and maybe it wouldn’t always be right, but these were educated guesses. And now we live in a world where a gold watch is not necessarily a gold watch. A Patek Philippe, presumably one of the most recognizable objects of value, is not necessarily an object of value. And to put that on Harry, to put that on a guy whose job it is to steal watches is, among other things, really a statement about him. And I guess in a wider sense that the world is not always what we think it is.I think for the businessman at the beginning, he obviously has lots of nice suits and lots of nice shoes and he lives in a tall building on the Upper East Side and he’s got a camel hair coat and works in a fancy office. There are all these reasons to think that this guy is fancy and makes money. He doesn’t carry cash. You know what I mean? He wears Aldens, as we know, a fancy shoe, but he wears a fake watch. I think it speaks to where the world is right now, which is that it isn’t about honesty or dishonesty. There are shades of gray, and we exist in a bit of a gray world.Does that character know it’s fake, or does he just not care?Great question. I think he knows that it’s fake. I think there is a world now where people—and I don’t think it’s just for watches, I think it’s for a lot of things—where people believe that getting most of the way toward something is enough. So somebody says to this guy, “Hey, you made partner. Isn’t it time to buy a $20,000 watch?” And then the guy next to him goes, “You can buy a $400 watch that looks just as good as a $20,000 watch.” And this guy goes, “Great.” And that’s it—that’s as far as they go.What’s in your personal collection right now? How many watches do you have?“Too many” is the answer to how many watches I have. But most of what is in my collection that’s important to me are watches that are not [necessarily] of significant financial value. I have a watch that belonged to each of my grandfathers that I had restored. And I did not have fancy grandfathers. These are watches that cost more to restore than they were worth, but are of incredible value to me. And a couple of my friends who I’ve worked with many, many times, my friends and mentors in movies have given me watches, and those are important to me because of that, because of where they came from and what they mean and the consideration that went into them.Watches like Benrus, which is, again, not a Rolex-level name, but Benjamin Lazarus founded that company in New York, and that means something to me as a guy from New York. So there’s something significant there. There are a lot of newer watches that I’m fascinated with, whether it’s companies like Oris or smaller brands like Haven or Bernhardt, which I appreciate.And do you have any grail watches?I mean, listen, I don’t own an Omega Speedmaster. I’d love to own a Speedmaster. I love what they’re doing with modern watches now, actually. I’d love to own a gold Rolex. I think there’s something really cool about a gold Rolex.I don’t know what I would do if I had a Rolex 6542, a Bakelite Bezel GMT [from the ’50s], because those are the coolest-looking watches. But if you sneeze at it wrong, does the bezel crack? I can’t worry about that.Just to have it sit in the box.Yeah, and I don’t believe in that! I want to wear my watches.