Austin Film Festival Interview: The Collecting Instinct in Chasing Time

It started with a Mickey Mouse watch. When Chris Gary was five, his father gave him a Mickey Mouse watch and a little bottle of Aspen cologne for Christmas. Every day the young boy would watch his dad put on his watch and do a spritz of cologne before going to his job as a cop. Now he could copy those actions “and I would cherish that,” Gary said. By the time he was nine, that one watch had become a collection, “and they were all lined up on my dresser.”

Timepieces are at the center of Gary’s new documentary, Chasing Time, which explores the high-price world of collectible wristwatches. As we talk, time is particularly pressing for the central figure in the film, watch dealer Adam Golden. As he sits in the Austin Club, he keeps checking his watch and his phone for word on whether his family, who are flying in from Miami, will make it to Austin in time for the film’s world premiere at the Austin Film Festival.

As explained in the film, Golden’s father initially wasn’t too happy that his son left the family law practice to enter the high-risk, high-reward world of high-end watches, but the father-son bond remained resilient. Now, Golden added, “It’s obviously rewarding that I’m in a movie about it.”

“It’s a point of pride,” Gary said. “It did something.”

“And my mom’s all excited,” Golden added.

As a kid, Gary was always a collector. “And I always understood that value was relative to what someone’s interests were,” he said. Take one of his other youthful obsessions, baseball cards. “I always knew that if you were into the Dodgers, you would value a Mike Piazza card more than you should.”

That’s part of why Golden became so key to Chasing Time. Before making the film, he was already one of the dealers with whom Gary worked, and while his job often involves flying around the world and watching bids fly in elite auction houses, his clients aren’t just multimillionaires. “I want to work with everybody,” Golden said. “I don’t care what your budget is. Come to us, we can make this fun together.”

That attitude sometimes leads to him not making a sale because it’s wrong for the buyer. In this case, Gary. The filmmaker recalled a message from Golden in 2018, after they’d been working together as dealer and collector for around two years. “This was the first instance where Adam said ‘no’ to a watch because it wasn’t right for my collection. The moment you say no to commerce because their standard is better than what you’re offering and they may not even know it, that’s a very specific decision. That’s when the dealer for me isn’t just in the business of exchange. They’re in the business of understanding your collection, they’re in the business of understanding what you’re interested in and why you’re interested in it, and they’re trying to give you the best example of that thing.”

“I don’t remember that,” Golden said, blushing a little, “but I do push people away from certain watches that I would love to sell because it would free up significant amounts of money. But I know that that’s not what they’re looking for.”

For Gary, the urge to collect isn’t so much about the item, and it’s why one of his most prized possessions isn’t a high cost watch. It’s a belt that he inherited from his father, the same belt he saw him tighten every day as he put on his watch and sprayed that cologne. “It’s about marking time,” Gary said. “When you start collecting as a kid, it’s usually a mirror of what your parents’ collection is, and it becomes a marker or an observation of your parents’ interest. As you get older, there’s a certain point when you start contemplating your life and what your life’s interests were.”

Then there’s another era in a collector’s life. Gary described it as being “when you start thinking what you want to be remembered for. At a certain stage, people become aware of the finality of it all, and I don’t mean that in a morbid way. We have four boys, and what do I want them to remember about their dad when it’s all said and done? I hope the greatest impact isn’t something physical. But say they look at all the photos of vacations in their childhood with me. The things they see me in and the things they see me living in become those tangible markers of their father’s existence.”

Gary added, “It doesn’t necessarily have to be between you and your child, or you and a family member. It’s, ‘This was in Henry Graves’ watch collection, and his collection became part of the Time Museum on the north side of Chicago.’ They become markers of this real existence.”

For Golden, that urge to collect is also a way to disconnect from that sense of finality. “We need to find ways to occupy our time – no pun intended,” he said. “We’re looking for these little moments in our lives that will give us reprieve. For us, it’s watches. For my dad, it’s stamps. For a lot of people, it’s baseball cards. It could be seashells. Anything just to give our lives that little bit extra.”

Learning what has true value to yourself is part of becoming a better collector. For example, Golden started off loving midcentury chronographs, but his tastes have shifted to include what are called independent watches – hyper-limited-edition pieces, handcrafted by artisan watchmakers. By comparison to many of his clients, he has a small collection – “a maximum of half a dozen to a dozen, but we always have a large enough inventory that I can get to wear and experience new things.”

Golden admits holding on to every beautiful watch that crossed his counter was a real problem for him early in his career. “I’d go, wait, why do I have no inventory and no cash? And then you open your case and there’s 20 watches there and someone comes in and you go, ‘Nah, I can’t sell that.’ Now, I’m much better about that.”

That can still get tough, especially with vintage watches, “because I’ll still fall in love with something, but then someone will come to the office and be like, ‘I’ve been searching for that for three years, please sell it to me.’ ‘No, that’s my personal collection.’”

“But then he’ll sell it,” Gary said, “and I’m like, ‘Bro!’”

Yet like Gary, there are certain watches that Golden will never sell because of their sentimental value, like the first watch he was ever given by his father, and one that was gifted to him by another client turned close friend and a character in the film, Newsies lyricist Jack Feldman. Golden said, “It’s not crazy valuable, but it’s beautiful and it means a lot to me.”

Chasing Time World Premiere, Juried Festival Selection Screening Friday, Oct. 30, 8:50pm, St. David’s Episcopal Church Bethell Hall and Wednesday, Nov. 4, 4pm, Highland Galaxy. Filmmaker Chris Gary and subject Adam Golden will be in attendance for both screenings.

Austin Film Festival & Writers Conference runs Oct. 28-Nov. 5. Passes and info at austinfilmfestival.com. Read more of the Chronicle’s AFF 2026 coverage here.

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