STYLE Edit: How choreographer Benjamin Millepied and composer Thomas Roussel collaborated to make an epic desert ballet film inspired by Richard Mille’s latest watch

The RM 72-01 Lifestyle is Richard Mille’s first flyback chronograph entirely made in-house at its manufacture in Les Breuleux, Switzerland. To celebrate this milestone, Millepied and Roussel have created an exclusive film featuring dancers Nayomi Van Brunt and David Adrian Freeland Jr performing a pas-de-deux in the Joshua Tree National Park.

Set in the vast wilderness of the southern California desert, the film, titled Within , captures the raw energy of the dancers through a spontaneous performance. “To render something that was more vibrant, more real, more sincere, I deliberately gave the two dancers great freedom, perceptible in the animalistic energy that emanates from them,” says Millepied, who famously choreographed the 2010 film Black Swan, starring future wife Natalie Portman.

“My role as a producer – the choice of locations, their photographic quality, the camera’s ability to take everything in – all this comes from the landscapes themselves … Everything is thought out in response to the chosen environment,” he says. The windswept, arid landscape in the film complements the nature of the materials used by Richard Mille for its robust watches.

Over the past 10 years, Millepied has collaborated with a lot of artists, designers and musicians for his various projects, but he was particularly drawn to Richard Mille as he likes to think of himself and his dancers as craftsmen pursuing the same goals as those in the world of high watchmaking. “I work, at all times, and piece after piece, to perfect the art of choreography. It is this relationship to precision that unites us with the art of haute horlogerie,” says Millepied, who is the former head of the Paris Opera and also the founder of the L.A. Dance Project.

Best known for his fusion music, which combines classical tones with contemporary beats, Thomas Roussel has created the perfect symphony for the film by playing on the duplications and dilations in time. Inspired by the stopwatch function in the timepiece, Roussel introduced a tempo to complement the high energy of the dancers and mirrored the sound of the counting seconds with percussion. The soundtrack was recorded with 50 musicians of the renowned London Symphony Orchestra (LSO) at St. Luke’s Church in London.

“Any watch is by definition linked to the rhythm of time, but thanks to its improvements and complications, this chronograph is even more so than others. And time is one of the phenomena that inspires me most,” says Roussel. “I was fortunate enough to do a show in Joshua Tree four years ago. So I could imagine it without difficulty, and our discussions with Benjamin guided me in the composition. I was thus able to adapt the music to the film by playing on duplications and dilations in time.”

Just like Richard Mille, which brings together the core traditions of high watchmaking and New Age materials in its futuristic timepieces, Roussel and Millepied draw on their respective artistic heritage to present unique compositions with a contemporary streak.