Denis Villeneuve has directed some of the best films of the last decade, and like another great director, Christopher Nolan, he bans the same item: cellphones.
In an interview with the LA Times, Villeneuve remarks: "I feel that human beings are ruled by algorithms right now. We behave like AI circuits. The ways we see the world are narrow-minded binaries. We’re disconnecting from each other, and society is crumbling in some ways. It’s frightening."
The interviewer notes that he looks at his phone while giving that answer, and Villeneuve notes there's "something addictive about the fact that you can access any information, any song, any book. It’s compulsive. It’s like a drug."
Because of this, he, like Nolan, bans cellphones on his film sets. "Cinema is an act of presence," he explains. "When a painter paints, he has to be absolutely focused on the color he’s putting on the canvas. It’s the same with the dancer when he does a gesture. With a filmmaker, you have to do that with a crew, and everybody has to focus and be entirely in the present, listening to each other, being in relationship with each other. So cellphones are banned on my set too, since Day . It’s forbidden. When you say cut, you don’t want someone going to his phone to look at his Facebook account."
There can certainly be a lot of downtime between takes on a movie set, so it may seem a bit cruel to prevent people from having a break by going on their phones, but I think he's onto something. Making movies is a creative process, and if you're separating yourself from that the moment you're not focused on a take, you're not giving your brain a chance to puzzle over a problem or come up with an interesting idea.
It's clearly a method that works, as both Nolan and Villeneuve have had films nominated for Oscars – Nolan even won two thanks to Oppenheimer – and their work is widely beloved by both fans and critics alike.
