Denis Villeneuve: ‘Cell Phones Are Banned on My Sets. It’s Forbidden. When You Say Cut, You Don’t Want Someone’ Checking Facebook

https://variety.com/2024/film/news/denis-villeneuve-cellphones-banned-sets-1236260000/

28 comments

  2. >The “Dune” filmmaker said “there’s something addictive about the fact that you can access any information, any song, any book” from your phone. “It’s compulsive. It’s like a drug. I’m very tempted to disconnect myself. It would be fresh air.”

    >But the one place cell phone addiction can not exist is on a film set. Villeneuve said that mobile devices are banned on his productions. Christopher Nolan similarly bans cell phones.

    >“Cinema is an act of presence,” Villeneuve said. “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 1. It’s forbidden. When you say cut, you don’t want someone going to his phone to look at his Facebook account.”

  4. Cell phones are an attention drain. They suck everyone’s concentration away.

  5. I get it. His movies that I’ve seen are very intense, very otherworldly- I feel seeing a video of a fat cat swimming in a life jacket between scenes would take you out of the zone 

  6. I work on tv/movie sets. A lot of my job involves waiting for long periods of time just to do something very quickly and then disappear and get out of everybody else’s way. I also have pretty bad adhd and tend to get bored and start trouble for almost no reason at all. Reading the news, catching up on reddit, and entertaining myself with my phone has probably helped me keep my job on more than one occasion. Yeah, the dude running the camera sitting in front of the director probably should not be scrolling his Twitter. But I got like 4 hours to waste, and nothing to do until the next new deal. Have you ever run and 80×80ft overhead on a crane? You move it into place, then sit next to a rope for 4 hours. Untie the rope, move it a little bit. When everybody is satisfied, you tie it off again and wait for 3 hours, making sure the wind doesn’t start blowing or your knot comes untied. A usual day on a movie set is 12+ hours, and you’re fighting the sun for light or darkness the whole time. At the end of the shift, you gotta land it strip it and make it safe for tomorrow. During that entire time, you have to be there, not necessarily at full attention but on the radio, and ready to move, or people could get hurt. You have to stay there and keep yourself entertained in a very boring condition.

  7. It’s like any other job that has a no cellphone policy.

  8. Yeah, working with people like this, they’re fucking stupid. Messages is how we get all our info and stuff from bosses. It’s really dumb

  9. Not sure why they are banned. Just fire those who are not meeting their job responsibilities.

  10. All workplaces should do this tbh. It sucks working with people who check their phone every 5 minutes.

  11. If all I had to focus on was one of his scripts I’d want to check Facebook too.

  12. Pretentious little prick. For most people, I’d say, +95% of the crew, this is just a job. One on the list of many. Something that you do to pay next month’s rent. Not some soul-checking, passion-project, love-letter-to-your-ass.

    As such, you should treat your employees as adults who are capable of doing their jobs, even if they check Instagram a couple of times a day.

  14. I don’t think it’s professional either but the more I hear about Villeneuve the more I dislike him.

  15. No way Timothy and Zendaya weren’t checking their phones on set

  16. Easy for him to say, he has things to do as a director in set. Ask any grip how boring the days can be waiting “hours” for nothing to happen

  17. I love how someone always has something to complain about. It’s cringey to read people who literally can never be told what to do or think they can do anything they want at all times.

    Look, don’t work for Villeneuve if you don’t want to. There’s a million people who would want any job on a Villeneuve set.

    If he allows one person to have a phone then it’s not fair for someone else to have one. And if a phone goes off during an important shot then they gotta re do it and waste everyone’s time and money.

    Really baffling. I also don’t want to cover myself when I go into some religious sites. If I don’t want to cover myself I simply won’t enter. Not start talking about the merits of covering myself or not. Some rules are arbitrary. Some are arbitrarily dumb. Some make sense. Some make barely any sense. Who gives a shit? Sometimes there are rules. People are insufferable.

  18. That sucks for the crew. I used to work on sets and a lot of the time I was just sitting with an hour plus of just doing nothing. All day too

  19. THIS is why I’ll never make a movie with Dennis Villanuve!!

  20. He must have banned competent screenwriters on Dune Part Two because it was a major step down from the first. The first one was well balanced, while the second one crammed everything down your throat and had the blandest dialogue possible.

  22. I feel like this is a good rule if you’re in any profession that requires a lot of creativity in general.

  23. Every set I’ve been on has relied on cell phones for crew to communicate with each other. You can’t walkie someone who’s on a run off set, you can’t communicate silently during a take with a walkie. How the fuck are all these crews communicating? What happens if an emergency takes place?

  24. You have to be insane to allow cell phones in that building.

  26. I somewhat agree with Denis but how about times where there’s nothing to film for hours on end what’s the crew supposed to do stare sleep this is a film set not congressional office

  27. I think he’s mostly applying this to himself, actors etc and not the crew. So much work gets done on your phone during or in between takes that taking it away from the Standby Art Director or the Best Boy would be very annoying. Understandable for actors though.

  28. Honestly I think this sounds right not for the Facebook part but the camera on the phone part like if I was making a movie I wouldn’t want any spoilers from somebody taking a photo for Instagram or making a tiktok for whatever and I would ask for phones to be in a box until filming is finished or given to someone so that if there is an emergency they can quickly find the person

Comments are closed.