Denis Villeneuve recently spoke to the Los Angeles Times and shared his discomfort over how “human beings are ruled by algorithms right now.” He explained: “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 Times columnist Glenn Whipp noted that Villeneuve shared these thoughts while checking his phone. 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.
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“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.”
Rumors persisted around the release of “Tenet” that Nolan also banned chairs from his film sets, which his team quickly debunked. Villeneuve said that for personal reasons he decided not to have a chair on the “Dune” set for himself, but certainly producers and others were allowed to sit.
“When I did ‘Blade Runner,’ I had a back problem because I was sitting a lot,” Villeneuve said. “So for the ‘Dune’ movies, my cinematographer, Greig Fraser, and I decided to stand, to have minimal footprints so we could be flexible and go fast, to keep the blood flowing, to be awakened. No chairs for us. Maybe for the producers at the video village.”
Head over to the Los Angeles Times’ website to read Villeneuve’s latest profile in its entirety.