Denis Villeneuve’s Reason for Banning Cell Phones Makes a Lot of Sense

Mr. Broder, my 10th-grade science teacher, once tried to send me to the Principal’s office for using my cell phone in class. I talked myself out of it, but he was 100 percent correct and should have followed through with the punishment. It’s not like I was doing anything important. The final straw for him was me loudly blaring a five-second clip of an Arnold Schwarzenegger song I thought would be a funny ringtone. It disrupted the class, rightfully annoyed him, and all I had at my disposal was a flip phone.

I cringe at the thought of having a smartphone in high school. I was already a bad student, and that kind of distraction would have made me infinitely worse. Don’t even get me started on the amount of internet pornography I would have rotted my brain with! Gone would have been my days searching the woods for discarded magazines, and with it, considerable adventures. It makes sense that many teachers require students to drop their phones off at the beginning of class to avoid distractions, and some directors do it too.

Rumors about what directors do and don’t allow on-set are always fun. People thought Christopher Nolan didn’t want actors sitting on his film sets when, in reality, he didn’t want them crowded around video village (if he had a video village at all). Zack Snyder had a similar situation on his sets, having to clarify that people were allowed to sit, but they didn’t go out of their way to provide chairs. Bradley Cooper has a no-chairs rule too! They hate these chairs! But not as much as Denis Villeneuve hates cell phones.

The Dune director recently revealed that phones are “absolutely” banned on his sets. “Cinema is an act of presence. 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,” Villeneuve said to the Los Angeles Times. “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.”

Denis is really showing his age if he assumes his actors are jumping on Facebook! Regardless, he is correct about how distracting phones can be and how that can be detrimental while making a film. People need to be ready to go at a moment’s notice, be they actors, grips, or anything in between. They can’t be desperately searching for the name of the Arnold Schwarzenegger song they upset Mr. Broder with (I think it was called Pump it Up but I can only find a newer version).

The director also admits that the rule is in place for himself as much as it is for anyone else. “I’m like anybody. 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. I’m very tempted to disconnect myself. It would be fresh air.” If any of the directors I mentioned previously said, “No chairs, because I can’t be tempted to sit, because oh boy will I sit,” it may be easier to grasp. Not only does Villeneuve’s ban make sense, he’s owning it. Gotta respect that more than you do a kid who already isn’t paying attention and is now blasting a gargled German accent for the entire class to hear (I’m sorry, Mr. Broder).