As Christopher Nolan continues his press rounds for his excellent “Dunkirk,” he has been revealing a lot about his filmmaking process including who got to look at his scripts, why he cast Harry Styles, and why he doesn’t like Netflix. During an interesting Q&A with Esquire, he also revealed that he doesn’t allow cell phones on set and his reasons why.
Like his friend and fellow filmmaker Quentin Tarantino, Nolan doesn’t allow phones on set because he believes they are a “huge distraction,” and prevent people from being truly focused on the task at hand.
“There’s a mass belief that if you’re texting, you’re somehow not interrupting the conversation—you’re not being rude. It’s an illusion of multitasking. I started filmmaking when people didn’t expect to have a phone on set, when it would’ve been seen as unprofessional to pull out a phone,”Nolan explained. “Phones have become a huge distraction, and people work much better without them. At first it causes difficulty, but it really allows them to concentrate on what they’re doing. Everybody understands. I’ve had a lot of crews thank me. With a set, we’re trying to create a bubble of alternate reality.”
His ideas about creating an “alternate reality” within a film set are interesting and show through his filmmaking. He goes on to say:
“The person doing it doesn’t realize they have taken the energy from the conversation. If you have people in a creative environment where they have to concentrate on what they’re doing, you can’t have them wandering off in their minds. You can’t be texting somebody else and paying attention to what’s going on. If you call people on it, they’ll repeat the last thing you said. They repeat the words with zero understanding of what they meant. And then over the next minute, you see them start to understand the words for the first time. You can absorb audio information just at the level that you can repeat it back, without understanding.”
The entire interview is an interesting read as it covers Nolan’s approach to writing and who he trusts to read his scripts among other topics. “Dunkirk” is now playing everywhere.