Ridley Scott famously blamed millennials and their “f*cking cellphones” for the failure of his acclaimed historical epic The Last Duel at the box office, but Steven Soderbergh has gone one step forward and called them “the worst thing that’s ever happened to movies.”
The Academy Award-winning director is no stranger to trying out the latest technological trends in a career that’s resolutely refused to see him pigeonholed once over the course of 30+ years, but he lamented the untoward influence of the humble handheld devices nonetheless in an interview with Variety.
“Cellphones are the worst thing that’s ever happened to movies. It’s awful. Last week, I told Ed that I’m going to build a timeline of every insert that’s in the show, just one after another of all the phones and screens in our show, just so you can have them in one place. One of the pleasures of doing The Knick or No Sudden Move was that this shit didn’t exist.
I think you could talk to a hundred storytellers and they would all tell you the same thing. It’s so hard to manufacture drama when everybody can ahold of everybody all the time. It’s just not as fun as in the old days when the phone would ring and you didn’t know who was calling. I remember that fondly.”
Of course, context is key here, with Soderbergh referring to how cellphones have become such a pivotal facet of everyday life that virtually every single modern-day story is obligated to feature them in one form or another. However, it’s also worth mentioning that he didn’t hate them all that much when he shot psychological horror Unsane and sports drama High Flying Bird entirely on iPhone, but in that case the technology was working for him rather than against.
Cellphone might be the worst for Soderbergh on-camera, then, but he doesn’t have an issue when he’s using them to make entire features over the course of a number of weeks as his primary form of image capture.