Steven Soderbergh, of all people, thinks cellphones are the "worst thing that's ever happened to movies"

In what could be described as an about-face on the subject, Steven Soderbergh, the Oscar-winning filmmaker who directed no less than two movies on iPhones in the last decade, hates what cellphones have done to film. In a new interview with Variety about his upcoming ‌Max mini-series, Full Circle, in which he either ignores the statement’s irony or, more likely, does not care, Soderbergh declared, “Cellphones are the worst thing that’s ever happened to movies.” This is like finding out T-Pain hates autotune.

However, the director of such shot-on-iPhone classics as Unsane and High Flying Bird, and who has been a booster for shooting movies on consumer-grade electronics since 2017, doesn’t take issue with making cinema on the same device we use to Google “What does ‘Livvy rizzed up Baby Gronk’ mean?” Instead, Soderbergh denounces their “awful” prominence in his series’ narrative. He even threatened to build a cut of Full Circle comprised 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.” Put simply, movies and television today feature too many shots of people getting their sweet, sweet blue light fixes by submitting to their glass rectangle in every other frame.

Unsurprisingly, Soderbergh’s hatred of cell phones made shooting his period pieces all the more enjoyable, calling it “one of the pleasures of doing The Knick [and] No Sudden Move.” His reasoning is sound, though. “I think you could talk to a hundred storytellers, and they would all tell you the same thing,” he said. “It’s so hard to manufacture drama when everybody can get a hold 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.”

Upon releasing 2018’s Unsane, Soderbergh described shooting his movie on an iPhone as “the future.”

“There’s a philosophical obstacle a lot of people have about the size of the capture device,” Soderbergh told IndieWire in 2018. “I don’t have that problem. I look at this as potentially one of the most liberating experiences that I’ve ever had as a filmmaker and that I continue having. The gets that I felt moment to moment were so significant that this is, to me, a new chapter.”

Steven Soderbergh’s latest project, Full Circle, comes to Max on July 13.