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.