Christopher Nolan is firmly pro-chairs on set, despite what the internet believed about him for a brief, bizarre 24 hours. In a statement to IndieWire Tuesday, the Oscar-nominated director’s rep clarified a recent statement from Anne Hathaway, in which the Oscar-winning actress claimed that Nolan bans chairs on his film sets because such furniture induces laziness.
“For the record, the only things banned from [Christopher Nolan’s] sets are cell phones (not always successfully) and smoking (very successfully),” Nolan’s spokesperson Kelly Bush Novak told the outlet. “The chairs Anne was referring to are the directors chairs clustered around the video monitor, allocated on the basis of hierarchy not physical need. Chris chooses not to use his but has never banned chairs from the set. Cast and crew can sit wherever and whenever they need and frequently do.”
Hathaway, who starred in Nolan’s films Interstellar and The Dark Knight Rises, set film Twitter tittering on Monday after Variety published an interview between Hathaway and Hugh Jackman, a fellow Nolan-set alum. In their chat, she said, pretty plainly, that “Chris also doesn’t allow chairs” on set.
“I worked with him twice. He doesn’t allow chairs, and his reasoning is, if you have chairs, people will sit, and if they’re sitting, they’re not working,” Hathaway said. “I mean, he has these incredible movies in terms of scope and ambition and technical prowess and emotion. It always arrives at the end under schedule and under budget. I think he’s onto something with the chair thing.”
Despite the apparent improbability of a no-chair rule (how could the guilds allow such a thing?), it also seemed somewhat believable, due to Nolan’s reputation as a very particular, exacting filmmaker. The director is known, for example, for banning cellphones on set in order to protect the artistic atmosphere. He’s also taken things a step further in his personal life, having refused to even own a cellphone because, in the words of Fran Lebowitz, yours will do just fine.
“It’s like that whole thing about ‘in New York City, you’re never more than two feet from a rat’—I’m never two feet from a cellphone,” Nolan told The Hollywood Reporter in 2015. (Due to his vermin comparison, we are required by law to link out to this Atlanta bit about rat phones). “I mean, we’ll be on a scout with 10 people and all of them have phones, so it’s very easy to get in touch with me when people need to…. I actually really like not having one because it gives me time to think. You know, when you have a smartphone and you have 10 minutes to spare, you go on it and you start looking at stuff.”
It’s so sad that Nolan may never know the glorious, mindless pleasure of looking at stuff on one’s phone. Of filling up a spare 10 minutes with a Twitter-induced doomscroll; of glancing at one’s mobile internet tabs and seeing a portrait of one’s truest, weirdest self. Tragic, really. Thankfully, his anhedonic tendencies do not extend to a certain four-legged invention, the humble chair. That rumor was fun while it lasted.
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