By Imagine this: you're visiting Quentin Tarantino's film set. The sun's going down, the sky looks amazing, Michael Madsen's wandering around. This is amazing! Instagram it. You take your phone out. But then there's a tap on your shoulder. It's Quentin Tarantino!
Quentin Tarantino holds out his hand. You give him your phone, because he's Quentin Tarantino. He launches your phone into the California sky. He looks back at you. It lands somewhere, out of frame.
"Now please leave," says Quentin Tarantino.
Now, to our knowledge, Tarantino has never deliberately destroyed anyone's phone, but according to Timothy Olyphant, mucking about on Snapchat while on a Tarantino set is a sackable offence.
"You’re fired. Cell phone out? Done. No warning, nothing, you’re going home," Olyphant told Rich Eisen on his radio show. "I’m not telling tales. Outside the set we’d have a lovely little booth for everyone to check their phones in. That’s where all of our phones would be. If you needed to make a phone call, you’d go out to the street to make a phone call."
William Paul Clark, a producer and assistant who's worked with Tarantino since Pulp Fiction, told the Independent last year that there's one staffer who has to take phones off people at 'Checkpoint Charlie'. "He'll even charge it if you want," Clark said. Though nobody had been sacked that Clark knew of, he did recall trying to track down whoever it was whose ringtone went off during a take on Django Unchained.
While Tarantino's script for The Hateful Eight leaked ahead of the film's release, Olyphant said Tarantino's phone moratorium is less to do with security than it is maintaining concentration levels.
"We’re not gonna be over there doing some other thing, Instagramming, working on your next script, or talking to your agent," Olyphant explained. "We’re here and this is what we’re doing, and we’re going to take it really seriously. I don’t know how it comes across, but it was one of the greatest gifts he could give the crew and actors."
And if anyone disobeyed the edict? "Oh man, it was scary," Olyphant said. "That person just took off running."
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