Anne Hathaway says director Christopher Nolan 'doesn't allow' chairs on set

• Anne Hathaway appeared in a new interview with actor Hugh Jackman for Variety's "Actors on Actors" series and spoke about working with director Christopher Nolan.
• Hathaway has starred in two of Nolan's films: "The Dark Knight Rises" and "Interstellar."
• "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," the actress said.
• Hathaway also said that Nolan might be "onto something with the chair thing," based on the kinds of films he creates.

Anne Hathaway says that director Christopher Nolan has a no-chairs policy on his film sets.

"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 during a conversation with "Les Misérables" costar Hugh Jackman for Variety's "Actors on Actors" series.

The 37-year-old actress continued: "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."

Hathaway has starred in two of Nolan's blockbuster movies. She portrayed Selina Kyle/Catwoman in the 2012 movie "The Dark Knight Rises," the final installment of his Batman trilogy that starred Christian Bale as the titular character.

Two years later, the actress reunited with Nolan for the sci-fi movie "Interstellar," which earned one Academy Award for best achievement in visual effects. The film also received four additional Oscar nominations.

Elsewhere in her conversation with Jackman, Hathaway praised Nolan's directing style.

"Chris' whole approach to filmmaking is one of my favorite ones," she said. "He's broken it down to its most minimal, but also his movies are just so huge and ornate. That combination of really being intentional about what it was that we were doing — and also, he's just so inspiring."

Similar to directors like Quentin Tarantino and Denis Villeneuve, Nolan also doesn't allow cellphones on his sets.

"There's a mass belief that if you're texting, you're somehow not interrupting the conversation — you're not being rude," Nolan told Esquire Middle East in 2017. "It's an illusion of multi-tasking. I started film-making when people didn't expect to have a phone on set, when it would've been seen as unprofessional to pull out a phone."

The director continued: "Phones have become a huge distraction, and people work much better without them. At first, it causes difficulty, but it really allows them to concentrate on what they're doing. Everybody understands. I've had a lot of crews thank me. When you're on a set, you're trying to create a bubble of alternate reality."

Hathaway isn't the only actor who's spoken about the way Nolan runs his film sets.

In 2017, Mark Rylance, who starred in Nolan's "Dunkirk," told The Independent that the director is "very particular."

"He does things like he doesn't like having chairs on set for actors or bottles of water, he's very particular," Rylance said.

"Dunkirk" costar Barry Keoghan elaborated on the rule, saying: "They're distractions — the noise of [the bottles], they're like toys almost, playing around with toys."

Moreover, not having chairs "keeps you on your toes, literally," Keoghan added.

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