Brett Ratner on Our Culture of Surveillance

In Being There, Chauncey Gardner (played by Peter Sellers) says, “I like to watch.” Nowadays, everybody is watching. Everybody is surveilling. I used to think surveillance was cool until I started being watched myself -- not by the CIA or the feds, like John Gotti was in those FBI videos I used to love as a kid -- but by anyone and everyone with a BlackBerry and a Twitter account.

I flew to New York the other day. I had taken a car service to the airport, and before my plane was even ready to take off, I noticed that the driver had tweeted about his gratuity: “Wow! Brett Ratner is really generous. He took care of me.” While at the airport, two girls sitting next to me—self-described “performance artists”—invited me to see their strip show. They then posted on Facebook and tweeted that I was coming to their show in New York. My girlfriend didn’t really like that.

While I was on the plane, the young woman sitting next to me spent the entire flight tweeting about my syncopated snoring. When I was finally in a car heading into New York City, I received a friendly call from an employee of the airline who said that I had mistakenly taken the bag of another passenger. When I explained that I was in the tunnel going into Manhattan, she very nicely promised to call the police if I didn’t return the bag right away. When she got home she must have told her son what an asshole I was for stealing someone’s bag, mentioning me by name. I guess the kid wasn’t a fan of Rush Hour, because within moments he’d told the entire world I was a thief.

Maybe I should look at the positive side of constant surveillance. Maybe it’s a sign that when one of my films comes out, and it’s really good, all of those secret spies will tell everyone about it, and get more people into the theater for opening weekend. But then again, they might not like what they’ve seen and tell everyone that the movie isn’t worth their dollars.

I don’t think anything will ever stop people from watching movies in a theater and sharing the emotion of the moment with an audience, whether the film is tweeted as good or bad—but I won’t be surprised when every face in the audience is illuminated by the light of a BlackBerry screen. I won’t even mind, so long as what they’re surveilling is my movie, on the big screen.