The Tribeca Film Festival hosted a special screening of “The Circle” last week at BMCC.
Emma Watson, Tom Hanks, Karen Gillan, Ellar Coltrane, Mamoudou Athie, Amir Talai and James Ponsoldt (Director) were all in attendance. They were joined by special guests Rita Wilson and Bonnie Wright.
Emma Watson: I was just talking to James about this, actually just behind the curtain. Which was that it was a very vulnerable experience me making this movie. I felt very vulnerable watching it and I think it’s ’cause it just really went to the bone a lot, in terms of experiences where you have to walk out on to a stage and there are things going on behind the scenes that no one knows about and you just have to just turn on and kind of be this thing. Getting to play Mae and put that on screen was really hard for me and really meaningful. Yeah it was really meaningful and I’m just very grateful to James for giving me the opportunity to do that and live some of that and share some of what that feels like occasionally.
On the evolution of Mae and Annie’s relationship:
Emma Watson: Mae and Annie’s relationship is so interesting and again it reminded me, you know I felt, it’s really hard. Sometimes, we’re friends with people in life that we see going down a certain path and you can’t save anyone. You have to try to figure out, knowing someone’s burning themselves out, knowing someone’s harming themselves and try to figure out how to be a friend to someone in that, is really complex. It’s interesting you say that it kind of starts off being that way with Annie, you know it really switches to Mae and they just get pulled apart. Their relationship just comes under too much pressure to survive in those circumstances. I think a lot of friendships have a hard time surviving in the pressure cooker of the world that we live in and how public everything is. It’s really tough.
On what the right answer is in regards to social media and privacy:
Emma Watson: I just wanted to add on to what Tom said. So Congress recently actually rolled back legislations put in place at the end of the Obama Administration, which prevented big companies like The Circle from selling our data without our permission. So that’s gone now. So I think what I would say is that there’s no right answer and trust me I have grilled Dave Eggers, I mean really, I’ve taken him into a room and like “Tell me what we do? How do we stop it? What do we do?” It’s much more complicated than that, unfortunately, as is life. But I guess for me the big thing having been involved in this, is taking back the idea that that information belongs to us or belongs to me and just being mindful and much more aware of what’s unveiling before our very eyes, often times without us even realizing. So that’s been really interesting for me. I didn’t think about most of this stuff before I read Dave’s book, so I thought that was really cool.
After the screening the cast celebrated the 2017 Tribeca Film Festival premiere of The Circle at the official after party at American Cut Tribeca on Wednesday, April 26th. Guests were seen sipping on Chloe Wine Collection, EFFEN Vodka and Heineken throughout the evening.
