With James Ponsoldt’s The Circle now in theaters, a few days ago I landed an exclusive interview with the busy director. If you’re not familiar with the film, it’s based on the novel of the same name by Dave Eggers and stars Emma Watson as a young woman who lands her dream job at one of the world’s most powerful tech and social media companies. As she rises through the ranks, she is encouraged by the company's founder (Tom Hanks) to engage in a groundbreaking experiment that pushes her to go “transparent” - which means broadcasting everything she does at all times. Her participation begins to affect the lives and future of everyone she knows. The Circle also stars John Boyega, Karen Gillan, Ellar Coltrane, and Bill Paxton.

During my wide-ranging interview with Ponsoldt he talked about why he wanted to take on this material, how he landed the incredible cast, what he learned from early screenings, deleted scenes and more. In addition, with Ponsoldt working on a number of other projects, I got updates on I Want My MTV, Inconstant Moon, and Wild City. Check out what he had to say below.

COLLIDER: So what was it about this project that said ‘I need to do this, I need to direct it, this is something that I have to do’?

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Image via EuropaCorp

JAMES PONSOLDT: Well, it started with Dave Eggers’ novel. I’ve been a huge fan of his writing since his first book, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, which came out when I was in college and I fell in love with it. I’ve read all of his books and he’s just an author who when he has something new I get really excited about it, because he’s such a great storyteller and he’s someone who I think, his finger’s on the pulse of culture, of where we are. And so I was equally as excited to read The Circle as I was his other books and yeah, I was really blown away by it. I mean, it was different than his other books, it was sort of a thriller, in a way that was different than his other books, but I found it darkly hilarious. I mean, it’s dark satire in the vein of, people refer to it as Orwellian, I would agree with that. And then there’s other sort of 70s, like Paddy Chayefsky or movies I could point to like Network or Hospital or even the paradigm conspiracy films from the 70s like Three Days of the Condor and Conversation that I really love that it reminded me of, but mostly, for all the ideas bundled up in it, it was Mae, the main character, who I found just wildly complicated and compelling and I’d never read a character quite like her who I found so recognizably idealistic and hopeful and yet so unknowable at times, and frustrating and sad and lonely and maybe angry.

Yeah, just the type of protagonist that I love, a complicated sometimes really messy person. But I couldn’t stop thinking about her and I think I could see myself, for better or for worse, in her, and I think it was that sort of coinciding with my wife and I getting ready to have our first child where, yeah, we just started talking about our own childhoods and how we were gonna raise our son. We now have two kids, but how we were gonna raise our son, and whether we would share information, like share photos on Instagram, things like that, and we wanted to be intentional and give our child the freedom of not having a digital footprint the way we had, you know? We were able to screw up in private and figure out right from wrong, or at least what we thought was right and what we thought was wrong, in a way that is part of the process of becoming an autonomous, self-sufficient adult with your own moral compass, and we realized that our kids, no matter how much we tried and no matter how much intentionality we brought to it, they probably wouldn’t really have a choice. Their lives would inevitably be documented, the moment they start driving, and the moment -- I mean, really, I have no idea, in 10-12 years, whatever the future holds, everything they do, they'll probably be a record that follows them to college and their first job and beyond, and they won’t have the luxury of having been unobserved. The idea of personal freedom, part of what’s inextricable from that is the idea of being able to opt out so to speak, or simply be alone, unobserved, and being a private citizen, that seems pretty central to it, and that sort of privacy seems to be on the way out.

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Image via EuropaCorp

Well, we’re living in an age where everything is online and people used to say, you know, ‘I can’t imagine ever sharing this information,’ and now everyone willingly shares everything. It’s crazy. I think the film is trying to tackle some of those issues. I’m sure you had a lot of conversations with the cast and a lot of conversations with people, but were you surprised with anything you learned about what people are feeling right now in terms of that balancing act?

PONSOLDT: I mean, I think people have always -- I think there is something classic in the story, an archetypal, whether it’s sci-fi or speculative or just a dark fable about a young person from the country who gets a job in the city, a dream job. In this case, that dream then becomes her religion which then becomes a glass prison of celebrity, but there are sort of paranoid conspiracy components to it of the ilk I really like, the 70s films where the bad guys aren’t really the bad guys, or there’s another bad guy behind them, or just like a bad, flawed system and you never even get to the truth. I think that was kind of the genre I thought of. In all of those, there’s a big governmental agency like the CIA or the NSA or something that’s surveilling the characters and watching them, an evil Big Brother. I think the irony was that I think we know that to be true, it is part of our life now. We know about the CIA or the NSA, that in fact they are kind of doing that, that’s kind of our job. The thing that I think the book gets into, and hopefully the film gets into, the irony is that we focus on those stories, we focus on tragedies that occur online, through people doing like a Facebook live thing or whatever it is.

We focus on the tragedies, but it’s not really the great boogeyman, our personal information isn’t going to be stolen by the government, it’s that we will freely give up our information. We will freely give it to these companies who are genuinely doing amazing things like taking us to the moon, exploring the bottom of the sea, connecting us all, they’re doing all of these great things but they’re all gathering all of our information, whether we know it or whether we don’t know it. They are collecting it, storing it, maybe monetizing it, and depending on what the future holds for a privatization of the government, perhaps even weaponizing it, who knows? But it’s like, once it’s out there it’s not ours, and we’ve kind of willingly acquiesced to this reality and it doesn’t seem to bother anybody. And it should! Because what we’re talking about, again, it’s not as binary as you like technology or you’re against technology because it’s so integrated in everyday life. I’m not a technophobe, I love technology, but I think a lot of these big companies, there’s a centralization and an accumulation of power, wealth, and information, and information does equal power and money, that is unprecedented with little to no government oversight, and it’s just -- I don’t know that any company, and certainly no person, should have that amount of power. It doesn’t end well.

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Image via Europa

Yeah, you’ve hit the nail on the head. We all love technology, we’re just not thinking about where it’s all ending up. I definitely want to ask you -- I ask this of all directors, I’ve probably asked you this on a previous film -- how long was your first cut versus the finished film?

PONSOLDT: The first cut was probably like two hours, ten, two-fifteen, something like that. The finished version is probably like an hour, with credits, between an hour forty-five, an hour fifty. We probably cut like twenty, twenty-five minutes out.

It’s not like some three-hour cut that got reduced.

PONSOLDT: No, no, nothing like that. A lot of that began from the earlier stages with Dave’s book. Dave’s novel, like most complicated novels, is a beautiful, complicated, ambitious, messy, awesome thing with tons of ideas and characters and plot that could make a wonderful mini-series like a lot of my favorite novels, but no, to make a film that was under two hours, there was serious streamlining that had to happen, and characters and plotlines that had to go, and really trying to focus on the psychology of the main character and her arc as opposed to fetishizing the gadgets and the world or going off on wild tangents of secondary characters. While it’s fun as hell in the book, it wasn’t central to what the movie was going to be about.

What did you learn from early friends and family screenings or test screenings that impacted the finished film? Did you make any changes?

PONSOLDT: Yeah, I mean, I’m thinking of a couple scenes that were lost. There were scenes that we were trying to make work where we couldn’t get them just right, and more often than not I found to be true, after you get your first cut out of the way, it seems that you spend disproportionately a large amount time in trying to make work, they may never work. Ultimately you can try to tinker and tinker and tinker and tinker and tinker, but you may just wind up cutting the whole damn scene. There were problem child scenes that were ID’d by friends of ours, it was like a confirmation of things we already knew that we tried to rework and ultimately we just cut. There were scenes that added great background to the characters, but in many ways people wanted to just move on with the story and get on with it already, kind of.

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Image via STX

I never spoke to you for End of the Tour and I always wondered, did you have a longer cut of that? Do you remember?

PONSOLDT: Yeah, it’s probably similar, actually. Probably a similar first cut and similar at the end, I think that movie’s about the same length, ultimately. It probably started at about the same. I’m an obsessive -- I mean, I have total respect for filmmakers who want to just make a two-hour forty-five minute movie and they want to leave all of their lovely, beautiful mess in excess, I love that. For me, when it comes to the scenes, I’ll just rework them endlessly and wish I could redo them and just cut and cut and cut and cut and try to get rid of everything that’s not essential. There’s that, I’m sure I’m paraphrasing, but there’s a Clint Eastwood notion that I’ve heard which is essentially that if you can take a scene out of a sequence and it will tell itself, it’s not that you probably should take it out, it’s that you must, because it isn’t essential. So I think when you’ve got a big, unwieldy, ambitious novel and you’re honing it down to a two-hour film, it’s trying to really figure out what’s absolutely essential to your character’s journey and trying to make it the best on its own terms and not being sentimental about anything.

I definitely want to touch on I Want My MTV, because it seems like that’s just a really cool project. How in the eff are you planning on whittling that down to a two-hour movie?

PONSOLDT: Have you read the book?

I have not, but I can’t even imagine.

PONSOLDT: Yeah, I mean, the book covers a big swath of time prior to the inception of MTV and it going on air to 20 years later, which is awesome, it’s amazing, and it’s at least 500 of the most interesting people you ever heard, whether they worked at MTV, whether they’re rock stars, all sharing anecdotes that are pretty nuts. I really tried to focus on the first handful of years of how the network was created, how something that would change pop culture, changed the way we relate to music, the way even our attention spans shifted, you could actually argue on that level, how it began with former radio DJs and advertising guys and 25 million dollars in American Express money, how they created something and then worked together, because working together is really, really hard, and how they just changed culture and had a good time but were really trying to create something that didn’t have a precedent or kind of flying blind and made a lot of mistakes, broke a lot of eggs along the way. I obviously experienced it like most people from the other end, as somebody who just worshipped MTV and just watched it all the time, it’s been really amazing to figure out how these guys did this, men and women, and many of them at such a young age.

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Image via STX

So does it take place over many -- I’m not sure if you said it, but does it take place over a few years or is it like the first decade, or what’s the time frame?

PONSOLDT: About the first four or five years, yeah.

So is it one of these things where if it’s successful there could be part two, almost a sequel?

PONSOLDT: I mean, the arc really was -- they went on the air in ‘81, and it was, I mean, I could talk about it all day, it was kind of a mess initially, because they couldn’t even get -- MTV wasn’t even carried by cable in New York, initially. When it went on the air initially all the people who created MTV had to go down to New Jersey to watch it in a bar, and the big thing was convincing regional cable carrier to carry MTV, because no one would watch it and if no one would watch it, advertisers wouldn’t put commercials on and then it wasn’t sustainable so it was going to be a failure really quickly, but then within about four or five years it wound up becoming a big success and they sold it to Viacom for a half billion dollars. But they were victims of their own success, I mean, the writing was on the wall, most of them were on their way out, the culture there would change. It had become part of culture as opposed to them -- you know, if you think of any friend trying to open a store or a restaurant or whatever, or have a band, most of them live about a year. They fail within a year usually, they don’t make it, because people are complicated and it’s hard to make a living doing it, so I think it’s sort of a bittersweet story, but obviously culture’s changed. And in a long-view, it’s kind of a weird thing, because now with YouTube, which is a perfect format for videos, there’s been a resurgence, but for the large part, MTV shifted into reality TV that young people don’t even know what it meant.

No, it’s crazy because it’s like, if you watch any old videos from MTV, the first few years was just like the indie record store that’s on the corner with nothing going on, but once a whole bunch of money started funneling through it became something completely different.

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Image via STX

PONSOLDT: The early videos were, generally speaking, pretty awful. [laughs] I mean, some charmingly so, some of them just bad, and it wasn’t even that the good ones and the bad ones, there was any correlation to how big the artist was, there was plenty of Rod Stewart videos from that era, who was a huge star, but just awful videos, and there was not enough content for it early on, so there were some really obscure bands that just got played a lot that made them seem like they were much bigger than everyone thought. There was also the mainstreaming of Euro culture and pretty closeted and coded, like a lot of the bands of that era like Duran Duran or whomever, that you imagine that people in suburbs of Nebraska or Texas or Georgia, in very conservative areas during the Reagan 80s were seeing super flamboyant new wave music was pretty radical, actually. It’s amazing.

Have you turned in the script? What’s the status of it moving forward?

PONSOLDT: Not yet, I’m still working on it. I’ll be diving to try to finish it right after The Circle comes out, but we’ll see with the potential, impending writer’s strike. Yeah, it’s something I’ve been working a long time on, I’m actually pretty close.

I definitely want to ask you about Inconstant Moon. What was it about that material that excited you and what’s the status on that one?

PONSOLDT: Yeah, that’s an awesome one. A good buddy of mine, Dan Cohen who’s at 21 Lap, he was a producer on The Spectacular Now, which we made together a few years ago, and then he was really involved in Stranger Things and Arrival, he’s been developing awesome, awesome material. He brought me the short story, and I really loved the idea of it. It’s a short, short story that sort of is just -- whereas Dave’s novel for The Circle is a huge, huge thing that needs to be cared down, this was super tiny and needed to be completely explored out. It’s an apocalyptic love story, I mean, it’s the end of the world and it’s one night and it’s Los Angeles. I think the idea of apocalyptic cinema and the world ending and that anxiety and what the end of the world would mean and how it could potentially externalize the inner conflict of a couple who’ve essentially given up on each other, what the end of the world means now in our current political climate, all of these things, sort of like a Before Sunrise at the potential end of the world, dealt with really messed up, complicated people just felt really exciting. We started having conversations, pretty early on we started talking to a really great screenwriter named Dan Casey, and so he’s the one who’s going to be writing it, he connected with it instantly. So yeah, he’ll be writing it, and it’s going to be with Fox 2000, and hopefully we’ll get to make it.

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Image via STX

Does everyone realize that it could be the end of the world or is it just this guy realizes that it could be the end of the world?

PONSOLDT: Early on, it feels like it could be idle paranoia or just like almost surreal envisionings of people who are on an emotional rollercoaster, like a slight magical real thing, and then it becomes real. [laughs] And then it becomes very, very real. Real stuff in a city -- people like to destroy Los Angeles in movies, I’m hoping this does it in a totally romantic, all by night kind of way, and it’s generally terrifying and maybe hopeful by the end of it.

And what’s this thing, Wild City?

PONSOLDT: Yeah, that’s something I’m totally stoked on. That’s something I’ve been working on for a long time as well for Disney. It’s an original idea that would be sort of live action with the effects the way The Jungle Book was, sort of inspired by an animal celebrity that’s in Griffith Park, a mountain lion who had to travel the entire city from the Santa Monica mountains to Griffith Park across the 405 and the 101. It was this basic kernel of something that just captured my imagination and sort of what that journey might look like in a relationship with another animal who has a family. At its core, what I saw at face was someone who lost their home, who’s an orphan and a refugee, who crosses a city in a tremendous act of courage and there’s no one else around him and people fear him for that and then come into a community of refugees. Also a love letter to Los Angeles and wildlife. A strange Ellis Island story with a lot of animal refugees in the biggest urban park in America, which Griffith Park is, so that’s what that is.

I actually remember reading about that animal.

PONSOLDT: Yeah, he really is a huge celebrity. You could do a deep dive. There’s a great photo that sort of went viral that was in the New Yorker of him with the Hollywood sign behind him, but he’s become sort of a mascot for all of California for urban wildlife and probably for the entire country, so he’s all on his own.

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Image via STX

Is that something that you’re writing? I mean, are you currently working or were you writing it or that’s just another project that you need to buckle down and do?

PONSOLDT: That’s something I’ve been writing, yeah. Something, again, once this is over, I will return to soon.

My last question, I want to jump back to The Circle. How the eff did you put together this cast?

PONSOLDT: [laughs] Man, luck, I don’t know. Luck, passion. I mean, I think it started the way everything starts, with a script, with a book. It started with Dave’s book and then a script and Tom was the first guy to come on board and he was excited to play Eamon, which exceeded my wildest dreams for someone who would be perfect for the role. It’s understandable that there’s a fundamental goodness and idealism to this character and you can understand how people would follow him to the end of the earth, and I think Tom sort of plays it to his public image in a way, to play some kind of well-intentioned fundamentalist. And then, yeah, from there, it’s just a lot of actors that I really have loved and admire, whether it’s Emma and Patton and Karen Gillan or Bill Paxton or Ellar Coltrane, they’re all people who I’ve really, really loved in different things. I felt super fortunate, I just had really great collaborators in all of them.

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Image via STX

As I was watching the movie, I was like, this is just crazy, the cast you put together. But no matter how much money you have for any movie, it’s never enough. What was something you had to change as a result of time or money?

PONSOLDT: Time is the most expensive thing. Everything gets expensive, visual effects get expensive, but the main thing was time. I would’ve loved -- on every movie, I would’ve loved to have more time. That’s where I would always put as much money as humanly possible, to have more time, more time to play with the actors, more time to just try things out, to experiment. Once you’re on the clock and it’s shooting day, it gets expensive. So that’s the biggest thing. If some investor came along and just dropped a check for five million bucks or something and was like, what do you want to do with it? I don’t know, there were things at the time, early on in early drafts, I don’t know if you read the book, but there’s a giant aquarium with some real sea creatures and fictional sea creatures that are fantastic. It was in early drafts and it would’ve been visually amazing and work certainly on a metaphorical level for the film, but there was just no way that we were gonna do it right. Literally, there’s a fictional creature that would’ve been entirely effects that I don’t think would’ve worked out, I think it would’ve been something we would’ve cut from the film anyway. I’m pretty good, I think, at letting go, ultimately the script that we shot was what we wanted to make and it was the best one, and it focused on what was central to what the characters were dealing with. The movie was not about the gadgets, it was not about a translucent shark, even though it would’ve been really cool! It’s about Mae. It’s about the character that Emma Watson plays, and you’re not gonna find a better version of Mae than Emma Watson. She’s a surrogate for the audience, and the issues she’s dealing with, her personal psychology, how she’s afraid of unfulfilled potential and wants to be seen and known and live a special life and also becomes something of a pragmatist, I think, and doesn’t just move away to Costa Rica and become a surf bum at the end of it, but she does things that maybe we wouldn’t do, for better or for worse, makes some bad decisions along the way, all of these things. That’s what the movie was really about. Hopefully the actors serve the story in a way that makes them part of a well-rounded ensemble that’s not totally obvious.

The Circle is now playing in theaters.

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