Ask the CIRCLE Filmmakers

Hi and thank you!!

A couple things to consider when thinking about ties:

1) You don't need several votes to get a tie, ties can happen if two people get one vote each and no one else votes, for example.

2) We don't know that the silent man never votes, we only know that Eric says he never SAW him vote. Eric took a risk in assuming that the silent man was not going to play along with the final few rounds of voting, based on observation. A risk that paid off, but it's never 100% confirmed that the man never participated for the entire game.

3)As for why not kill himself, if he DID truly never vote, that doesn't mean he wanted to die. It just meant he didn't want to kill anyone. What if the person who never voted got to walk out of there? The man clearly had a strategy he was working towards - Eric speculated it may be because he doesn't want to give the aliens "what they wanted." It could simply be that he thought playing the game meant you would not be able win.

-Mario

I loved how engaged I was with this film, but I have one request; Do you think you could maybe release a 'voting history' of each character or something like that? Because in certain 'eliminations', there was no clear reason and I feel like if I knew who was voting for who, it'd shed some light as to why certain characters received votes.

Thank you for checking out the film. Really glad you found it engaging.

While an exact voting history for each character for every vote is a herculean task for a single message (I do like the below suggestion of it being an extra on the dvd, though!) I can hopefully shed some light on a few of the eliminations.

Teenage girl, for example, comes as part of a power struggle between the older and younger members of the circle. Following the College Guy's death, we see that the kills seem to oscillate between old and young, as each side has been galvanized by the idea that youth is valuable in the circle. Though the group is often sidetracked by politics for a round or two, this fear/power of youth is pervasive throughout the entire ordeal; in fact it is the main conflict in many ways... The idea that the young somehow deserve life more than someone who is older. Just before she is killed, the young of the circle push back against the idea that if you have a family, you're more worthy. "What if some of us want to have kids someday?" the translator asks. "I still AM a kid," says the Asian kid. "Yeah, me too." Says the teenage girl.

In this moment, they've reminded the group that as "kids," they're more sympathetic. They have a better chance of getting out. Maybe not as good as the Little Girl or Pregnant Girl, but still better chances than most. As a result, they become targets for people like Rich Guy, Bearded Man, etc. The ones who are arguing "everyone's the same in here."

Translators death is similar but it's also driven by something else. She is the only lifeline that the Hispanic Man has. Without her, the Hispanic man is essentially useless. "Oh great," the soldier comments after she's gone. "A two for one." The Rich Guy and Bearded man conspire to kill her. Eric notices this, but there's nothing he can do. She is killed as part of a strategy to eliminate two "good" characters in one fell swoop.

Throughout all of this, it's important to note that it doesn't take much to tie or kill someone. Two votes could be enough if everyone else gets one.

And now, the big event, the 5-way tie. This was something that, during production, we walked through with the cast about how they're voting and why, but essentially the key points is that the group is completely broken. The Bearded man has convinced the Lesbian to vote against the "good" group, the Pretty girl will only vote for certain "good" people (i.e. not soldier), and the Soldier will only vote for Bearded guy.

There's confusion and fear, plus the fact that Eric, unbeknownst to the group, is voting with Bearded Guy's team. He's been deliberately sabotaging the game every step of the way... Remember Counting Man, anyone?

So keeping the confusion in mind, that vote shakes out as follows:

Original vote:

-Eric votes for Lesbian
-Cancer votes for Pretty girl
-Soldier votes for Bearded Guy
-Lesbian votes for Cancer Survivor (per bearded's instructions)
-Bearded votes for Soldier

The rest abstain. Pretty girl tries to vote but doesn't get it in in time.

Tiebreaker vote. In a tie, you can only vote for one of the 5 people on the chopping block. Ties often galvanize people to participate who didn't participate in the first round, so we see more votes here. They shake down as follows.

-Eric votes for Lesbian
-The Deacon votes for the first and only time. For Lesbian. This moment of weakness is a huge moment of regret for him, and he steps off his spot a few moments later because of it.
-Pregnant girl votes for Pretty Girl
-Cancer votes for Pretty Girl.
-Soldier votes for Bearded guy.
-Pretty girl votes for Cancer Survivor (she gets the vote in this time, per bearded's instructions)
-Lesbian votes for Cancer Survivor
-Bearded Guy vote for Soldier
-Wife votes for Soldier.

Phew. There you have it, everyone gets two votes except for Bearded Guy who gets one, which ensures his survival.

When thinking about this vote, I want to stress that these people aren't friends, they're strangers. They formed a momentary alliance early in the game, but as the reality of the situation begins to bear down on them, their human weaknesses show. The fear of death and the chance of survival push them to turn on each other and it's ultimately their undoing.

Hope this helped clear some things up?

-Mario

From someone who was a Behavioral Sciences major, it disturbed me, too. But, I found it brilliant. Hours later, I'm still thinking about it! And, yes, what did she say in Spanish?

Hi and thanks for watching! Is it sick that I'm glad you were disturbed by it? :)

This moment for the translator was ad-libbed by our actress, Rivka Rivera. The script called for the following: "The translator explains the situation to the Hispanic man, who listens carefully," so Rivka just used her own words to do that. She's essentially breaking down the argument between the players on the other side of the Circle, letting him know what each of them is saying/arguing for, since he cannot understand them.

-Mario

Hello and thank you!

1) When the group truly tries and succeeds at not voting (the moment where the entire circle lights up and begins to flash), the machine chooses randomly. The Circle was designed to not allow this sort of stalling, for efficiency's sake.

2) Had everyone (including silent man) truly voted correctly, they would have gotten into an ALL PLAYER TIE. Yellow selection beams over every character, and if no one voted again, they'd have all died. Very short game!

It's unclear if silent man never actually voted, Eric just claims he never saw him do it. It's possible that silent man participated during the "test the system" rounds, as it was an honest attempt to help everyone survive...

Thanks again for checking out the film and commenting!

-Mario

Thanks for watching and glad you enjoyed most of it!

It seems as though you take just as much issue with the fact that someone survived at all as you do with us showing the final minute outside, so let me try and address both?

First, the idea of a survivor.

I will say that while killing Eric was always an option, I'm not sure that it would have been particularly surprising.

For what happens in the Circle to be truly meaningful, doesn't survival have to be on the table? If we say "oh there was no escape, anyway" it implies at least somewhat that the circle was pointless. If no amount of talking would change who lives and who dies, why bother? Everyone should just step off.

It also felt like sadism for the sake of it. There are other films that have taken this route, and it can work, but we didn't feel like it was in service of the story we wanted to tell. We also liked that the system was brutal but fair. You cannot cheat the system, but that does not mean it is unbeatable. This was a machine developed by beings who had a purpose. The idea that their purpose was to travel light years to earth to torture the entire population seemed a bit beneath a race with this sort of technology. Isn't there something more interesting than "we want the humans to suffer"?

Beyond that, I think we both just felt that the betrayals that happen during the game are far more interesting when the survivor has to live with himself after. This is a huge question when talking about "anything to survive." At what point is survival not worth the cost? So I will say that throughout development, Eric was always going to be alive at the close of the film, though the hows and whys shifted as we developed. What he does was too interesting to us to let him off easy. Many people would say he DESERVES to die after what he's done... But does he? If he's truly played the game better than anyone, doesn't he, more than anyone, deserve to live? The idea that he is gifted a survival he may not deserve was something we really responded to.

How far we showed into the future we showed, however, WAS something we heavily debated.

Do we end in the circle? Does he get out? Does he wake up in ANOTHER circle?

The Final Minute

That final minute is actually something that we discussed a LOT moving from development to production to post. The original script didn't have it. In developing the film, Aaron and I assumed we would have to keep production as streamlined as possible, with no room for an outdoor shoot of any kind. As such, we kept the entire story contained within the Circle. A purer experience, to be sure, but one that we felt might also be frustrating to watch. Everything is speculation. Everything ambiguous. We're not against ambiguity as filmmakers by any means, and we do think our current ending still leaves much to speculate about, but we also wanted to create a cinematic experience that wasn't entirely a "?" at the end.

So we wrote a single page as an addendum, in the event that we would have the opportunity to shoot one day outside. This would be something that expanded on the ideas within the Circle in some interesting ways, while opened up the mythology a bit with (somewhat) concrete observations.

Side note: We were also well aware we would be getting a lot CUBE comparisons with this film and Cube's ending was similarly ambiguous. We never saw outside. I can't say that was a major factor in our decision, but we certainly were aware that going a step further would help differentiate us from other "one-room" film experiences. We liked that showing "the outside world" helped open up the scope and mythology a bit. When you're creating a low-budget film, especially one as minimal and sparse as this one, you are certainly aware of how people view these sorts of ventures. Ideas/scenes/moments that help the film feel bigger are always part of the discussion.

So throughout post-production we asked ourselves "is this necessary?" "What does this add"? Ultimately, after a lot of discussions, testing out the ending on people, just general living with the film for awhile, we decided that we would go the extra step.

As I'm sure you'd imagine, reactions to this minute have been very strong and very mixed. Many people have told us they were hoping that we wouldn't end in the Circle and grateful we didn't. Some have echoed your sentiments here. Still others have said that the film, final minute and all, has "no ending whatsoever". That last one's a little puzzling, but I digress.

To us, there are a few things this extended ending confirms/discusses:

1) There were other circles. Many others. What if it was the whole world? Why would aliens do this?

2) Not every circle ends the same way, but several circle survivors have commonalities. Why is that? What does it say about what we value as a species? What does it say about the morality of surviving at all costs?

3) The aliens let the survivors go and appear to be leaving. Again, clearly this goes beyond sadism... But why did they do this at all? There's the idea of brutality in service of altruism here that we find interesting here.

4) Eric survives, he's one of the lucky few, but the things he's had to do have not left him unchanged. Does he deserve this freedom?

Without that final minute, none of the above would be a major part of the discussion following CIRCLE. Some of it, absolutely, could be inferred by more thoughtful viewers, but some of it couldn't be.

I hope that helped give a little insight into how and why we decided on this ending for the film. If it makes you feel any better, there were almost certainly circles that ended with no survivors... We just didn't happen to show one of them!

Thanks again for watching and commenting!

-Mario

Ok, let's do this!

1) One of the things we liked about this concept was the idea that people DON'T get a chance to tell their life stories. Just like real life, we often don't know the whole picture about people we meet before we draw conclusions about them. To that end we never developed a ton of detail about these people's lives before. We wanted to steer clear of that...that being said, there WERE some moments that were cut from the script, either during the development process or in editing.

These were typically minor details like how the one-armed man lost his arm (originally a car accident before we decided we wouldn't address it), the fact that the African American man owns his own business or a bit more about the accident that claimed the life of Oscar, the son of the woman who volunteers to die (He was killed by a girl who was texting and not paying attention to the road).

We also let the actors develop their own backstories if they wanted. The sequence where the Lawyer and Lesbian has a moment where each goes to almost ridiculous lengths about their past in an effort to show how sympathetic they are to each other. Those moments were ad-libbed by the actors and we enjoyed them so much we kept them in. These are people who have been waiting for some time for their one moment to defend themselves to the group, surely they would craft something wordy and elaborate in order to make an impression.

2) Julie is amazing! She was adorable and funny and so super professional. We both geeked out like crazy when she agreed to be a part of this film.

3) The Silent Man isn't apathetic, per se. I think he cares about what's happening, but as Eric observes, he doesn't seem to want to give himself away to the group AND those running the overall experiment. Staying silent and not voting is a viable strategy, clearly, as it keeps him out of the line of fire. It's also possible that he thought that the only way to really win was to simply not play. We did certainly allow him to be a little extra strange, a bit of a red herring for people to think maybe he's special. It's this strangeness that Eric uses to convince Bearded Man to vote for him. But ultimately I can confirm that he was, in fact, a human.

4) The entire soundtrack was composed by a friend of ours named Justin Marshall Elias. He pulled off a miracle - We only had two weeks to score the film (which is an insanely short amount of time--welcome to low budget filmmaking!) and he just nailed it. He completely understood the sound and atmosphere we were looking for and working with him was really great.

You can hear more of his stuff under his publishing name SECRET PIANO, here - https://soundcloud.com/secret-piano

5) Good catch. In the original script, Eric tells the group his name while he's explaining what he remembers about the "red room." We ended up having to trim it out for time in the editing room, but the character was always Eric in the script, so the name stuck!

6) Yes, I think it's safe to say there were some very small, speaking age children in at least some of the circles. It's certainly possible that the very small non-speaking children and infants were left behind by the aliens, since they couldn't contribute to the circle in any meaningful way.

7) I love how the Bearded Man character was portrayed by Kaiwi Lyman-Mersereau. He has this surfer dude / beach bum aesthetic but it's hiding a truly ruthless and manipulative character. He only speaks when he has something to say, he doesn't engage in petty morality debates. We know literally nothing about him. He's comforting yet scary all at the same time. He also wants to live, just like everyone else. And at that moment, he has no friends left in the circle.

Eric is not entirely sure about the Silent Man. He doesn't want to chance a guess as to whose side he's on, that was a mistake the Bearded Man made. What Eric does know is that he hasn't seen him vote yet. That doesn't mean he won't, though. Further, the pregnant girl doesn't usually vote, in fact, she actively tries not to. She only votes at key points throughout the story where friends are in danger. Eric risks a tie with Bearded Man if he's outwardly aggressive. And if the silent man decides to break his own rule... it could be a problem.

Much like you noticed that the Silent Man was suspicious, and possibly alien, so did Eric. He played on the Bearded Man's desire to survive by suggesting that maybe, just maybe, the silent man was the key to everything. What if he WAS an alien plant? What if, if they voted for him, they could all walk out of here alive. Eric wanted to distract the bearded man so that he didn't even vote for one of the main group and put anyone else at risk.

Eric managed to use the specter of hope to keep the rest of the group safe and thus ensure he would be the last one alive with the girls.

Hope this made sense!

-Mario

Thanks for writing.

Absolutely, aside from population control, the Circle allowed the aliens an unprecedented look into the morals and values of humanity. A look that they arguably couldn't have gotten any other way.

I think that perhaps the biggest takeaway for them, as they finished their job on earth, was the sheer unpredictability, variety, and will to live that comes with being human. No Circle played out the exact same way. No group of people was the same. Everyone is so different, and though some cycles ended cynically, many did not.

I'd like to think they'd be a little surprised by us, after watching everything play out. And maybe, MAYBE... a little impressed.

-Mario

Hello and thank you!

There could most certainly have been a Circle where most if not all of the players abstained from voting. I don't think the aliens would consider that an invalid result at all. In fact, I think they'd find it interesting. Here you have a group of people who truly believe they all deserve a fair shot. If the purpose of the Circle is to allow the humans to decide among themselves who deserves to get out, I think the decision would be honored by those running it, and the "winner" would be set free.

The aliens are watching how the decisions are made, but they're not interested in influencing or diminishing the result in any way.

-Mario