Ask the CIRCLE Filmmakers

Hi and thank you for the kind words and also for checking out the film!

1) We talked about a TON of options for the ending, though I don't think we ever seriously considered having the little girl survive. I know we talked in very vague terms about "what if the little girl was a plant" but that never really went anywhere. I think that having the little girl be the winner out of deviousness could have been really cool and really dark, but we ultimately felt that having Eric betray them would be the darkest (and thus the most interesting) way we could wrap up this group of people. We wanted an ending that made people feel gross inside, haha, and I think if the little girl won by being a badass, most people would cheer... I know I would!

2) Regarding everyone being alive, in talking about the how's and why's of the circle we felt it was most important that death be real. We wanted the decisions to matter and we felt that any option that had everyone alive at the end would feel like we cheated because we were afraid to really pull the trigger on anyone. Also, we'd be afraid that erasing all the deaths would make all the decisions "not that bad". You know "no harm, no foul"? So for us, these people had to die in order to really make the point we wanted to make.

3) We're an Ultra Low budget which is sub 250k.

Thanks again!
Mario

THANK YOU!! That's really fantastic to hear. We were really hoping to create a film that had people talking afterwards so it's so cool that people are taking the time to comment and ask questions and share theories. Really gratifying.

Aaron and I worked together on our webseries THE VAULT, so we already had a system down pretty well. We'd discuss broad strokes together, often writing pages to show the other what we were thinking. We had shared documents online (yay google docs) that were just laundry lists of characters and ideas that we would add to day after day. We knew we would have only 50 characters in the film so once we had far more than 50, we began to narrow them down to help give us the most diverse circle we could have. Simultaneously we were brainstorming scenes and topics and moments that we wanted to address in the film, again each writing pages and sharing with the other to see how it would fit.

Once we had a ton of pages and a general flow of the story, we met and just poured over the script page by page, cutting, changing, evolving, until we had something we were both happy with. The actually writing didn't take long, I think we managed to go from outline to first draft in a couple of weeks. That's unusual, but this is an unusual film. The script evolved as we went and even got tweaked during filming, but the core of the film didn't take long because we were pretty clear on what we were looking to say.

I think the key to collaboration in any creative pursuit is willingness to compromise. Making a film, even beyond the writing, is all about successful collaboration and being open to new ideas. Working with people who believe in the project and allowing them to contribute and enhance your vision in ways you maybe didn't originally anticipate can really take things to another level. So many great people helped make Circle what it is, from the sound, music, production designers to our DP to our actors. It truly was a group effort. Every film is, I think.

As for my favorite part, it's gotta be the moment Eric betrays the two girls. Aaron and I discussed several varieties of the ending for quite some time before finally settling on this one. To me, this is always how it had to end. Every other alternative felt like a cheat. I tend to have a very cynical, somewhat dark view of human nature, personally, and I love cliffhangers and twists. Having this seemingly sweet man just totally execute these two characters in cold blood was too delightfully horrifying to pass up.

Also, let's face it, no one expects us to kill a kid. It's pretty rare for a film to take that step... For that reason alone, we kinda had to do it.

What can I say? We're sick!

Thanks again,
Mario

Oh, and my question is - did he regret his decision? He looked like he did at the end when he looked around at all the pregnant ladies and kids at the end. ✨💫💜

Haha, thank you for not only checking out the film but also taking the time to write!

Happy endings are OK sometimes, but we thought that for our story to have the most impact, we couldn't have everyone be somehow alive at the end. What Eric does is really bad, and we didn't want to diminish the badness of it by having them not actually die.

-Mario

Thanks for giving the film a chance. We always knew that this would not be an experience for everyone. Some people are put off that it takes place only in one room. Some are put off by a lack of gore or scares or "action" in the traditional sense. Some people think it's boring. That's just something you have to deal with when you make a non-traditional film, I think. Especially one that you put on the internet (we always know how that goes...).

If I had to pick the one thing that bums me out about the negative reviews is that they influence people who are looking for new films to watch. I am totally 100% cool with people not liking the film. I just don't like the idea that someone who may totally love the film would be put off from even giving it a shot by some dude who thought it was stupid... But really, there's not much we can do about that. I hope that eventually word of mouth serves the film well and the people who enjoy it overwhelm the negative comments of the people who don't.

In the meantime though, I do think overall response has been fantastic and we're all really happy with it.

Thanks again,
Mario

Thanks for watching Circle!

To be honest, I saw Cube once, many years ago and enjoyed it BUT I don't really remember a lot about it. I have vague recollections of some pretty horrific deaths, and shifting rooms and the very end (walking into the light). That's kind of it. I should go back and rewatch. Was also curious how the sequels turned out. I never saw those.

-Mario

Great to hear you enjoyed it!

We planned the hell out of this movie. Aaron and I knew that if we were going to pull this off on our really tight schedule we couldn't just go in and wing it. We had a ton of shots we wanted for each sequence that we spent weeks planning (and then promptly had to cut many on set due to time, of course!).

In terms of color, once we committed to the Red, we were pretty ok with it throughout. The floor is kind of a character in and of itself, and we did talk early on about a shift in grading as the film went on, or other subtle changes to the colors but ultimately decided to just keep it simple.

As you mentioned, we do have some camera motion in the film, though it's often subtle-- slow pans, slow push ins. Fast, crazy motion never felt like it was at home in this story, so our motion stuff is pretty calm, but it is there. A good number of the moving shots in the film were actually connected in filming, we sometimes did whole scenes using long moving camera angles. Those ended up getting a bit chopped in editing to help keep the pacing up, but a lot are there if you look. We wanted to do even more but, like I said, when you have 10 days to shoot 110+ pages, concessions have to be made on set. Really I think this will be true of every project any filmmaker ever does. Set is crazy and hectic and you need to think on your feet and not be afraid of changing things if you have to.

Also those big moving shots can be incredibly difficult to pull off and sometimes it just didn't feel worth it to spend an hour for 20 seconds of footage. I'm glad we got as many as we did in, but sometimes I think we were right to chop them up to keep the story moving.

We did often favor locked off shots, we found that they're easy to pick up and they look nice. The only shot type we were really against for this film was handheld. We avoided it at all cost. We just felt like, when you have a film that lives in a setting this minimal, handheld makes it feel too indie and "guerilla". We were always trying to balance the minimal design aesthetics with interesting camera angles and motion to stay just on the right side of cinematic.

The 180 rule was something we discussed CONSTANTLY in planning the shots and on set. We often were huddled with our DP and Scripty to make sure we weren't breaking rules. We shot with two cameras on basically every shot, so whenever one camera wasn't assigned to one of our shots from our list, we just got general B angles. We definitely got good stuff from that roaming B camera when we weren't expecting to, but ultimately the eye line stuff just seemed to work out, since we were careful on set.

The Vault was something we shot in my living room on a set the two of us built. We did everything from lighting to camera to post. That was hard but it was controllable.

Circle was our first feature with real equipment and a real crew and it was absolutely baptism by fire. We adapted and we survived and we have a movie we're really proud of, but man, nothing can prepare you for that first day on set.

-Mario

First off, the above user's comment on the 180 rule cracked me up. God bless your script sup, though I guess having a lot of clean shots and no movement also helps ease the continuity quite a bit.

Thank you for taking the time here to answer everyone's questions! That's some serious time-consuming commitment I'm sure.

Earlier in the thread, I think you mentioned that primary shooting lasted only ten days? That has to be a record of some kind. How long did you have on pre-production for this? Did everything in production go more or less as planned or did you have any major road bumps?

Awesome and thanks for checking out Circle AND The Vault!

1) Not sure yet. I think that's the big question that creators struggle with when a project winds down and we're no exception. I think we want to try our hands at a lot of different things. I've got a lot of ideas that could be at home in the short film world, or on the web or as a feature, it's just a matter of feeling it out as to which makes the most sense to do next. I can say it will definitely be some sort of horror/sci-fi/genre concept, though. I don't really have any desire to do anything else...

2) While I don't think either of us are HUGE fans of reality TV competitions like that, I think we were both totally aware of it during developing circle. We referenced them on occasion when developing how the set would be laid out, what voting would be like, etc. The film is, in a lot of ways, a real life "survivor," and that fact was never lost on us.

As for Eric, we had him manipulating the group from the beginning. There are key moments in the movie that this is apparent: When characters die inexplicably when the group is trying to work together (sabotage), when Eric tells the story about what he remembers (making himself valuable) and when Eric points out the pregnant girl and kid are targets (focusing the group on his biggest threat). His decision at the end was a culmination of a game-long strategy of manipulation (and a little luck).

Random characters deaths were never truly random. People in the circle were choosing them because they felt like a threat. Young people are killed after noting how young they are. Old people are killed because some think it's "right" that they go first, the translator is killed because without her, the Hispanic man doesn't have a place in the game, etc.

3) For the characters, we tried to figure out what their worldviews were right at the beginning and then applied their commentary to issues as they popped up in an attempt to 1) flesh them out and 2) keep them consistent. The Lawyer (tie, red suspenders) is one of those characters that we defined as having pretty far right conservative idealogy. He's anti-illegal immigrant and in real life would probably also be anti-gay marriage. I think it's important to keep in mind too that he may not ACTUALLY care about gay marriage. He just sees it as a wedge issue that might help galvanize other conservatives to knock this woman out of the game.

These characters, though they only get a few minutes in the film to express themselves, are all built upon real people that you can find in our society. He survives the illegal immigration conversation because the group is focused on others in the circle, but these sort of strong opinions can only stay in the background for so long. That's something several other characters discover in the film as well.

I will say this, we never purposefully inserted our own politics into the film in an attempt to sway viewers towards our own political ideologies. That would be futile, anyway. We have opinions on that stuff, sure, but we tried to have each issue approached from various perspectives. The outcomes of certain scenes were based on how we felt issues would be addressed by people in our current society. Deaths aren't us saying "this is what's moral or right in this situation", it's us saying "this is how we think it would go in real life, based on X or Y".

For example, the racist cop. He gets killed because we felt like more people in our society would be against what he's saying and how he's saying it than not. Each elimination we tried to look at how these characters had conducted themselves up to that point and we thought about how society at large might vote on their behavior. We specifically avoided trying to pander or preach to anyone. Some people have commented that we clearly had a liberal agenda, which is certainly their opinion, but ultimately that wasn't our intention. We wanted people to consider these questions/decisions and why they happened, not worry about what WE personally think about these things.

Certain characters, like the lawyer, were fun to keep around as antagonists from a story perspective, but I also think those types of people often surprise you in their staying power. Sometimes, people like having someone around who says the things no one else will dare say. I'd probably keep him around, too, knowing that he'll eventually say the wrong thing and in the meantime he can take attention away from me!

Thanks again,
Mario

Thank you! We love to hear that!

1) We wanted Eric to be thinking about what had happened and realizing that other circles had been more selfless than he was. Uneasiness is a good word. Maybe it's not guilt, maybe it's just him asking himself if he made the right decision?

2) Reactions have been really strong and really varied. I don't think anything surprised us TOO much... Most people hate the people we expected them to hate, like or want to protect the characters we expected. I think most of the characters have some redeeming qualities to them, even if it's not readily apparent. They may be saying or doing bad things, but in real life most of them are probably pretty pleasant, on the surface...

3) I don't think aliens wanted ANYTHING specifically, beyond having the humans choose a winner. I imagine that not playing is as valid of a strategy as anything, so the aliens may not have had an issue with it. They built the machine to compensate for players who don't want to vote (no votes choose someone randomly), so it's not like they didn't expect this at least a little.

I think most people would want to save the kid. One of our goals with the film was to get the viewer to ask themselves "why do I want to save the kid?" Why do we value what we value and are OUR values more just or fair than someone else's?

Thanks again for checking out the film and commenting!

-Mario