It was a very vulnerable experience for me making this movie.
EMMA WATSON
On her new movie, ‘The Circle’
NEW YORK: Emma Watson says making The Circle, about a fictitious social media giant, had been a tough and vulnerable experience that brought home issues of ethics and the boundaries of privacy in an increasingly public age.
Watson, 27, grew up in the public eye as a child actress in the Harry Potter movies, but she said she had not fully considered the implications of mass data collection, online activities and personal freedom before making The Circle.
“It was a very vulnerable experience for me making this movie... (It) was very hard for me and very meaningful,” Watson said after the movie’s premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival.
The Circle is a chilling vision of how social media giants control and monitor personal information — not always for the good. The Circle is a fictitious company that has been likened to Google, Facebook and Twitter.
Watson’s character, Mae, volunteers to become “fully transparent”, wearing a marblesized camera 24/7 that streams all her activities online. The experiment leads to the terrifying online hounding, tracking and death of a close friend who had tried to shun social media.
“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.” Reuters