'The East' Stars Admire Film's Anarchist Inspirations

The East, opening in select cities May 31, follows a ragtag bunch of anarchists who deliberately target the higher ups at corporations for their negligence–or worse.

It’s eco-terrorism 101.

The stars of the film, Brit Marling and Ellen Page, apparently have plenty of admiration for not only the anarchist movement but the real life radicals whose exploits influenced the storyline.

Here’s co-star Ellen Page on one inspiration for her anarchist character:

I met this young girl, she was 15, she was in our class, and she had dropped out of school and was a freegan. I was just in awe of her. She just made me feel horrible about my consumption and my justification of it. So I’d met people and had known people sort of in that world. But then also I read anarchist manifestos and books that were actually really incredible and intriguing. A lot of the ideas are actually common sense, and that’s what is actually kind of unfortunate.

Page is one of many liberal actors who collects a handsome salary but feels just plain awful about it all the same:

I think it’s a tricky time to be alive when we know that there’s incredible disparity of wealth, where we’re destroying the environment, you name it. It’s a tough time to be a person. It’s hard to look at all those things, but I think it’s important. I’m just as guilty and responsible for all of the things that I think about – and I’m aware of that.

Marling, who co-wrote the script and stars as an undercover agent who infiltrates the anarchist group, admires how “connected” real-life anarchists are as opposed to most tech-savvy citizens. 

I feel like one of the things our generation’s, maybe everybody’s, struggling with is stuff like isolation and alienation. More technology doesn’t seem to connect people necessarily. These groups of people seemed so connected. They seemed engaged with one another. They seemed awake and living their lives in this way that I hadn’t felt in a long time. I think we were both really moved by that.