HOWARD GENSLER, Daily News Staff Writer gensleh@phillynews.com, 215-854-5678 Posted: Friday, October 10, 2014, 12:17 AM

ANSEL ELGORT is having a year.

He broke onto the scene in "Carrie," co-starred with Shailene Woodley in both "Divergent" and "The Fault in Our Stars," and now is part of the ensemble cast of Jason Reitman's "Men, Women and Children."

In the film, about how the reliance on tweeting, messaging and Internet porn affects the lives of a group of suburbanites, Elgort plays an unhappy high-school football star who gives up the game and starts a relationship with a classmate (Kaitlyn Dever), who's being tracked 24/7 by cellphone and online by her obsessed mother (Jennifer Garner).

The Daily News spoke with Elgort last month at the Toronto International Film Festival, and found him to be one of the more thoughtful, opinionated young actors we'd ever met.

AE: This movie has that dark undertone that the world is screwed, but I don't think the world is screwed. The story line between Kaitlyn and I is positive, and I think that there are people that no matter what happens with technology are still going to be people. It's not going to completely destroy the world.

I'm not overly worried about humans. Right now is interesting because there are a lot of people in the world who were alive before any of this happened. But that's a very short amount of time in the grand scheme of things. Very soon, everyone on the planet will be alive only when there was a smartphone, so people will really know how to handle technology and use it.

For example, there were all the iPad leaks, which someone hacked and got everyone's pictures. But in the future, people are going to know where to put the pictures and where to not put the pictures, so the hackers can't get them. People are going to become more technology-savvy because it's just going to be a part of human nature.

DN: But won't the hackers also get better at hacking?

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Ansel Elgort: A futurist playing actor