David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin's 2010 Interview for The Social Network

facebook was founded in 2003 by a 19 year old harvard student named mark zuckerberg the company has since grown into a global phenomenon with 500 million users and an estimated value of 25 billion dollars the invention of facebook has already been the subject of countless articles several best-selling books and two major lawsuits it is now a major motion picture it is called the social network and here is the trailer here you go here how do you do this thing where you managed to get all girls to hate us i think i've come up with something that looks good that looks really good welcome to facebook girls hi hello million dollars isn't cool you know what's cool a billion dollars you made facebook yep this is our time this social network joining me now is the director david fincher his previous films include fight club zodiac and the curious case of benjamin button for which he earned an oscar nomination in 2008. also here the screenwriter aaron sorkin is writing credits include the west wing sports night in studio 60 on the sunset strip i am pleased to have both of them back at the table welcome good to be here and congratulations thank you very much um is it surprising that the two of you are working together on this i mean you know at first glance it's an unusual marriage of director and material david is most known for being peerless as a visual director and i write people talking in rooms uh so it is my question yeah a felix an oscar thing but um that reap great rewards because uh um first of all david completely embraced the fact that this was going to be a story told with language but he he brought his distinct visual style and artistry to the movie as well as being able to get great performances out of a group of very talented but very young actors and then finally in in the editing room his cutting style there are moments in the in the movie of hacking and uh uh david makes them look like a bank robbery uh well it is kind of like a bank when you were asked to do this i guess scott rudin did it or no i got a call from from scott and amy pascal and they said we have a script that that's uh so good that it doesn't even require anybody of any ability at all so so did you say yes after 15 minutes of looking at the script i read the thing all the way through but but shortly thereafter five ten seconds after a movie about facebook that's what i said you know my that that was my my my biggest fear was um it was a something i didn't really know anything about i didn't really know the story behind it and and i was unsure of how dramatic it could be and and you know my questions were answered in the first 20 or 30 pages and the thing is it's not a movie about facebook it's at the center of this is this very very modern invention uh but the themes in it are and the story is as old as storytelling itself of friendship and loyalty and betrayal and power and class and these things that shakespeare would have written about and esplas would have written about and patty chayefsky a few decades ago and it was just lucky for me that none of those guys were available so i got to write about it so your challenge was to take these relationships and these lawsuits and these animosities and all of that among very young people and create the yeah well the first challenge was that after you look at all the available research and then all the legal documents and after i did a lot of first-person research talking to uh you know a number of the people who are characters in the movie including zuckerberg no we made a an aggressive attempt to get mark to help us and get facebook to help us and after deliberating for a long time mark did exactly what i would have done which was uh past but we did tell i tell them that whether they cooperated or not we were going to show them the script and we would love to hear their notes so we did do that and they uh they gave us notes that had mostly to do with hacking um i mean terminology for hacking so they accepted the idea this is a movie and there is uh well what you have to understand is there were as i said in your intro there were two facebook there were two lawsuits brought against facebook at roughly the same time the defendant the plaintiffs the witnesses they all came into the deposition rooms they all swore out an oath and we ended up with three very different and often conflicting versions of the story so what i did was instead of pick one and decide that sounds like the truth to me i'll run with that or pick one and decide that sounds like the sexiest to me i'll run with that i really like that there were three so considering this is the movie this is not the story of the founding of facebook it's a movie in which uh there are various people who saw what happened differently and you reflected that those stories are set against the backdrop of the founding of facebook it i don't think it belongs to any genre frankly but the closest one and david and i may disagree on this but i think the closest one it belongs to uh is a courtroom drama where at the beginning we're certain of someone's guilt or innocence and then we change our mind uh uh five times before the end of the movie there will not be a consensus in the audience about who's good and who's bad and who's right and who's wrong those arguments will happen in the parking lot tell me about mark zuckerberg that you have captured here and tell me about the actor who plays him jesse eisenberg um well again we didn't have access to mark zuckerberg we had access to you know some youtube video there's lots of clips yeah i mean we were able to look at those but you know again the the two things are they're hard to a little hard to reconcile because obviously mark zuckerberg the character in this movie is has words put in his mouth by byron sorkin and so wouldn't we all like yeah exactly but um but it was a it was a that was a very difficult thing to reconcile because you're talking about a guy who on 60 minutes is you know moves very um slowly and cautiously in terms of how he he he speaks and answers questions and and and obviously the script that was written was 162 pages yeah so the guy we saw in 60 minutes is not the guy we see in your script terms of rapidity of conversation velocity of talk yeah the the the characters are speaking in my voice but the the the you know they're certainly you would the guy we see in the movie you would certainly recognize as uh as the guy we see on 60 minutes the one big difference is that the guy we're seeing on 60 minutes uh is now 26 years old we get to see where where's our mark zuckerberg in the movie is 19 he's a sophomore and at home sophisticated yeah and we wanted to get that in the in these deposition room scenes which take place several years after most of the action in the movie uh there is a more sophisticated uh uh slightly more grounded guy who's been through fire and is uh he also in those scenes he's the underdog he's uh he has to defend himself against this white shoe law firm and all these accusers uh and he's got to do that his head flying off here is a clip from the 60 minutes profile of mark zuckerberg he and his two roommates created an online version of the harvard student directory where kids could message each other they called it the facebook and launched it from their dorm room within four months they had expanded to 40 colleges and over the summer moved to palo alto but mark had done code writing for some upperclassmen with a similar idea and they have filed a lawsuit three harvard students are suing you claiming that you stole their idea for facebook well i mean we know that we didn't steal any ideas or code so we're just kind of waiting until that comes out in court in the lawsuit they claim that that you were duplicitous are you worried about it no i don't really spend a whole lot of my time worrying about that i mean we we have lawyers at the company who deal with that stuff and it's just it's not a huge concern and here's a clip of mark zuckerberg as played by jeff jesse eisenberg in the film the social network uh a scene having to do with the deposition is that a question in the 16th email you raised concerns about the site's functionality were you leading them on for six weeks then why didn't you raise any of these concerns before it's raining i'm sorry it just started raining mr zuckerberg do i have your full attention no do you think i deserve it what do you think i deserve your full attention i had to swear an oath before we began this deposition and i don't want to purge myself so i have a legal obligation to say no okay no you don't think i deserve your attention i think if your clients want to sit on my shoulders and call themselves tall they have a right to give it a try but there's no requirement that i enjoy sitting here listening to people lie you have part of my attention you have the minimum amount the rest of my attention is back at the offices of facebook where my colleagues and i are doing things that no one in this room including and especially your clients are intellectually or creatively capable of doing did i adequately answer your condescending question here is what new york magazine says the movie facebook doesn't want you to see is the social network fair start arguing now is this fair to zuckerberg and facebook you you never want to present a character in a movie that you don't empathize with you know it was never it's not a character assassination we were we were we had a guy who from from certain perspectives he was you know judas and she had he had he had betrayed his friend and obviously that's a specific pov there were other people you know we've people seen the movie who know some of these participants and they have said you know alternately how did how did jesse eisenberg capture mark zuckerberg and at the same screen coming out of the same screen and you'll have people come and say you didn't lay a glove on them so you know it's it's it's a very um it's a tricky thing i i always try to make sure that that you know it's not my intention to to present an argument where i already know i've already drawn my conclusion i like the fact that there were four people at a table who all thought they were right and i think that makes the most interesting drama and the most interesting arguments and i think that you know if if i were mark uh and facebook i would want the story told from only my perspective uh but this is a a story told from marx as well as the the people accusing him uh i i i do think that it's fair uh i i think that uh um uh like david said you you can't create a movie character that you don't empathize with i don't think any of us would truth as a writer or director or the actor for that matter um and uh i i understand you know i don't i don't think any of us would want a movie made about the things we did when we were 19 years old um but this is a movie you know he's a he's a fascinating guy uh who in the end he's seen fascinating to you as a writer uh i think that he's got his nose pressed up against the window of uh of social life at college and and then the world i think he feels like a bit socially inept more than a bit um he's a socially awkward guy by the way i can identify with that too he's most comfortable sitting 18 inches away from a computer screen and and you're most comfortable in a room with the door shut i would like 24 inches um sure i would like people to think that you know i'm uh as as quick and clever and charming as the characters that i write and i would be very happy just uh writing what i write kind of slipping it under the door and having somebody slip a meal back under the door in exchange and that's actually what mark ended up creating he invented a world where you can reinvent yourself all right roll tape this would be the introduction of two other characters uh i mean one other character eduardo played by andrew garfield when they launched the site because he plays a significant role later here it is relationship status interested in this is what drives life in college are you having sex or aren't you it's why people take certain classes and sit where they sit and do what they do when at some center you know that's what the facebook is gonna be about people are gonna log on because after all the cake and watermelon there's a chance they're actually gonna get laid meet a girl yes that is really good and that was it what do you mean it's ready it's ready yeah right now that was it so who was that character played by andrew garfield how is it water sovereign who is he he's um the guy who put up a thousand dollars to to start start what was at that point called the facebook and he's uh he's his college buddy and his confidante and his uh his um his best friend he's he's his best friend it's it's possible in fact that he may have been his only friend at that moment um and uh genuinely cares uh for mark and is uh tries to act as as mark's conscience which is a problem for justin timberlake's character who uh sean parker sean parker the founder of napster uh and he he comes into the movie about an hour in and in order for sean to pursue his own agenda needs mark to get rid of eduardo tell me about sean parker in the casting ah well um we had you know we had the version of sean parker in the movie who needed to be i mean he's described in the in the pros as as being like uh frank sinatra he walks into this restaurant and all eyes are on him and he is able to navigate these waters so gracefully and and justin will do just fine well that's right that was the thing you know there are many number of ways that justin timberlake being in your movie can sort of upset the apple cart you know in that we're trying to build you know this ensemble and and and you know you bring in a guy who is so well known in this other realm and it can it can throw off the balance of of trying to make all these like sort of separate but equal puzzle pieces and you know in the end i mean we put him through through how he did the four or five screen tests for it but but i needed somebody that jesse could look across a restaurant and see and go that's how you do it like that's how you walk into a restaurant that's how you handle being the center of attention and there was you could tell an actor yeah or how or how you or how you abuse it and how you how you ignore it and how it you know it flows from you and it flows to you and i needed somebody i needed a 20 something who could understand what it is to to put people together and profit from it uh what literary license what's the largest literary license that you took here i didn't create any fictional characters i changed some names uh i changed there are three characters whose names i changed and one of those three is an off-screen character and the other two cases uh it just wasn't necessary to embarrass this person further um but the there are no the literary licenses that i took are exactly the same as the literary license taken by anyone writing non-fiction um which is to say that people don't speak in dialogue so you you have to write that for them and life doesn't play itself out in in scenes it doesn't have the dramatic structure that you need for a movie nothing was invented for the movie to for the sake of sensationalizing it or hollywoodizing it but i did the same thing that you know when peter morgan writes the queen obviously he wasn't in queen elizabeth's bedroom when she's talking to her husband about their daughter-in-law was it hard to visualize i don't you know i don't think in those terms i i sort of read the story you know i think of it's maybe not visualization as much as it is um i i think of my job is to create an environment wherein somebody can work those things out you know i i i don't think of it as so much about camera placement until after you've done a rehearsal and you've decided what people are going to do and then you go well where's the moment here and where's where's where do we have to be and are we over the shoulder are we including a piece of the person or are we just in seeing what they see you know how subjective is it and and for me that you know yeah there's a lot of stuff you go oh my god there's gonna be so much typing in this movie you know how you know how how we're going to make that but but there's also so many moments where people are are are riffing and the excitement is in seeing the reaction of the the person who's listening you know there's like the club scene take a look at this uh this is mark and sean you know to talk about facebook at the nightclub yeah talking about about where it can go what it can be and and how not to miss it sean is really seducing mark um uh but you'll see rotate here he is so i decided to come up with the next big thing i didn't know that after wasn't a failure i changed the music industry for better and for always it may not have been good business but it pissed a lot of people off what your face match was about they're scared of me pal and they're gonna be scared of you what the vcs wanted to say good idea kid grownups will take it from here but not this time this is our time this time you're gonna you're gonna hand them a business card that says initially the first draft of the script was much more of this idea of of being able to get revenge or be able to be able to show the woman who had who had scoffed at you how what you could become and and we replaced a lot of those ideas as soon as we had you know justin and we were sort of tailoring it for justin to this idea of the of the victoria's secret you know the guy who invented victoria's secret and and talking specifically about this this um store that went from being a forty thousand dollar loan from in-laws to a five million dollar thing that the guy cashed out and sold to somebody else who then went on to make a half a billion dollar industry out of it and the guy who originally invented it jumped off the golden gate bridge and so that's what sean's talking about in this he's saying it's not only whether or not you have a great idea but there's a moment in time where this can be something huge and don't miss it congratulations to both of you thank you very much thanks for having us

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Length: 19min 33sec (1173 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 28 2020