"Social Network"-ing with David Fincher & Jesse Eisenberg

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Parent Category: Film Festivals

Category: Interviews

Published on Thursday, 30 September 2010 14:42

Written by Frank Lovece

If The Social Network were on Facebook, everyone would want to friend it. Opening the 48th New York Film Festival, director David Fincher and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin's story of Mark Zuckerberg's controversial founding of Facebook premiered to ecstatic reviews spanning highbrow to lowbrow, from The New Yorker to the New York Post -- where Lou Lumenick hyperbolically called it "quite possibly the first truly great fact-based movie of the 21st century."

The comment, aside from other eye-rolling considerations (United 93, The Queen or Fincher's own Zodiac, anyone?), is ironic given the hotly contested nature of just what is true and what's not in the Facebook creation myth. Sorkin worked in loose collaboration with author Ben Mezrich, who provided an outline and showed chapters of his in-progress book The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook: A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal -- a 2009 best-seller for which Mezrich was castigated by critics for spinning entirely made-up scenes and dialog, and by providing no footnotes or other typical tools of the non-fiction trade.

Fincher, Sorkin and producers Scott Rudin, Dana Brunetti and Michael De Luca understood the quicksilver nature of "truth" in this story, which even today continues to unravel in real life as lawsuits and their attendant depositions and other under-oath testimony still spill forth.

In a series of separate, one-on-one telephone interviews -- with Fincher gamely calling from Stockholm, where he's in the midst of shooting the U.S. remake of the 2009 Swedish film The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo -- they and star Jesse Eisenberg, who plays Facebook prime mover Mark Zuckerberg, together construct a tapestry of what what's true about, at least, the making of The Social Network.

Q. How did you first hear the material, because I gather the book wasn't even written when Aaron Sorkin started writing the script.

Scott Rudin: It was a book proposal that Mike De Lucca and Dana Brunetti had for Sony. It was slipped to me, and the guys were very gracious and we all decided to partner on it. Aaron Sorkin expressed interest in writing it and was available then to write it and didn't want to wait for a book to be finished, so Ben [Mezrich] agreed to sort of share his research and his reporting with us.

The book and this movie were written on parallel tracks. And then there was a great deal of additional research done by Aaron on his own that came from legal filings and interviews with a lot of the people who were around for these events, even if they weren't depicted in the movie.

Dana Brunetti: Initially it didn't inspire me, because when Ben told me his next book was going to be the story of Facebook, it didn't really sound like a movie to me, and I think a lot of people had that initial reaction. But then once he started to tell me the story, I started to understand this would make a great film, so we started to dig more into it and research more about it.

Michael De Luca: When Dana showed me the book proposal, what struck me immediately was that, first of all, you're dealing with someone young and in college, where we're all struggling to figure out who we want to be and what we want to do. This story deals with people who are operating at such a high level of a certain skill set that they may know what they want to do before they know who they are. Still in your early 20s, at a time when most of us are still struggling to figure out what is going to make me happy -- not what's going to make me wealthy, but what's going to make me happy -- and sometimes the two get confused.

David Fincher: I knew I wanted to do a couple of things. I knew I never wanted to see Facebook except for the one time when it's launched and then at the end. But as far as the rest of it went, I think we just felt we had to get through it as quickly as possible. I do agree that people don't want to see people writing [computer] code. It was about putting together a mosaic of faces that you could look at for long periods of time and then trying to cut it as quickly as possible.

I think that was something [director Frank] Capra once said, that the idea is to come in at the last possible minute and get across your point and move on. So we definitely took that attitude with this movie.

Q. The movie's press notes talk a lot about the Rashomon aspect of the film, and some writers perhaps not as well-versed in film as they should be have parroted that in articles. But that's not really there -- there's no scene in the film where you go back and see it again from someone else's perspective, which is what Akira Kurasowa's Rashomon unique and now a shorthand term for different memories of the same event.

SR: To me it's somewhere between Rashomon and All About Eve. When Aaron and I were working on the script, that was the other model -- the way All About Eve hands the narrative from one person to another. … I thought Aaron's idea of doing the movie from three different perspectives felt like a fantastic way at basically describing the subjectivity of truth where ownership is concerned.

DF: I wasn't there, and the people who were there disagree. Who was wrong and who was right and who behaved callously or indifferently and who said whatever it is that they said with the intention of really trying to make things better, I don't know that. I know I had a script that was fully fleshed out and I thought it was a riveting story and brilliantly told, and I had a studio who said we'd love you to make this. And my first response was, "You've got to do it right away, because I can see this not being the most interesting thing three years from now, and secondly, you've got to vet the script and have it go through [the studio] legal [department], because I don't have time to get involved in a war of words." I'm interested in this story, I think it would make a great movie, but to go and sit with everyone involved and ask them, "Did he say this?" -- I could see that dissolving very quickly.

Jesse Eisenberg: I think I'm kind of in a fortunate position to not have to be concerned with [what's true and not in the movie] because there's a legal team that considers that, and Aaron Sorkin, who wrote the script, I know is concerned with that. My job was specifically to defend my character's behavior and kind of justify where he's coming from and provide some kind of emotional rational for his behavior, and I feel confident that I did that. It's impossible to speculate how [Zuckerberg] would feel about the movie, although I'm sure for anybody watching a movie about their life at 19 it would be an uncomfortable experience. I feel, personally, as the actor portraying him, that I did as much as I could to justify my character's behavior in any given circumstance.

SR: I think, as Fincher says, we didn't want to do [fictionalized story] and call it Mugbook [a la the Bette Midler classic The Rose, about a fictional, Janis Joplin-like character]. I think what gave us the ability to do it was the fact that all of these people in these two litigations swore under oath that they were telling the truth, and then all told different stories. So the movie isn't saying that there is one truth; the movie is saying that there are three points of view: the Winkelvoss' point of view [referring to the entrepreneurial twins who had approached Zuckerberg with a Facebook-like idea], Eduardo [Saverin]'s point of view [referring to Zuckerberg's fellow student and first investor and business partner], and Mark's point of view. And all of those get equal time in the movie. And each person believed they're right, and that's where the drama comes from. One set of agreed upon incidents took place but nobody agreed how they happened and why they happened, and that's how you get a movie, I think.

JE: These deposition-room scenes that take place throughout the movie, we shot them at the end of [filming], so all of the anger that I [as the character] kind of had stored up from the flashback part of the movie, feeling like I was taken advantage of or feeling like the site was threatened, all of the anger I'd stored up during those scenes were kind of a relief to shoot, because I had gone through five months as Mark feeling as though others were threatening my hold on this company, and then in these later deposition room scenes I was able to unleash some of that anger.

Q: What is it about Facebook that allowed it to become this worldwide new paradigm? It's like how we used to not have cell phones or e-mail, and now everyone has a cell number, an e-mail address -- and a Facebook page. I get that it's about how we as human beings desire human connection -- and yet, except for our actual friends and family, these aren't real connections. They're people we don't know and will likely never meet. They're virtual people. It's seems a step away from making friends with videogame characters.

DF: I'm always amazed, but I guess I shouldn't be. I watch kids text each other and it's the same conversation that probably we used to have when we were teenagers calling people on the phone and saying, “What are you doing?” “Nothing. What are you doing?” “Nothing.”

MDL: It was just kind of a moment in time when things definitely changed. When communication itself and how we interact literally was revolutionized and changed forever.

SR: I think that's right, and to me that's the kind of perfect-storm part of the movie, which is that someone who suffers from enormous social awkwardness has an idea of a social utopia, but his idea of a social utopia involves people never being together. With communication from behind a computer screen, there's the possibility for people to invent a persona through which they communicate

Q: Do you have a Facebook page yourself?

DF: No.

SR: No. Because I'm fundamentally an addictive personality and would probably spend all my time on it.

JE: No, I also don't. People chase you and stop you on the street because they've seen you in a movie, and I do interviews, so I really don't have the desire to go and tell strangers even more about myself.

Q: So … anybody suggest doing The Social Network in 3-D?

DF: (laughs) No! (chuckles) No, we were trying to make this movie as inexpensively as possible. As much as there was a studio that loved the script and wanted to make it into a movie, they did not want to make a $100 million movie.

SR: [The budget was] under 40. Substantially under 40.

For more by Frank Lovece: http://franklovece.com