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The Social Network

Coverage by Nobuhiro Hosoki

Story : On a fall night in 2003, Harvard undergrad and computer programming genius Mark Zuckerberg sits down at his computer and heatedly begins working on a new idea. In a fury of blogging and programming, what begins in his dorm room soon becomes a global social network and a revolution in communication. A mere six years and 500 million friends later, Mark Zuckerberg is the youngest billionaire in history... but for this entrepreneur, success leads to both personal and legal complications.

Press Conference with Aaron Sorkin, Jesse Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield, Justin Timberlake & David Fincher

 

(Q): Aaron, I think you’ve expressed your distaste for the electronic communication world. What is it that made you overcome that and made you want to write this script?

(Aaron Sorkin): My feelings about the internet are actually irrelevant to anybody’s enjoyment of the movie. But what made me overcome it was that I didn’t think it was as movie about Facebook, really. I thought it was a movie that has themes as old as storytelling itself of friendship and loyalty and class, jealously, power, these things that Aeschylus would write about or Shakespeare would write about. Luckily for me none of those people were available so I got to write about it. And David really agreed, and you should talk about it.

(David Fincher): Obviously, there was a lot of internet chatter when it was announced that we were going to make this movie. I think people thought we were making a sequel to “The Net,” or we were trying to do some kind of fad hopping. But I really didn’t know anything about the origins of Facebook; I just had a dry-read of a script that had a bunch of people in it that I felt I knew and knew intimately and could relate to and empathize it. I thought it was a lovely, wonderful, two hours.

(Q): Aaron, I just want to ask you because the opening scene number one is so great, but number two it so instantly pulls you right in. I mean there’s no question you get on board with the film right away. How long did it take you to figure out where to begin the film?

(Aaron Sorkin): Once I had Mark’s blog, which you see in the movie and which is pretty much verbatim, I made it a little bit shorter but it was clear that he’d just gotten his heart broken by a girl and that this was going to be a night of drinking and blogging and this revenge stunt face-mash. I knew that I wanted to see him get his heart broken by a girl, that I wanted to see that scene, but since he brought up that it was nine pages, that it’s two people sitting in a bar. David, what he’s most known for is being peerless as a visual director. So intuitively this is an unusual marriage of director and material because I write people talking in rooms. And you would think that the director would come along and say “Listen, I just don’t know what I’m going to point the camera at. I can’t begin a movie like this with a nine page scene and two people talking at a table.”

(David Fincher): It’s a good scene. There’s no problem in sublimating your desire to show off if what you’re presenting is something that you think is what it’s going to take to kind of steep the audience. Originally when the script began it was in black and you hear the voices over black, and I kind of wondered why don’t we just see the Columbia logo and start hearing them then and hear the jukebox and hear all the people talking, and let people know pin your ears back man, you’ve got to pay attention because if we could start over the trailer for other movies.

At one point we talked about the notion of putting the credits over that opening scene so it was just like jukebox, cacophony, people dropping burger plates, two people talking right over the top of each other, and unit production manager. Just go information overload. I just felt that the scene teed up exactly who this guy was, exactly what the stakes were, exactly what the world was, and it taught you how to watch the movie. And also, when Aaron read it it was four and half minutes. It was nine pages in four and a half minutes, so the whole thing was let’s get everybody used to the idea of nine pages in four and a half minutes.

(Q): I’d like to ask Jessie, Andrew, and Justin if your approach to the role involved much actual research into the people you were playing, or whether you took more of your inspiration just from what was in the script.

(Jesse Eisenberg): I did a lot of research during the rehearsal process but if I didn’t and only had Aaron’s script that would have been perfectly sufficient. I auditioned for the movie prior to looking up Mark Zuckerberg online. I didn’t know what he looked like, I had never heard him speak, and all I had was Aaron’s incredible characterization and felt that was more that sufficient to make the audition tape.

Then we had about a month and a half of rehearsal and in order to feel more prepared and to understand who this guy was I found every interview and watched every interview that was online and got every picture that I could find of him. But really, as Aaron said, it was not really a movie about Facebook as much as it is about these more substantive themes. And in the same way it was not traditional biography picture, we were trying to do kind of an imitation of the character of Mark Zuckerberg, and so I was really just focusing on playing Aaron’s characterization.

(Aaron Sorkin): I think Jesse put it very well, I don’t know how much I have to add to that outside my own personal experience, which is that I had a photo to go from. But that was great in its own way because I could just invent something from inspiration, and I immediately saw that he, maybe this is my own projection, but he seemed very warm but kind of reserved. I kind of had minimal to go from which was actually quite liberating, even though I did try to find him in a very obtuse and uncommitted way. But it would have been really interesting because of course when you’re playing someone who exists and is living and breathing somewhere you kind of feel a massive sense of responsibility to not ruin them on screen because we’re all human and when you have empathy for other humans then it’s difficult to do that.

(Justin Timberlake): I also have empathy for human beings, thank you. I think there was kind of a collective movement with Jesse and Andrew and myself that we all felt like so much of the information we needed was there on the paper, and then moving into the wonderful mind of David to find out exactly where this film was going to go. But I think just for playing my character I actually stayed as far away from anything on the internet that I could. You meet my character when he meets Facebook pretty much, so I wanted to be excited by that. But like they said, the themes and the ideas are so much bigger than what the actual invention of Facebook in the film services.

(David Fincher): We had conversations about how it’s a biopic. A biopic is essentially there to tell you why somebody did what they did, and I wasn’t interested in that at all. I was interested in what they did, and because we saw it from the multiple points of view and all of those points of view of course were polarized by intense litigation I don’t know whether Eduardo was Mark’s best friend. I know the lawyer stated that he was his best friend and I know that Mark stated the exact opposite.

So we had to find kind of a happy medium in there where both of them could walk away from the scenes that we see them in and one could righteously say “I was your best friend,” and the other one could look and be aghast by that. I wanted to stay away from mimicry. We cast the actors that we cast because of what they brought to it and we wanted to unleash them with as much freedom to make each of the parts of the movie, the story that they were supporting as human as possible, and give them the leeway to be human and not to trap them with “Well he normally starts with his left foot.”

(Q): You mentioned a month and a half of rehearsal, which strikes me as extremely unusual for a Hollywood film these days. What did that month and a half consist of and is that something that you’ve done in your previous films?

(David Fincher): Was it a month and a half?

(Jesse Eisenberg): Yeah I said a month and a half. I just wanted to clarify. We had about three weeks of rehearsal; I had about a month and a half before I started shooting.

(David Fincher): Yeah we did about three weeks and most of those three weeks was “What does he mean when he says this and why is he saying it now? What’s your intention and is that the best way for this person at this moment? So it was really about just tearing at the fabric of the text and saying I understand that this chronologically happens here on the page; is it better being a line earlier or a line later? Just asking those questions.

And Sorkinese, as I like to refer to it, it’s a different kind of a way of communicating because in a lot of cases these are characters who are thinking aloud. So you need to know what inspired them to get on this role. I like to describe it as it’s not a character presenting a wall of bricks; it’s like a character with a dump truck dumping a ton of bricks in the audience’s lap. A lot of what made these guys special and what made it obvious that there was no one else to play these roles was you could see that they could talk about one, two, three things simultaneously and be thinking about a fourth and a fifth. And that’s what it required. So the rehearsal time was really mostly about how do we dovetail all these words?

(Q): I wanted to ask Jesse and Justin what were the challenges of playing characters people may think are big assholes? And also for Justin, have you given up singing? Are you going to be singing with “Yogi Bear” this December? Is acting your whole thing now?

(Justin Timberlake): I was hoping you were going to ask me about “Yogi Bear.” I’m glad that we just can get that out of the way with the first question. I’m sorry, Jesse; go ahead.

(Jesse Eisenberg): It’s impossible to play a role and to look at it, not only in the way that you described it, but look at it objectively at all. I had the unique position in that my main responsibility was to not only understand where my character was coming from but to be able to defend all of his positions, his behavior, and ultimately sympathize with him. And over the course of the movie and really over the course of this publicity experience I’ve developed an even greater affection for my character. You have no choice; it’s impossible to disagree with the character that you’re portraying. We shot the movie for about five and a half months, they were very long days, and you’re spending a lot of time working hard to defend your character’s behavior. So even if the character is acting in a way that hurts other characters you still have to understand and ultimately sympathize with all of that behavior; it’s just impossible to play it any other way.

(Justin TimBerlake): Just to add to what Jesse said, I think I think it’s fundamentally the same application for myself. It became clear to me after my first reading of the script that there was going to be the version of this person, my character, in the film that he wasn’t the hero, so to speak. But you never play anything sitting behind a laptop twirling your moustache. That’s the beauty of this film to me, that you really get to pick who you side with. I had a friend who recently screened the film and said to me, it was one of the really telling things, as soon as we walked out he said “You know, I don’t agree with anyone in this movie, but I don’t disagree with anyone in this movie,” speaking about all the characters, and I think that’s what kind of makes the dynamic of these three characters tick. But I feel like you defend your character. No one believes that what they’re doing is wrong in life, and so I feel like you attack it that way.

(David Fincher): The character is an asshole is such a reductive, overly simplistic way. I have no problem saying that I think Eduardo Saverin had a fairly good imagination, and I think at some point there is going to be a fork in the road for those two guys and I don’t think that Sean Parker was overly Machiavellian. I think that what he’s saying, how he presents himself, is perfectly reasonable. As somebody who’s been through it, who has had a Napster and lost a Napster, here’s a guy who’s saying “This is the big leagues. And it’s great that you have friends from your dorm, and it’s great that you have college buddies, and it’s great that you have somebody you can turn to and borrow $19,000.

But this is the fucking bigs, and you have to now realize that if you want to protect what it is that you invested so long and so much of your energy. If you want to protect that you’ve got to have the support of people who know what they’re doing who can navigate these waters.” We’re very conscious that Sean never advocates himself as the guy. He comes to say “I’m a fan, I’m coming to say hi, and I’m saying watch your back. These guys, they don’t want you, they don’t want some 21 year old kid telling them where the future is.

They want your idea and they want to sideline you. That’s what it is.” I think all these facets are true of this situation. I think what Mark Zuckerberg said was probably “I am up to my eyeballs trying to figure out how to make this thing work and how to get it on 60 million laptops. How do I do that?” and a bunch of guys came to him and say “Hey, your buddy who put up $19,000, he can own 30% of something that’s worth a million dollars, or he can own .03% of something that’s worth $10 billion. Do him a favor.”

(Q): I was just wondering if any of you maintain personal Facebook pages and if so how addicted to them are you?

(Aaron Sorkin): I put up a Facebook page the day that I signed up for the movie. I didn’t have one before; honestly I didn’t know much about Facebook. I’d heard of Facebook the way I’ve heard of a carburetor, but I can’t pop the hood of my car, point to it, and tell you what it does. So the first thing I did was start a Facebook account, I kept it up all during research, during writing, during photography, and then took it down.

(Jesse Eisenberg): I had a similar experience. I signed up for Facebook the first day of rehearsal so I could understand what my character was talking about, and when we started shooting and I had to learn all those lines I stopped using it.

(David Fincher): I’ve seen it over someone’s shoulder. No, I don’t have Facebook.

(Andrew Garfield): I was your usual, general kind of Facebook user, I’m sad to admit, and I’ve been three months clean. I’ve proud of myself too. But now I don’t use it because it was just negative for me, like it is for most people.

(Justin Timberlake): I don’t have a personal Facebook page, but it is nice to know that you through the world of philanthropy, for instance, that you can send out a message and, for instance, raise money for free health care for kids. But no, I don’t have a personal Facebook page. It’s hard enough to do voice work in animated films, so I took a double-duty of it all and I just didn’t have time to look at pictures of my friends.

(Q): I thought you guys had 160 pages and then the studio said you guys had to cut down because it’s going to be too long, and you said “Let’s read it together,” and it turned out to be a lot faster than that. I got the idea that it was the studio threatening you with having it cut that made it fast, or did you intend it to be fast from the get go?

(David Fincher): No, it was written to be fast. When you have the guy who wrote it and you say “Read it for me,” and he reads it for you and it timed out at two hours, then you call the studio and say “We don’t really need to worry about this, it’s going to be two hours,” and contractually for me to have final cut after delivering a movie that was two hours and 19 minutes or less, and I was able to come in way under the mark.

(Q): You’re known as a technical director.

(David Fincher): It’s my personal point of pride.

(Q): How has the evolution of technology over the past 10 years affected your filmmaking process, and how do you think it’s affected filmmaking in general?

(David Fincher): I think that technology will never make movies better. Technology has never allowed a movie to be made any faster, it’s allowed people who are making movies to iterate faster so that you can have more options, and as well all know sometimes more options is good and sometimes more options is just more indecision, more procrastination. Obviously how we make movies has changed radically in the last 10 years; you are now able to be in two, three different places at once.

I have videotexts of rehearsals that are happening in Uppsala right now that are being downloaded so that I can look at them when I get back to the hotel room and say “This is how I want my parade float to appear in a scene that we shoot on Sunday morning.” Obviously that’s a great thing; give anybody a chance to the technology and you can do it, you can find a way to think about something forever.

But for instance, in this movie, the Henry (Royal) Reggata sequence we put that to the end, we had to shoot that on July 4th and we had to have it really locked and loaded and ready to be made prints of at the end of August, so we had four or five weeks to do about probably a hundred CG environment shots. It was only possible because of the way that we were able to shoot on the red, the way we were able to take that data and we were able to ship it to LA and people could get started tracking backgrounds and we could hit the ground running. So it can be a great tool. Just like Facebook, it can be an incredibly powerful way to connect and it can also be a gigantic waste of time.

(Q): Was the way that the script was constructed the way it was originally written or did you tamper with that?

(Aaron Sorkin): No, that was the way it was originally written. Once research revealed that two separate lawsuits were brought against Facebook at roughly the same time, the defendants, the plaintiffs, the witnesses, they all came into the deposition rooms, they all swore an oath, and what we ended up with were three very different versions of a story. And instead of choosing one and deciding that one’s the truth, I’m going to run with that, or choosing one and deciding that one’s the sexiest, I’m going to run with that, what I really liked was that there were three different versions of the story, that there was Rashomon.

It didn’t come to me instantly, there was a period of climbing the walls and pacing around like there always is, but I came up with the structure of the deposition rooms and that everything was going to come out of that, which would give everyone an ability to say “That’s not true; that’s not what happened,” and would also have the added benefit of putting Mark just a few feet away from his accusers. Mark’s actually an underdog in there; he’s got to defend himself against a team of very high priced lawyers who were sitting next to these young Kennedys and that sort of thing. But the structure worked mostly for the Rashomon quality, right?

(David Fincher): Yes.

(Q): I was wondering if you knew if Larry Summers was coming tonight, and how did you cast that role?

(David Fincher): I loved the Larry Summers scene when I read it the first time. Its first incarnation was a little bit more of them hitting a brick wall with Larry Summers and we sort of retempered the ending a little bit. As it was described to Aaron and as Aaron was describing it to me the Winklevoss’ went to meet with Larry and Larry kind of said “This couldn’t be less interesting to me, and I can’t imagine involving this office in sorting this problem out. By all means, have at it in the courts of law, but I can’t get involved.” And I thought it was such a great idea that finally you get to go behind the curtain and meet the wizard and the wizard is supposed to sort the whole thing out and he kind of goes,” This sounds a little dull.

This just doesn’t sound interesting at all and I have so many other things that are vying for my attention.” So I was friends with Douglas Urbanski, I know him as Gary Oldman’s manager, and I thought of him to play Larry Summers. And I send him the script and he liked it very much and he said “You know, I sort of look a little bit like him,” so I looked him up on the internet and he does look a little bit like him. But he came in and he read and he tore it up. He’s a fantastically, intellectually entitled guy who is withering in his contempt for people who ask stupid questions, so I thought it was kind of perfect.

(Q): After two hours of Trent Reznor’s score it’s a little jarring to hear The Beatles. I’m wondering why that song was chosen and also why Reznor’s music was used throughout the movie in general.

(David Fincher): I wanted to work with Trent and we had temped a lot of the movie with Nine Inch Nail’s “Ghosts,” which was sort of conceptual studio album that they did in like two weeks or something. And we temped a lot of the movie with that and I remember when we were shooting the final deposition scene I was listening on my iPod and I had a Beatles compilation on there and I thought we might be able to get away with this. And when we were shooting the deposition scene I played it with Jesse and Jesse nodded his head, which is approval.

And then when we kind of laid it up underneath it was funny because we didn’t lay it under the scene and then play just the scene, we laid it under the scene and then we played the whole movie. And we watched it and I remember going yeah, I think that’s going to work. I could be wrong.

(Q): I have a question for Mr. Eisenberg. A lot of people in the tech community comment on Zuckerberg’s personality as being somewhat of an Asperger’s personality, where he’s very not touching, very emotionally muted. Was that some of the thought processes in the movie for your portrayal of Mark?

(Jesse Eisenberg): I certainly don’t want to diagnose him but in Aaron’s script and then also in watching these interviews there’s a certain kind of disengagement that you see. It’s frankly not dissimilar to some disengagement that I probably express when I’m doing interviews because they can be incredibly uncomfortable, so to kind of attribute it to some extreme diagnosis doesn’t feel right to me. But there was a really interesting quality that I wanted to bring out, which is this difficulty connecting to others. Of course it makes his invention that much more ironic and fitting, that he would create something that connects everybody else, but it was something we tried to bring out.

It makes the character far more interesting to play, that he has trouble connecting with others and yet feels particularly comfortable connecting everybody else, and perfectly comfortable in the social environment of Facebook. And it was also something to make me feel the character was really a full person, so even though he maybe appears enigmatically or reserved or detached, there’s still something happening beneath that. Our feeling, among many other often conflicting emotions, is feeling lonely. At the end of the movie he’s a billionaire and he’s created something really out of nothing almost by himself and he feels still alone.

(Q): Did you guys encounter any problems from Facebook the company and Zuckerberg? And do you know if he’s seen the film and what his thoughts are about it?

(David Fincher): I know that Scott Rudin had conversations with Facebook, I know that Aaron, you were privy to…

(Aaron Soirkin): Yeah we, we being Scott Rudin and me a little big, aggressively courted Facebook’s and Mark’s cooperation in the film. Mark would end up doing exactly what I would have done, which was decline, but we also told them at the time that whether they participated or not we would show them the script when the script was done and we would welcome any notes that they had. So we did give them the script, and their notes largely had to do with hacking.

There was a little bit of hacking terminology that I’d gotten wrong, unsurprisingly. I know that there was a rumor a day or two ago that Mark had been spotted at a screening; I doubt it. I don’t there are any of us who would want a movie made out of the things we did when we were 19 years old. If Mark is going through an uncomfortable moment that doesn’t give me any joy at all. So I understand; I doubt he’s going to be first in line next Friday to buy a ticket.

(Q): A lot’s been made of the embellishment and sexualization of certain scenes in this film. Can you talk about what scenes in particular were very embellished?

(Aaron Soirkin): None, and I don’t know where this is coming from. I’m not going to sell any tickets by making this statement, but I have to tell you that there is less sex in this movie than there is in any two minutes of “Gossip Girl.” Nothing in the movie was invented for the sake of Hollywoodizing it or sensationalizing it. As I explained, because of the three different versions of the story that were given not just in the deposition rooms, but there was a lot of first-person research that I did with people who are characters in the movie and people who were close to the event, most of whom were speaking to me on the condition of anonymity.

And there were a lot of conflicting takes so there are going to be a lot of people saying that’s not true, that didn’t happen, just as they’ve been saying that since 2003. The work that I did is exactly the same as the work that any screenwriter does on any nonfiction film. When Peter Morgan writes “The Queen” he’s going from fact to fact to fact, but Peter Morgan wasn’t in Queen Elizabeth’s bedroom when she was talking to her husband about their daughter-in-law. Moreover, and more important, people don’t speak in dialog and life doesn’t play out in scenes.

There’s work that the dramatist does, but nothing was invented, certainly nothing was sexualized in order to amp up the temperature on the movie. Even the Harvard Club scenes. You’re talking about the part at the beginning of the movie. That is based on descriptions of parties given to me by members who have been at these parties. Those beginning of the year parties, the bus that brings girls to the parties, what goes on at those parties, but that particular scene again is an example of is that scene really happening or is that the party that Mark’s imagining in his head that he can’t be at? That kind of thing. But really, this is a nonfiction story.

(David Fincher): You have to keep in mind that there is a point of view, there is a perspective. Certainly we did a lot of research and we had stories told to us that were far worse, far more salacious, far more demeaning to the participants than the stuff that we chose to actually show, and we had to temper it. We were trying to tell a story about somebody who is sitting at home doing something and going “Everybody else is having far more fun than I am,” and that’s the narrative purpose of it.

(Q): Rooney Mara doesn’t have a lot of screen time in this but she’s absolutely great. I was just wondering if you could talk a little bit about casting her in this and also when you knew she would be right for the role in “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.”

(David Fincher): I met Rooney auditioning for this and pretty much all the things that we loved about her for Erica are the kinds of things that we loved about her for Lisbeth. She’s really capable, she’s a smart, hard working, serious actress, and she came in and auditioned for “Dragon Tattoo,” and we were kind of like yeah, she’s still great. And I also felt I needed somebody that people didn’t have a preconceived notion of who they were or how they would behave, and so I love the fact that she’s a mystery into which the audience can project.

(Q): Mr. Fincher, lot of the early word about this is saying that this is a departure for you and I’m curious what you think about that.

(David Fincher): Because it doesn’t involve somebody aging backwards or because it doesn’t involve a Serial Killer?

(Q): I don’t know. I’m curious about what you think about people calling it a departure for you.

(David Fincher): I’d like to give it a lot of really deep thought, but I probably won’t. I don’t know. You read scripts that you want to see the movie of and then you beg to be involved, and this was one of those. I know now and I felt it when I was shooting it that I was going to be able to make something that I could look back on 10 or 12 years from now and say “I got to work with all these guys right as it happened.

Right as they kind of coalesced.” It was a great opportunity to work with a lot of people who came to play, and it was an ensemble movie that was going to live and die by quality of whether or not you believed the behaviors of the people who were gifted this man’s words. And every day of the 72 days that I was lucky enough to be able to shoot this movie I got to walk away from it saying “He’s good. That’s going to work. That looks like a marriage coming apart.” So I feel about it like would I have loved to have made “American Graffiti”? Now sort of in its own weird way I’ve been able to, I got to do something where I got to look at nine people across the screen and there was a moment in time when they were all in the same movie.

End.