Aaron Sorkin: The Making Of The Social Network

THE SOCIAL NETWORK (Blu-ray)

Release Date: February 14th 2011
Certificate: 12
Running Time: 120 minutes

Director: David Fincher
Screenwriter: Aaron Sorkin

Cast: Jesse Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield, Justin Timberlake, Rooney Mara, Joseph Mazzello, Armie Hammer, Josh Pence

The Social Network Blu-ray Review
David Fincher: The Making of The Social Network

For BAFTA Award winning screenwriter Aaron Sorkin, work on The Social Network began when he received the initial proposal for Ben Mezrich’s book The Accidental Billionaire, a 14-page précis that would instantly spark his own intensive investigation into the history of Facebook. Sorkin was taken with the accelerated trajectory of the characters – primarily that of Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, who turned from anarchistic hacker to era-defining webpreneur and CEO practically overnight. He never said “yes” faster to any project than he did to The Social Network.

The more he learned about Facebook’s controversial origins, the more Sorkin was intrigued by how it seemed to serve as a snapshot of this very specific time in American life – and equally of such enduring human subjects as genius, power and emptiness. For as technologically brilliant and keyed-in to digital lifestyles as these young upstarts are, they are also, in Sorkin’s portrait, brash, angry and never quite emotionally fulfilled.

Sorkin studied the notes of Ben Mezrich (though not his book, which was written simultaneous to the screenplay, and which was not completed until Sorkin was nearly done with his script) and conducted his own research, making his way through numerous legal filings and interviews with many of the people depicted in the movie (and many who were present at the events described, although in some cases not depicted in the movie) that made clear the starkly contrasting views of Facebook’s early days.

All of these sources, integrated in a panoramic way, formed the structural backbone of the screenplay. Sorkin was refused access to Zuckerberg, which did not surprise him, but used many public sources, including reportage and legal filings, to incorporate his perspective.

It became clear to Sorkin as he wrote, that as carefully sourced as the screenplay was, he would be juggling a series of equally “unreliable narrators,” each with a differing version of events, none of which, years later, anyone involved directly can come close to agreeing upon – and each of which needed to be integrated into the story in order to forge the broader picture.

It was Sorkin’s way in to revealing all the friction and burgeoning enmity that led to the creation of the world’s most powerful social network. He made it work by putting his emphasis on uncovering the individual intentions and warring objectives of each of the characters.

Sorkin found himself particularly intrigued by Mark Zuckerberg’s internal contradictions as a young man who demonstrates a certain amount of social awkwardness, and yet comes up with a brilliant way to transform the basics of the human social urge into pioneering computer code. Even at a time when he was an outsider at Harvard, Zuckerberg’s initial concept was to mathematically model what he has referred to as the “social graph,” the radiating, sustaining links every person has to all the other people they know.

The opening scene to the film was key to setting the tone.

That structure purposefully keeps bumping up against the nature of the truth as a subjective construct, something that has only been magnified in the internet era, as instant, indelible communication can turn rumours and innuendo into globally accepted fact. As one of the characters in the film says to Zuckerberg, “The internet isn’t written in pencil, Mark. It’s written in ink.”

Ultimately, Sorkin’s screenplay defies the notion that there can be a single truth and he fully intends for this to provoke debate.