Q: What drew you to The Social Network?
Jesse Eisenberg: In the very traditional way, I read the script. Frankly, I thought I wouldn’t have a shot in it because it seemed too good. It seemed like the kind of thing that was too good to be a possibility because the character was so interesting. You can see the character is simultaneously enigmatic where you don’t know where he’s coming from. My hope is by the end of the movie that he becomes more understandable, that you understand that he’s coming from a place of loneliness rather than of malice.
Aaron Sorkin: I got a 14-book page proposal that Ben Mezrich had written for his publisher and the publisher simultaneously was trying to shop it around to the movie studios to set up a film deal. It was the fastest I’d ever said yes to anything. I assumed that the studio was going to want me to wait until he had written the book before I adapted it, but they didn’t. They wanted me to start right away. So Ben and I were doing research at the same time and writing at the same time. There is no way the movie could have been written without Ben’s book, but it is not a traditional adaptation. What drew me to it wasn’t Facebook. I didn’t know much about Facebook, I wasn’t on Facebook, I had heard of Facebook, but I heard of it the way I heard of a carburetor. I can’t pop the hood of my car and point to it and tell you what it does. What drew me to it was that even though the invention at the center of it was as contemporary as it gets, the themes in this story were as old as storytelling. It’s of friendship, loyalty, betrayal, jealousy, power and class.
Q: What surprised you the most when taking on the character of Mark Zuckerberg?
JE: I was unable to meet the real Mark Zuckerberg, but I would still really like to. The thing that excited me the most was that he was always acting in a way that I as the actor, and he as the character, felt as authentic, even though he hurt some of the other characters in the movie. I think it always comes from a place of feeling like he was trying to connect and just was unable to. The dramatic irony of the movie is this guy who always felt like an outsider is able to create the thing that unites everybody else. I think it’s because he looks at social relationships from a distance and he’s able to see what makes them work.
Q: If you had an opportunity to talk to Mark, what kinds of questions would you ask?
JE: I thought about that a lot but have not come up with anything. I’m interested to meet him more out of my own curiosity because I spent the last year thinking about him everyday, especially on the movie set where I played his voice in my iPod before each scene. I don’t really know what to even ask him because I don’t understand most of what he does. I’m not on Facebook. We probably wouldn’t have that much to discuss, with the great exception being that I know everything about his life.
Q: What was the most difficult part of creating a character based on a real person?
JE: I didn’t look at not meeting him as an obstacle because the director, the producers and Aaron Sorkin, who wrote the script, discouraged us from doing impressions of our characters so I didn’t feel like I had to become a perfect imitation of Mark. I was really just playing the character that Aaron had written, which was an incredibly nuanced and complicated character. So I never felt as though I was at a loss because I didn’t meet him.
Q: You said you’re not much of a computer techie, but did you try and study technology in any way for this role?
JE: I really tried. I bought C++ For Dummies, which is a coding manual, and it’s just impossible. It was really hard to get through, even the introduction. And then I had a consultant on the movie who tried to teach me [to code a website]. I think I just have so little interest in it that I couldn’t really follow what he was doing. So I ended up learning the lines about the computers more or less just phonetically, just understanding how to say them and what the intention is behind them. I really made kind of an effort but [was] unsuccessful. It’s like learning another language where you learn how to ask for the bathroom in Italian, but you don’t remember anything else in Italian.
Q: How did you perceive the audience would relate or not relate to the character of Mark?
AS: People are going to relate to Mark in different ways. It’s not important that everybody feel the same way about him, and it’s certainly not important that everybody feel the way that I do about him. You can have an antihero at the center of some movies. An audience, though, does have to be invested. I mean, an audience has to care whether a character lives or dies. I believe that the audience does care if Mark lives or dies. I do want to make sure you understand that I’m not a one-man-band. Jesse Eisenberg helps the audience care if Mark lives or dies [and] so does David Fincher.
Q: What were the difficulties of writing a character based on someone who is still alive?
AS: Non-fiction is a much different animal than fiction, and non-fiction about people who are still alive is trickier yet. This isn’t a story about people who were alive during World War II. Facebook is very much in the news, Mark is very much in the news. You’re very aware that you have two important things in your hand. You have history, and you have somebody’s life. First, do no harm. I don’t have a problem saying that a guy was left-handed when he was really right-handed. I’m not going to ruin his life by doing that. But I’m not going to say that a guy is cruel to puppies just because it makes a good movie. It’s not important to me that the actor [does] a thorough physical impersonation of this person. In other words, it wasn’t important to me that Jesse walk and talk like Mark Zuckerberg. We wanted their talent and concentration going other places. In terms of non-fiction and the facts, everybody here I think, draws their own lines, makes their own rules about that kind of thing.
Even if I was willing to defame somebody, you have to understand that [with] these scripts-especially a movie script like this where it is non-fiction about people who are living now, who have demonstrated that they are very litigious-these people have resources. This company is bigger than Sony. They could spend us [into] debt. As a result, a team of very, very good lawyers vexed the screenplay to within an inch of its life. They have only one client, the studio. It is not their job to care if the movie is good or not. It is not even their job to care if the movie is successful or not. They’re given one job: Make sure there’s nothing in this movie that is false and defamatory, that will expose us to a lawsuit. I know how I feel when I get misrepresented somehow, and the last thing I’m going to do is do it to somebody else, but by magnitudes because it’s a movie on a giant screen that millions of people are going to see.
Q: What is one thing that you want the audience to take away from you as the actor, or from the character?
JE: I hope that the reaction is as complicated as the presentation of the movie. I hope that people walk away and view the characters as complicated a way as we tried to present them, that there is not a clear protagonist and antagonist, that right and wrong is gray. The movie tells the story from these different perspectives and asked the audience to decide for themselves what the truth is. My hope is that it sparks debate as the movie ends. [In] most movies, often times you’re just so spoon-fed by the people making the movie that there’s no room for debate afterwards, whereas this movie is both entertaining but also thought-provoking. p>
