Written Interview: Aaron Sorkin

From WGA.org:

Aaron Sorkin is as potato chip-addictive an interviewee as he is a writer. Yet when asked if he is like Mark Zuckerberg, the socially tin-eared but brilliant Facebook founder he portrays in his script for the new David Fincher-directed pic The Social Network, he bristles uncharacteristically just a bit. What could the award-winning Hollywood screenwriter and West Wing creator have in common with a 26 year-old computer programming billionaire?

More than you think, which might be one of the reasons Sorkin’s script — taut even at 162 pages — could be one of the best of 2010.

Sorkin admits he had a painful sense of intellectual inferiority early in life that was eased when he found the power of his obsessively smart, fast-forward writing style. The Zuckerberg of Network, which is based both on Ben Mezrich’s book The Accidental Billionaires and Sorkin’s own extensive research, is a computer coder with a nearly Asperger’s-like case of social impotence that drives him to create an addictive online social platform where people control how they present themselves to others and he, as creator, is finally king of the school.

Sorkin points out that the key difference between his depiction of Zuckerberg and himself is that Zuckerberg’s insecurities turned into anger while Sorkin’s became script pages. Indeed Sorkin’s Zuckerberg is a tragic character empowered largely by an implied vengefulness, but whatever the fuel, the result is a creative outpouring — a vision that speaks to millions.

Even Sorkin would admit that if his dialogue were computer code, it would create a giant, habit-forming, global computer program.

In an in-depth interview with the Writers Guild of America, West Web site, he spoke about his controversial depiction of Zuckerberg — played with a maniacal monotone by Jesse Eisenberg — his own similarities to the tragic hero at the center of The Social Network, and why Facebook had nothing to do with what grabbed him about this story. Some interview excerpts:

What attracted you to this initially?

What attracted me to it had nothing to do with Facebook. The invention itself is as modern as it gets, but the story is as old as storytelling; the themes of friendship, loyalty, jealousy, class and power. This is story that Aeschylus would have written or Shakespeare or Paddy Chayefsky. Luckily for me, none of those guys were available, so I got to do it.

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You’ve said in the past that story is hard and what you love is dialogue. To what extent did this whole Facebook thing and these characters provide you with the structure on which to embellish the theme and work your magic with the dialogue?

You still have to find Waldo in there somewhere. Here’s how it started: I got a 14-page book proposal that Ben Mezrich had written for his publisher for a book he was going to call The Accidental Billionaires. The publisher was simultaneously shopping it around for a film sale. That’s how it wound up in my hands. I was reading it and somewhere on page three I said yes. It was the fastest I said yes to anything.

But Ben hadn’t written the book yet, and I assumed that Sony was going to want me to wait for Ben to write the book, and I would start a year from now. They wanted me to start right away. Ben and I were kind of doing our research at the same time, sort of along parallel lines.

Was he sending you pages as he went?

No. Two or three times we’d get together. I’d go to Boston, or we’d meet in New York and kind of compare notes and share information, but I didn’t see the book until he was done with it. By the time I saw the book, I was probably 80 percent done with the screenplay.

There’s a lot of available research, and I also did a lot of first person research with a number of the people that were involved in the story. I can’t go too deeply into that because most of the people did it on the condition of anonymity, but what I found was that two lawsuits were brought against Facebook at the roughly same time, that the defendant, plaintiffs, witnesses all came into a deposition room and swore under oath, and three different versions of the story were told. Instead of choosing one and deciding that’s the truest one or choosing one and deciding that’s the juiciest one, I decided to dramatize the idea that there were three different versions of the story being told. That’s how I came up with the structure of the deposition room [which Sorkin uses as a narrative frame from which to tell the story in chronological sequence].

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There is a bit of a scandal with the central character in this film. A lot is being written about it, including a huge piece in The New Yorker. How do you characterize your depiction of Mark Zuckerberg?

I would say for the first hour and 55 minutes of the movie, he is an anti-hero and for the final five minutes, he’s a tragic hero. In order to be a tragic hero you have to have paid a price, and you have to feel remorse. Both of those things are true at the end of the movie. What we see is a very brilliant guy, a terribly complicated guy, but also a guy who is very angry because he lives with his nose pressed up against the window of social life. As a result, he did something extraordinary — he reinvented social life so that he and other people could reinvent themselves.

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You don’t stay up late to write anymore. You write in the morning now. Has that had any discernable effect on your tone? You talk about the music of writing. Has your voice changed now that you’re a morning writer?

I don’t think so. I was worried that it was going to. There seems to be something romantic and bohemian and edgy about staying up all night and writing, and I was worried that once I stopped doing that it would homogenize my writing somehow. It turned out the time of day had nothing to do with it.

So that’s largely a fantasy of that image of the struggling artist, living in the wee hours?

Yeah.

So go to sleep and get up and write some good stuff?

Yeah. A writer will generally have a sweet spot when they have energy and the ideas are all in the right place. Listen, the thinking doesn’t stop. When I go to bed at night, my mind is still racing, I’m thinking a lot about what it is I’m going to write tomorrow. If I don’t know what I’m going to write tomorrow, I have a lot of anxiety about it. If I do know, I’m very excited about it. But it’s when I get up in the morning that I have the most energy, and that’s usually when most of writing gets done, but it doesn’t just happen in the morning. I write in the afternoon and the evening, I’m just not writing at 1 a.m. anymore.

Nearly every screenwriting teacher and how-to book warns against overuse of dialogue, yet some of our most gifted screenwriters specialize and indulge in dialogue. Do you think it’s just that the rule should be, “Don’t write dialogue unless you’re really good at it?” Is there something false about that rule?

That rule is completely false. It’s espoused by people who don’t write dialogue very well. There are thousands of ways to tell a story. Some people do it more visually than others. I’m a guy that writes about people talking in rooms. Some people, like Harold Pinter, are minimalist when it comes to dialogue, but they write brilliant dialogue, just a different kind. This business of jettisoning dialogue — I feel like that’s something a B-action star would say.

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