I joked about this, but I really would have loved
to have begun the dialogue in this first scene in the trailers for other movies,
just to make people realise what was coming.
Did you know there are more people with genius IQs living in China
than there are people of any kind living in the United States?
- That can't possibly be true. - It is.
When I read the script, this first scene not only, kind of, was a great foundation
for the character of Mark Zuckerberg, I'll be very careful to say that,
but also sort of set up the movie and how the movie should be taken,
that it was gonna be about semi-important things, and self-effacing,
and that it was going to be about this kind of pace.
I like the first scene of a movie to inform the audience
as to how much they have to pay attention, and this was definitely one of them.
You know, you read it in script form, it's probably 9 or 10 pages.
That's a pretty balls-out way to start a movie. I gotta give it to Aaron.
And a second ago, you said you like guys who row crew
so I assumed you had met one.
I guess I just meant I like the idea of it. You know, the way a girl likes cowboys.
Okay.
Should we get something to eat?
Would you like to talk about something else?
In the casting of this scene,
this was one of the sides that we kind of allowed to leak out,
because we wanted to cast as wide a net as possible
to look for actors to play Mark.
I think we were probably two or three, maybe as many as four weeks
into the looking, turning over rocks and seeing who was available
and seeing who was out there and...
One of the things in trying to cast a 19-to-25-year-old lead
is that you don't have to find somebody who's made 30 movies.
You can find people who've made two or three movies,
and so there was a process of really seeing a lot of films I hadn't seen before,
and a lot of independent films that had teenage actors in them,
and I remember, I had seen Squid and the Whale,
and I had seen The Education of Charlie Banks,
and I felt I knew what Jesse was,
and I felt that there was something about his sweetness
that I thought we could do without, as Zuckerberg.
Not to say that Zuckerberg isn't sweet,
because I think in some of the videotapes that I've seen of him,
you know, he's gregarious and charming,
but I felt like, you know, I had this 10-page scene in my hand
that I was looking for something,
and I was looking for somebody who could just come out of the gates
and be relentlessly who he is.
And this QuickTime of an audition ended up on my computer,
and I turned it on and I watched Jesse Eisenberg.
I think he did two takes of this scene, and I just thought,
"Wow! Like, that's pretty undeniable."
And I remember dragging Aaron into my office and saying, "Just watch this,"
and he looked at it and he said, "Well, our job's done."
And, you know, it's really a compliment to Jesse
that he was so... I mean, he basically did this.
You would do that for me?
We're dating.
Okay.
Well, I wanna try and be straightforward with you
and let you know that we're not any more.
- What do you mean? - We're not dating any more. I'm sorry.
- Is this a joke? - No, it's not.
You're breaking up with me?
You're gonna introduce me to people
I wouldn't normally have the chance to meet?
What the... What is that supposed to mean?
- Wait, settle down. - What is it supposed to mean?
Erica, the reason we're able to sit here and drink right now
is 'cause you used to sleep with the door guy.
"The door guy"? His name is Bobby. I have not slept with the door guy.
The door guy is a friend of mine, and he's a perfectly good class of people.
And Rooney, Rooney was a...
I was looking for Katharine Ross from The Graduate.
I was looking for the one that got away,
and we'd seen a lot of really smart, pretty young things,
and we had seen them be defensive,
and we'd seen them push back against Mark in this first scene
and I didn't think anybody did it with the kind of sharpness,
that she was both trying so hard to let it pass,
and then finally it just got to be too much,
and then she's so capable in her subsequent vivisection.
And I'm sorry I don't have a rowboat, so we're even.
- I think we should just be friends. - I don't want friends.
I was just being polite.
I have no intention of being friends with you.
I'm under some pressure right now from my OS class
and if we could just order some food, I think we should...
Okay, you are probably going to be a very successful computer person.
But you're gonna go through life thinking that girls don't like you
because you're a nerd.
And I want you to know from the bottom of my heart that that won't be true.
It'll be because you're an asshole.
There was a piece of music that was in the script that Aaron had talked about,
a track that he wanted to hear here, and it didn't work for me,
but you get into that thing where music is such a personal thing,
so one person hears one thing,
another person hears a completely different kind of mood when they hear something.
And I had in mind an Elvis Costello song. I wanted to use Beyond Belief,
and everybody was sort of trying to talk me out of it,
because they felt it was too much my generation
and not the generation that we were talking about in the movie,
and people were polite, but they were definitely aghast.
And I'd cut the original sequence,
or we played with Beyond Belief in this original title sequence,
and Trent Reznor, Trent and Atticus Ross, sent us this track.
It's actually track number seven.
It was just a series of sketches of different moods that they had in mind
for the movie somewhere, and they didn't really have a place for it,
but I heard it and I thought, "That's so stunning and profound and simple."
Sorry, Elvis, but Beyond Belief went out the window,
and we immediately started looking for ways to incorporate this.
Hand Covers Bruise, I think it's called.
This one little sketch became a triptych in the film,
and it happens in two other places, and I'll point those out.
This is Johns Hopkins, by the way. We weren't able to shoot at Harvard,
and at first I was extremely pissed off
that Arthur Hiller got to shoot there and I couldn't,
but in the end I think I was happy about it, because the buildings at Harvard are very...
As beautiful as they are, and I do love the sort of decrepit nature of them
and how they sort of list and crumble and...
There was something about Johns Hopkins that allowed you to get...
You know, not only is it a stunning example of colonial architecture,
but you can actually get half a block away from the buildings,
and so we did a lot of little matte paintings to add landmarks,
so you sort of knew, "Here's Lowell and here's Kirkland and..."
But obviously the buildings are nothing like the Harvard campus.
The Harvard campus is nowhere near as, sort of, homogenous.
It's way more cobbled together.
You have colonial here, but you also have this very...
They have the odd Gothic building here and there.
Or do you think it's because all BU girls are bitches?
For the record, she may look like a 34C,
but she's getting all kinds of help from our friends at Victoria's Secret.
She's a 34B, as in barely anything there. False advertising.
The truth is, she has a nice face.
I need to do something to take my mind off her.
Easy enough, except I need an idea.
This stuff is really interesting to me.
It's always really interesting to me how people do the things that they do
and again, you have to walk that very fine line
between informing the audience of what the character is up to,
and boring them with a tutorial on how to hack.
As I always said, making police procedurals,
it's not necessary that the audience take away from it
how to do forensic investigation,
but it's very important that it look like
the lead characters in the movie know what they're doing.
And this was definitely one of those things
where we wanted to present hacking not as the...
It's always been presented in movies as caffeine-fueled, self-important naughtiness,
and I wanted it to be more playful than that. I felt like, as it was described in the movie,
he has to be masterful at what it is that he does,
but it's really much more of a graffiti artist, really,
than a seditious terrorist.
I also felt that it was important for his character,
that he does feel people are overreacting when they...
"Doesn't anybody have a sense of humor?" He means that when he says it.
Next is Eliot.
They're also open, but with no indexes on Apache.
I can run an empty search
and it returns all of the images in the database in a single page.
And I can save the page and Mozilla will save all the images for me.
Excellent. Moving right along.
Excuse me! Everybody!
You are at one of the oldest, one of the most exclusive clubs...
So a lot of people have taken umbrage with this notion
that we've hyperbolized the Phoenix Club party,
and in my research and the people that I talked to,
yeah, it's slightly sexed up, in that we are making a movie about it,
and it does have to open on a Friday night.
But the actual pharmaceuticals that are being distributed,
and the verve with which they are partaken of,
in my understanding, and the people I talked to,
I don't think it's hyperbolized at all.
We are making a point here, because it's an omniscient point of view.
It's a party that has to be subjectively channeled through the people
who are not invited.
And the bus is not something that we made up.
That's something that actually exists, and there are girls who do get bussed in,
and I'm not so sure they're in this good a shape,
and I'm not so sure they are this apt to disrobe,
but from my understanding, we're not that far off.
Here you go.
Done.
Hey, what's going on?
Perfect timing. Eduardo's here and he's going to have the key ingredient.
- Hey, Mark. - Wardo.
You and Erica split up.
How did you know that?
It's on your blog.
The irony of a character who creates the most successful and undeniable
social networking tool, and who is himself semi-asocial,
may be a creation of Aaron's.
I certainly think that's his perspective on Mark
and what the research that he did supported.
I don't know whether he had a conclusion that he had drawn before he did the research,
but the irony of that to me is quite a lot of the friction
that creates the heat of the narrative.
I never saw Jesse, as Zuckerberg, as somebody who was stopping there,
in terms of his characterization.
I felt like, in every moment that he was on-screen,
and every time he gets defensive or verbal
or explains his side of things, he always seemed very human,
and it never occurred to me when people started sort of saying,
"Wow, it's such a nasty piece of character assassination."
And this is maybe that I just know so many unsavory people.
Or I'm so unsavory myself.
He never seemed that cruel or despicable to me.
He just seemed very driven and clear about what it is that he wanted
and how he was going to go about getting it.
Hey, guys, check this out.
Someone go to the left. Dude, do left.
Look at these girls. Right or left?
- Left is hot. - Left? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Right or left?
That's my roommate.
- Oh, my God. - The girl on the left.
This is pathetic.
Right.
Left.
- Left. - Left?
Oh, shit.
Albright.
He blogged about you.
You don't wanna read it.
And again, like, the scene with Rooney where she finds out
that he's blogged about her, she's so economical,
and I felt, you know, watching her, like, this is somebody who is gonna make
a big impression in a very short amount of screen time.
- Left. - One on the right.
Left.
Man, that's an awful lot of traffic.
You think maybe we shouldn't shut it down before we get into trouble?
I'm very proud of the fraternity of the outsider,
you know, the feeling that you get from Andrew
and from Joe and from Jesse and Patrick,
and how they sort of worked together to create this impression of people
who are co-existing amongst huge piles of unwashed laundry.
It just feels... There's just a sense of this sort of sloppy,
not only interplay but, kind of, that you're navigating each other so well
without stepping on each other's feet,
and it really does feel to me like that kind of camaraderie
that only comes from living on top of people. Forced proximity.
The look on Jesse's face after Andrew says, "Oh, God, we're in so much trouble now,"
and you cut to Jesse, and he has that sort of impish look on his face, like,
"So what? Isn't that the whole point, is to, like, kind of be naughty?"
And then you see it sink in for a second and he's like, "Wait a minute."
You know, I remember watching that as we were shooting,
and he probably did it 12 or 13 times, and every time was just a little bit different,
but you could just tell he had his fingers tightly around the throat
of exactly what he was doing with this guy, and it's a great pleasure
to watch somebody who is as skilful as Jesse Eisenberg is.
He doesn't, I think, give himself the credit a lot of times,
because he's so much of a responder.
He's not the kind of actor who wants to take center stage, he wants to react,
but when you see him be this good for this many weeks in a row...
And I remember he took me aside at one point and said,
"You would tell me if I was sucking ass. You would tell me if this was terrible."
And I said, "Yeah, absolutely. You'd be the first to know."
But I just kept thinking he was great.
Thousand.
What?
Twenty-two thousand.
Wow.
You know, I know that the Winklevosses were world-class rowers,
and this is a fairly ham-fisted introduction into who they are and what they're about,
but it's one of those things where you kind of go,
either we're gonna get it in this one big, broad flourish
with these guys yards out in front of the nearest competitor
and trying to still be, sort of, respectful in that Harvard way, about competition.
It was a delicate thing
and I thought Armie and Josh pulled it off really well.
We looked for months to find two 6'5", 220-pound twins,
and in the end, it got down to two guys. It was Armie or it was Josh Pence.
And I was kind of like, "Well, Armie has more of that..."
"I think he'll get away with the self-righteousness"
"and the not-comic entitlement of who these guys are."
So I made an entreaty to Josh Pence, who had been through the entire process
of many, many, many screen tests. I finally said to him,
"Will you please come and play with us, and can we lop your head off
"and put Armie's head on your body?" And he was a real sport.
And aside from being a guy who could come up with ideas
for what Tyler would be doing in the scene that would be different
from what Cameron would be doing in the scene,
Josh is one of the most adroit physical performers I've ever seen.
His instincts about when to look
or when to run his hands down the crease of his trousers
or when to readjust himself or when to get bored.
He's an astounding actor,
and to have somebody who would be so generous
to give us as many months of his time as he did,
to come in and kind of set the tone for who Tyler was, was a real find.
A lot had been written about in the script about how he's always wearing flip-flops.
Here he is and he's got his Adidas flip-flops on and he's over here...
And you shoot a picture on a widescreen,
and you don't realise that you almost never see the guy's feet,
so we got to this scene and I thought, "There's such a great, kind of,"
"'...you' thing about meeting with the administrative board in your flip-flops"
"that the scene should begin with a shot of his flip-flops,"
and we tilt up from there.
I also felt like his little foot-tapping, which I explained to Jesse
was like the beginning of My Three Sons,
and he didn't understand the reference, but Barry Livingston did.
He did understand what I was talking about, the title sequence to My Three Sons.
And that was, kind of, those two sets of wing tips,
and then the flip-flops just tapping away.
You deserve recognition?
I believe I've pointed out some pretty gaping holes in your system.
- Excuse me, may I? - Yes.
And I love Barry. He's got such a great...
He's like a compassionate bureaucrat.
He's trying really hard to understand what the kids are up to,
and yet he still has to be the fist of reason.
So?
Six months academic probation.
This is another situation where we're at Johns Hopkins,
and we found this little corner that we really liked,
and we decided to place that shot there instead of...
There's probably 15 or 20 places we could have done that at Harvard.
How do you do this thing where you manage to get all girls to hate us?
- And why do I let you? - I know.
- You can't do that. - Wardo, I said I know.
Okay, let's look at a sample problem.
Suppose we're given a computer with a 16-bit virtual address
and a page size of 256 bytes.
The system uses one-level page tables that start at address hex 400.
Maybe you want DMA on your 16-bit system. Who knows?
Originally when he opened the little piece of notebook paper, it said...
And the studio wasn't comfortable with the word...
They didn't want to parade that in front of the MPAA,
'cause they felt we were already walking on eggshells,
so they took that out and put "u dick" on it,
which doesn't have quite the same resonance for me.
That is correct.
Does everybody see how he got there?
So there's a head-replacement shot,
when Armie taps Josh on the shoulder and he turns and comes forward.
We put Armie's face back onto Tyler's body here.
And it was one of those things where... There was just a couple of scenes like this
of blue screen shot where you have the two of them conversing,
but there was a lot of times where we wanted to see them doing dick stuff that twins do.
Finishing each other's sentences and touching or pushing or whatever,
and this technology allowed us to do that.
- Yeah, I've got a minute. - Great.
Here's another situation where I...
When they're walking down the street, about to go into the Porcellian,
we put Armie's face onto Josh's body behind the sunglasses,
and he takes the sunglasses off,
but they're so similar, in terms of the way that they look,
there were times when I would look at the composite and say,
"Okay, well, I need to see it with Armie's face in there,"
and they'd say, "That is Armie's face." And I would say, "Wow, really?"
Once you're out of the hairline and the cheekbones, front and down,
they're actually quite similar.
So maybe there were tens of thousands of dollars worth of work that was unnecessary,
but at least it was done impeccably.
But you invented something in high school, too, right?
An app for an MP3 player that recognizes your taste in music.
Anybody try to buy it?
Microsoft.
I love Max Minghella. He came to us...
He obviously came in to read for another part,
and we had read an enormous... Probably 100 Indian actors
who came in to read for Divya,
and I saw footage of the actual Divya Narendra, who I've met now,
and he's kind of like Warren Beatty.
There's nothing, aside from being incredibly tan,
there's almost nothing that seems particularly ethnic about him.
He's really handsome. He reminds me a lot of Peter Dante,
who's an actor that's in a lot of Adam Sandier movies.
And we couldn't find somebody who had that sort of smoothness.
I looked, I looked and I looked. We went to London, we went to, I think, Paris,
we went to Montreal, we cast from everywhere,
and finally in the end I just felt that Max had the most, kind of...
I just wanted to make sure that Divya was an equal.
He was the most important third wheel in this triumvirate.
You know, neither Tyler nor Divya can move Cameron,
and Cameron is the one that, kind of, is the leader in a way,
but in their alliance, they had to be very powerful,
and Tyler is sort of the brawn, and Divya was kind of the brains
of the other half of the Winklevi triumvirate. So Cameron is sort of in a lead position
and the other two guys are just trying to move him off.
I mean, basically, they spend the most of the movie trying to say,
"Can we do this? Can we finally take this guy to court?"
This doesn't need to be that difficult.
I'm currently in the middle of two different lawsuits.
Did you answer affirmatively
when Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss and Divya Narendra
asked you to build Harvard Connection?
Did you say yes?
I said I'd help.
When did you approach Mr. Saverin with the idea for The Facebook?
I wouldn't say I approached him.
- Sy. - You can answer the question.
At a party at Alpha Epsilon Pi.
What's that?
The Jewish fraternity.
It was Caribbean Night.
So I have nothing against the Jewish fraternities of Harvard
or Asian women, just for the record,
and I'd like that to be heard as this scene plays behind.
Anybody has an issue with that, take it up with Aaron Sorkin.
His e-mail address is...
I don't think it's that complicated. They're hot, they're smart,
they're not Jewish, and they can't dance.
Hey, Mark's here.
Mark!
Be right back.
Andrew Garfield invented this little dance
about take three or take four on his walk over.
I thought, "This guy's gonna be a movie star."
He's... It was just so...
It's funny.
It's funny and it's, you know, charming and self-effacing and relentlessly human.
And that little move that Jesse does...
The look on his face when he's both happy for his friend
and utterly jealous is...
I remember, as we were shooting, I was like, "Wow!"
And such a quicksilver change from this "please" thing
to the penny dropping, and him understanding what that means
in terms of the difference between them now, and it was pretty spectacular.
This we shot at the Milton Academy.
We just found this back door that seemed like it was,
you know, off a general use hall or something,
and it had the Harvard sodium vapor look that we were looking for.
So why not build a website that offers that?
The breath in this is faked, not that it wasn't ridiculously cold anyway,
but we did not have the humidity that it required to have people's breath be visible,
and I just felt, to ask people to stand out in this kind of cold weather
and not see their breath was unfair.
You would have to know the people on the site to get past your own page.
Like getting punched.
We were trying to find a piece of reggae music that we could all agree on
would be kind of nerdy enough for a bad party,
because the scene in the script is described as this really terrible party
that Mark would prefer not to be at.
It's only marginally more interesting for Eduardo to return to the party
than it would be for him to freeze to death outside.
So we were looking for a piece of music that would appropriately encapsulate
what we were trying to say about this party,
and I think it was Bob Wagner who came up with the idea
of 10cc's Dreadlock Holiday, as it was called, and as we were looking for versions of it,
'cause there's probably 12 or 15 different versions of it,
we stumbled on the karaoke version,
which I think was, hands down, considered to be the single worst version
of 10cc's Dreadlock Holiday, and we went with that.
Because we thought, if you're gonna do cheeseball steel drums over it like that,
you would bring in a steel drums soloist to play over it,
that the karaoke version was probably the most appropriate.
That I was jealous of Eduardo for getting punched by the Phoenix
and began a plan to screw him out of a company
- I hadn't even invented yet. - Were you?
- Gretchen. - Jealous of Eduardo?
Stop typing. We're off the record.
Ma'am, I know you've done your homework,
and so you know that money isn't a big part of my life.
But at the moment, I could buy Mount Auburn Street,
take the Phoenix Club and turn it into my ping-pong room.
I'll let you know how the party is.
So, I love Jesse's walk.
He worked a lot on this idea that Mark was a fencer,
but he also wanted to get this kind of...
Not only good posture and sort of upright, in terms of his posture,
but it was also this being lost in his head.
You know, this notion of somebody who's just so deep in thought
that they don't realise that they're in the snow in flip-flops,
and they don't realise they're in cargo shorts,
and they end up going from one place to the next,
and it's only upon the arrival that they realise that they're freezing cold
because they've been so completely not in their body.
Again, there's a lot of little split-screen stuff going on here,
where the Winklevi are, you know, stacked up, one on another.
There's a great little reaction here to David Selby's inquiry here,
and Andrew gets his little snipe off, and the Winklevosses respond
and it's just some really lovely little, like, roto split-screen stuff.
How would you know? You weren't even there.
Ty.
And David Selby was another...
You know, both John Getz and David Selby did us a solid.
They came to read. They were actors that we knew.
That we asked to come in for the read-through,
and David played the attorney and John played the other attorney,
and we were kind of like, "Wow! Those guys were great."
"Let's just get them."
A lot of times, Laray, I'm convinced, has already pre-cast the movie,
and she's just waiting for me to come around.
So she'll put people, sort of, in my way, and I'll go, "Well, it'd be a great idea."
And she'll... "I never thought of that."
"That would be really smart to do it that way, David."
From Mark Zuckerberg to Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss.
December 10, 2003.
"This week has been pretty busy thus far with classes and work,"
"so I think it's probably best to postpone the meeting."
"I'm also really busy tomorrow."
Okay, anybody else feel like there's something up with this guy?
Tell him okay,
but we do have to make sure that we meet up before we all go off for break.
I know, I know. Yeah, watch out.
I will say that one of the things that made this movie possible
was the ability to shoot actors
typing at laptops and desktops that just had blue on them,
because they never had to worry about whether or not what they were typing
was real or real coding or...
And, you know, all of the actors really learned, kind of, where their fingers were required
in order to do what they're supposed to look like they're doing,
but if we'd had to teach them how to do a lot of the stuff that we see them do,
it would have just been a nightmare.
So there's hundreds of composites in this movie
of the different screens that people are working on,
and it was an odd thing, 'cause the first cut of the movie,
as I was watching it,
I was so aware of the fact that they weren't doing anything
and that their computers weren't in any way, like, connected to the outside world.
They were just pantomiming in front of a blue computer,
and I was like, "Oh, God, this looks so stupid."
And when these screens start coming in, and there's hundreds of them,
I mean, in the depositions, there's... You know, all of the stenographer's stuff is...
Actually, they're typing exactly what's being said.
And when you finally put all the screens up and you see the Harvard Crimson,
and you see the Harvard e-mail system, and you see the, you know, Emax,
and you see the scripting programs that they're using,
it was like an unbelievable sigh of relief.
I was like, "It doesn't look stupid any more."
And we had a consultant that worked with us, Paul McReynolds,
who did an amazing, amazing, thorough job of going through the script
and saying, "This is stupid, what they're saying here.
"They should be saying this," or, "This is what we would be seeing."
And he caught stuff where he would generate code writing
and then he would go on and go,
"Except this version of the software is two years later than what you're looking for."
"You're looking for this version, and the only difference"
"is that in this little section of the scroll..."
And so we would go back in and retouch all of those frames,
so that if Paul signed off on it, then we were golden.
Like just the Network Solutions, just to see it be the actual Network Solutions web page
and to see thefacebook.com.
Maybe most people don't get the same thrill out of that that I do,
but I think it's good that it's kind of steeped as much in reality as it can be.
What in the world is this?
"Hey, Cameron, I'm still a little skeptical that we have enough functionality in the site
"to really draw the attention and gain the critical mass necessary
"to get a site like this to run"?
"We'll speak soon"?
This is the first time he mentioned any problem?
Yes, it was.
This was just something that Jesse did on the day. He was writing something,
I don't know what he was writing on his legal pad,
and when we got to the end of the scene, he just raised the page up,
and I realised he had been doing doodles the whole time,
and I was like, "That's a genius idea."
And he was like, "Well, I can raise the page at the end and you can see it."
I said, "No, just do it, just write. Just do your doodle."
"Draw little pictures of tanks or whatever you want to do,"
"and at the end of it, you can just raise the picture up"
"or we can see you spin the pad."
"Something that lets us know that you are less than interested"
"in what these guys are saying about you."
Mark.
There is a girl in your art history class. Her name is Stephanie Attis.
Do you happen to know if she has a boyfriend?
So, Joe Mazzello. Joe Mazzello came in and was fantastic.
I mean, I saw him... From the first auditions, we were like,
"We gotta find a place for this guy."
"I don't know that he can play Zuckerberg, but we gotta find a place for him."
And Laray, you know, wisely, she showed me a picture of Dustin Moskovitz and said,
"Well, he doesn't look anything like Dustin Moskovitz,"
"but he's so much fun to have around."
And apparently he'd been in a movie called Jurassic Park,
which I was not aware of.
I didn't recognise him from Jurassic Park, because he's 20 years older.
He doesn't like to talk about it.
He doesn't like to be reminded of, you know...
It's what he did when he was seven or eight years old, so...
But somebody had said something in my presence to him
about being a child actor or something, and he had sort of rolled his eyes about it,
and it only came out about two or three weeks
before we wrapped shooting
that I became aware of the fact that he had been in Jurassic Park,
and I think that he had been...
The entire time had sort of been dreading that that might come up,
and, you know, luckily, I'm stupid and uninformed.
It's clean and simple.
No Disneyland, no "live nude girls." But watch.
What'd you write?
"Relationship Status." "Interested In."
This is what drives life at college. "Are you having sex or aren't you?"
It's why people take certain classes and sit where they sit and do what they do.
And at its center, you know, that's what The Facebook is gonna be about.
People are gonna log on because after all the cake and watermelon,
there's a chance they're actually gonna...
- Gonna get laid. - Meet a girl. Yes.
That is really good.
And that was it.
- What do you mean? - It's ready.
- It's ready? Right now? - Yeah. That was it.
And here's the masthead.
- You made a masthead. - Yeah.
- "Eduardo Saverin, co-founder and CFO." - Yeah.
You have no idea what that's gonna mean to my father.
Sure I do.
It's a nice, lovely little thing that Sorkin does there with Eduardo and his,
"That's gonna mean a lot to my father."
He works with a very fine brush, you know? He doesn't get a lot of credit for it,
but he does plant these little ideas and pays them off, sort of, throughout.
The way that he doles out information, it's to be admired. It's very skilful.
He gets a lot of credit for being amusing
and being, you know, one of the great cinematic smart-asses,
but he also is... He's very good about the blind stitch.
He's really good about the stuff that kind of holds the fabric of it together.
He gets the quotable lines, he nails that stuff, but it's also the little stuff,
it's the craft stuff that I appreciate, I think, most about him.
And I like the idea that both Mark and Eduardo
are sort of connected on this idea,
that they do want to make a good impression on their parents. They do...
You know, they aren't unlike the Winklevoss, in that it's just not about them.
They want to have pride,
and they want to have pride and authorship of their lives and what they're doing,
and I think that Aaron, he was able to do that in a very deft way.
Aaron had written this scene where the Krokodiloes,
who are a singing group at Harvard...
He had written this scene where everyone is watching the Krokodiloes
as they sing a love song, but I felt, as I read it, and incorrectly,
that he was kind of making fun of this notion.
You know, there's this kind of staid Harvard, real erstwhile, perennial thing at Harvard,
but, I mean, the girl's on the laptop, and it was in a dining hall,
and so it wasn't that everybody was taking the Krokodiloes too seriously,
and we got there on the day to rehearse the scene,
and Aaron came in and he said,
"So this place is gonna be filled with people who are all absurdly appreciative"
"of the honor of being able to see the Krokodiloes."
And I thought it was a joke.
I thought we were talking about it like it's dessert,
and there's a few stragglers who haven't left, but nobody's really there to see...
He's like, "No, the Krokodiloes is a really big thing."
So there's another example of where you have to ask the author their intent.
But the guys from Bruin Harmony came in and filled in admirably for the Krokodiloes.
I almost killed Max Minghella on this shot.
I had no idea that he was smoking as much as he had been,
and so we did, like, 16 takes of him running across the bridge,
and he spent the rest of the morning vomiting.
But we did manage to get that take where you see him run over the bridge
and you see a boat, one of the eight-man boats,
go underneath it,
and we were able to put the boathouse in a matte painting across the Charles.
I remember I flopped it because he runs left to right out of the Krokodiloes scene,
but he comes in right to left in the rowing tank scene,
and I thought it would be better to connect it to the rowing tank scene. I think.
That was just one of those weird things where you look at stuff sometimes
and you just go, "It looks better the other way."
Yeah, I called earlier. I'm looking for Mark Zuckerberg.
Yes, sir. He's actually quoted a couple times.
I can read it to you.
"'Everyone's been talking a lot about a universal Facebook within Harvard, ' he says."
"He" meaning Mark.
"'I think it's kind of silly that it would take the university
"'a couple of years to get around to it.
"'I can do a classier job than they can and I did it in a week."'
Tell him Divya Narendra called.
- I know, that's how he talks. - Appreciate it.
"As of yesterday evening, Zuckerberg said,"
"over 650 students had registered to use thefacebook.com."
"He said he anticipated that 900 students would have joined the site by this morning."
Yeah, Divya was just reading that 650 students signed up for it on the first day.
God, if I was a drug dealer I couldn't give free drugs to 650 people in one day.
And this guy doesn't have three friends to rub together to make a fourth.
All right. Yes, that's what we'll do, Mr. Hotchkiss.
This is a perfect example of one of those scenes where Josh Pence came in,
and he's playing Tyler in all the over-the-shoulders,
and he's playing Tyler in the master and...
He came up with all the stuff about this frustration and his fingers
and slapping his...
And how he moves the computer over to look at it and where he...
I mean, Armie has enough to think about, 'cause he's the fulcrum of all the drama.
He's the guy that we keep going back to.
We're cutting off of him to establish screen direction in both cases,
so he's gotta really, really match,
and so the first half of the day he's playing Cameron
and he's gotta be in his zone,
and then suddenly he has to change pants and put on a sweatshirt
and sit in this other chair and watch the master over and over and over.
And realise, "God, Josh is doing this and Josh is doing that."
And it's kind of amazing how quickly he could just absorb
what another actor is doing as another character
that he then has to sort of match to.
And he could do it physically. He could take on all of Josh's...
And this is testament to how good Josh was,
he'd take on all Josh's physical stuff and still be the voice of Tyler.
You know, and it looks a lot easier than it is.
By the end of this, they could finish each other's sentences.
They were really, really in tune with one another.
They were constantly together, they were training to row.
They had worked out, "When am I gonna be looking at you?"
"When are you gonna be looking at me? When am I gonna avoid you?"
"Avoid eye contact. At what point am I pissed off?"
And they brought all that stuff, all that preparation,
and man, we were able to accomplish a lot.
He's gonna say it's stupid.
What, who, me?
Say it. Why not?
Because we're gentlemen of Harvard.
This is Harvard, where you don't plant stories and you don't sue people.
You thought he was gonna be the only one who thought that was stupid?
During the time when you say you had this idea,
did you know Tyler and Cameron came from a family of means?
"A family of means"?
Did you know their father was wealthy?
I'm not sure why you're asking me that.
It's not important you be sure why I'm asking.
- It's not important to you. - Sy.
Did you know that they came from money?
I had no idea whether they came from money or not.
A lot of these little cutaways where you see people talking to one another,
where you see Divya getting Tyler's attention
and sliding papers over to each other, and writing notes and showing each other,
these guys were winging this in the rehearsals,
and we would just say, "Do that. Definitely do that. Do that."
And so you would see it in rehearsal and you'd go,
"Yeah, I definitely want a close up of that, and I want this," and they would...
None of this stuff was written, it was just the words that were being said were written.
None of this interaction with how papers get filtered around
and who checks them,
and when they check over each other's shoulders,
or when they whisper to one another.
You know, this was just really good actors in a room going with it.
Like Rashida, I mean,
we were so lucky to get Rashida Jones to come in to play this part, where you say,
"I need you for 12 days, and on two of them, you're going to speak,"
"and the rest of the time you're gonna be sorting papers,"
"and you're gonna be listening,"
"you're gonna be writing stuff down in ballpoint,"
"and we may cut to you three more times in the entire movie,"
"but you have two pages you have to do, and then you have a good 15 pages"
"where you're just an extra."
And to have an actress of her caliber come in,
somebody who could bring what she brings to this, come in and say,
"God, I'd love to be an extra for 80% of my waking life for a month," was...
You know, when you have an Aaron Sorkin script, you get people to do that.
It was a beautiful day and I was in my Radcliffe dorm room.
He brought that magazine up and he showed it to me and he said,
"Look, it's gonna happen without us. We've gotta start now."
So this was a scene that we shot in Santa Monica at a public hall,
and it's very similar to the... I believe this is the Lowell Auditorium.
And we had reference for this Lowell Auditorium,
and of course we had no cooperation from Harvard,
so there was no chance we were gonna shoot in the actual Lowell Auditorium,
but we found a place in Santa Monica that sort of had the basic idea,
and we got a guy
who's the premier Bill Gates lookalike in the United States, maybe in the world,
and he came in and did this...
Basically, you see, like, his cheekbone and maybe the tip of his nose
for about two seconds, but he had to do this all day long.
Do the off-camera and give everybody an eye line and stuff to look at.
We see him on the monitors and stuff in the background,
or we see him at the beginning,
but again, this is, like, one of those things where people go...
Somebody actually asked me, "Did you get Bill Gates to do that?"
And I said, "Well, when you have a good script..."
She said, "Facebook me and we can all go for a drink later,"
which is stunningly great for two reasons.
One, she said "Facebook me," right? And then the other is, well, you know...
They wanna have drinks later.
Yes, have you ever heard so many different good things
packed into one regular-sized sentence?
Excuse me, Mark?
This is the scene that we shot in Boston,
and the three guys who did it in Boston, who did the acolytes or the groupies,
they were great, they did a great job.
I just did a miserable job of staging, and it just didn't feel like it was balanced,
so we reshot this, and I wanted to apologise, because it's not that...
And again, it's not that the actors who did it when we reshot it didn't do a great job,
I'm just saying it was one of those things where the director... up
and the day players suffer.
You can't tell Bill Gates is in front of you for an hour?
I wasn't wearing my contacts.
Can I get a Glock and kill you?
It's time to monetize the thing.
What were their names?
- Hear what I just said? - When?
I said it's time to monetize the site.
What does that mean?
It means it's time for the website to start generating revenue.
There's a great sort of kinetic quality that Andrew has.
He moves very well. He's very smooth.
And I liked the juxtaposition of his pirouettes,
and how he moves around the room and how he tosses things back and forth,
and then there's this great thing that Jesse does here,
where he throws the bottle cap at him and he kind of slips out of the way.
He did it in one take, but it was...
I remember turning to Sharron Reynolds, the script supervisor, and saying,
"Well, that's in the movie. We gotta use that."
'Cause it's such a great way of dramatizing two guys
who are so familiar with one another,
and they're just marginally at each other's throats at this moment in time.
You know, tossing that bottle cap and the guy just ducking out of the way,
like the slings and arrows of friendship.
- Who? - The girls.
When did you get this?
About 10 days ago. Right after we launched the site.
- Jesus Christ. - Hey, the girls. What were their names?
The Winklevoss twins are saying that you stole their idea.
I find that to be a little more than mildly annoying.
Oh, well, they find it to be intellectual property theft.
- Look... - Why didn't you show this to me?
It was addressed to me.
So here's, kind of, the crux of the entire... I mean, if people have to ask,
and I've been asked only about 600,000 times.
You know, "Where do you come out?"
"Where do you feel... Did Mark Zuckerberg steal the idea?"
And I think that it's eloquently and elegantly and very specifically articulated here
by Aaron when he says,
"Guy builds a nice chair doesn't owe money to everybody who's ever built a chair."
I think that's ostensibly... I mean, that's my point of view.
I think it's the point of view of the movie. It's certainly the point of view of the director,
which is, I don't know what the contribution of ConnectU or Harvard Connect,
I don't know what that meant to Facebook.
I think what matters is that... And the reason that there was a settlement was,
there's certainly no disputing the fact that they had a conversation about an idea
before the invention of Facebook that had similarities.
It was easy for me to direct the deposition sequence,
'cause I honestly believe
that at the same time that the Winklevosses are saying,
"Without us and without our having that conversation, this thing doesn't exist,"
and I also believe that without Mark Zuckerberg,
there is nothing to divide. So that's the movie that I made.
That's what informed every choice of every single take that finally exists in the movie.
Here's the second of the triptychs where Hand Covers Bruise is used,
and the notion here was,
it has this sort of undercurrent of dissonant frustration.
Not anger, maybe anger's too easy a word,
but a kind of impatience and a kind of frustration,
and then it has this piano line over it that's so childlike.
And I thought it was so important, because we are talking about kids.
We're not talking about adults. I'm not excusing their behaviour,
I'm not excusing our presentation of their behaviour,
I'm just saying that the movie is about people who were 19, 20 years old,
and they did what they did, and these are the disparate views
of how what they each did affected the three major points of view.
So what I loved is that you have this frustration,
but you also have this childlike memory, almost, that sort of floats over the top of it.
I remember, we were auditioning different piano sounds,
and Trent sent a sound of a very clear piano miked very closely.
It was beautiful, and we said, "Well, that's really the first time we hear it."
And then he also had recorded a piano from very far away,
so you almost didn't hear the actual strike,
you just sort of heard what emanated from the cabinet.
And then he had one that wasn't even that, it was like the echo off the wall
of the noise coming from the cabinet.
And I thought it would be an interesting thing,
and I thought it was done beautifully by Trent and Atticus,
is that the first time you hear it, it's very clear that there's this piano.
It's a very distinct piano sound, and the second time, it's from further away.
It's like he's further and further away from that child
that he is at the beginning of the movie.
And then the last time that you hear it, at the end of the movie,
it's just a vapor. It's a distant memory of who he was.
Brenda Song is maybe five feet tall,
and the single most dominating force of character
of any human being in this movie.
I saw a video tape of her doing the infamous fire scene,
and I just thought she's so awesome and powerful and crazy
and, you know, hormonal and all that. And then I met her, and she's tiny.
Such an odd thing to meet somebody who's so diminutive and that powerful.
Here's Josh Pence. Finally Josh Pence gets to be in the movie,
and lend some of his just disgusting handsomeness to the proceedings.
We have groupies.
And then she's back. Rooney Mara from across the room.
And Jesse manages to...
I always felt like he is coming over to apologise.
He just wants to put it in its proper context,
and she doesn't want to let it be easy on him in any way, shape or form,
and I think that that's...
And they miss the connection, and he's trying to impress her.
It was never my intention that this is the love of his life.
It's never my intention that this is...
This is somebody that reminds him of a place in time,
and he wants to, kind of, make good on it,
and the fact that her hurt is based on this very specific moment,
and he's kind of trying to be more general in terms of their relationship,
and she's like, "No, you don't get a 'get out of jail free' card"
"because we're talking about a really, really hurtful specific night,"
"and everything before that I was actually willing to cut you some slack for,"
"but this is where you've transgressed the unwritten law."
right before you made some ignorant crack about my family's name, my bra size,
and then rated women based on their hotness.
- Erica, is there a problem? - No, there's no problem.
You write your snide bullshit from a dark room
because that's what the angry do nowadays.
I was nice to you. Don't torture me for it.
If we could just go somewhere for a minute...
I don't wanna be rude to my friends.
Okay.
Good luck with your video game.
Hey, that was great. That was the right thing to do.
You apologized, right?
Again, you know, hats off to Aaron to come up with this idea
that that's the thing that fuels his...
I mean, it may not be the truth.
It may not have anything to do with who Mark Zuckerberg is,
but in the context of this story,
I think it's important that we relate to why he's pushing,
why he's continually trying to make better.
Because I do. Now here's the arrangement.
Eduardo is CFO and owns 30% of the company.
Dustin is vice president and head of programming,
and his 5% of the company will come from my end.
Chris is director of publicity,
and his compensation will depend on how much work he ends up doing.
Any questions?
Again, another perfect example of, you know,
Joe Mazzello bringing much needed, sort of, humanity and levity to a situation.
- Yale and Columbia, let's go. - And Stanford.
- What? - Stanford.
It's time for them to see this in Palo Alto.
You don't want any lunch?
No.
You're welcome to some salad.
Again, Rashida, being treated thanklessly in this really boring corporate suit,
which she was kind enough to wear for us to play this person, you know?
She had to kind of play an invisible person.
I know it's a tricky thing, and no one wants to play somebody who's forgettable,
but we needed her to kind of be forgettable on the fringes of what's going on,
so that then, when she actually has a comment about...
When she actually has something to say,
you go, "Yeah, she's really been there through the entire process."
You must really hate the Winklevosses.
I don't hate anybody.
This was really important to me,
and I thought that Jesse played this really well.
I don't think he's resentful of the Winklevi position,
or the conclusions that they drew, however much he disagrees with them.
I think that he resents, you know, being involved in a legal thing
that takes him away from the thing that he really loves and knows about
and wants to be part of,
so I thought that it was really beautifully articulated.
I wanna hire a lawyer to file for injunctive relief and get the site taken down now.
Every minute the site is up, Harvard Connection becomes less valuable.
I want an injunction. I want damages. I want punitive relief.
And I want him dead.
Yeah, I want those things, too.
Then why aren't we doing anything about it?
Because we're gentlemen of Harvard?
No, it's because you're not thinking how it's gonna look.
How's it gonna look?
Like my brother and I are in skeleton costumes
chasing the Karate Kid around a high school gym.
Cam, he's violated Massachusetts state law.
When he goes to Connecticut, New York and California...
And this was the thing that, you know, when we saw Max do this speech,
when he was talking about his whole Harvard law thing,
I thought he was good. He was who I saw Divya Narendra as.
Harvard Student Handbook.
Every freshman is issued one of these, and somewhere in this book it says...
You can't steal from another student.
It's amazing how these tiny little things can put two people in a room like...
Whenever we had an opportunity for somebody to toss something
to somebody else, I was like... You know, the fact that Tyler just throws
the Student Handbook over to Cameron,
and then Cameron snatches it out of the air and walks away,
these little, stupid things just make them feel more like they're in the same room.
I'm sorry.
I'm late for biochem.
Now, let's talk about Dakota Johnson first, 'cause, again, pretty thankless role,
but we needed somebody who would be sort of unforgettable
in the introduction of Sean Parker. We needed Sean Parker to be...
I mean, in a weird way, she tells us more about Sean Parker
than a lot of people in the movie. It's kind of how we tee him up,
and the fact that she wanted him and that she was seduced or seduced him
without knowing who he is, I thought was such a smart idea,
and a wonderful way to dramatize how charming Sean can be.
You know, that it's not his fame that gets him this particular girl.
It was something else.
And it's only in hindsight that she goes, "Good heavens, that's who you are?"
No.
Wait, you're not like 15, are you?
No.
So, what do you do?
I'm an entrepreneur.
- You're unemployed. - I wouldn't say that.
What would you say?
That I'm an entrepreneur.
Well, then, what was your latest preneur?
Well, I founded an Internet company that let folks download and share music for free.
It's a pretty great character introduction, it's a lot of fun,
and Timberlake, never one to miss an opportunity to be winning,
certainly makes the most of it.
And all the things that he does... I mean, he moves so well,
and he doesn't get a lot of credit for what he can do.
But he was so... I mean, every time we would screen-test him,
I would be like, "He's great. We can just move on."
"No, I'm not so sure." Everybody was, you know...
But every time I saw him do the scene, I was like, "He's just so watchable."
This is blowing my mind.
I appreciate that.
I gotta hop in the shower and get ready for class.
Biochem, even though you're a French major whose name is Amy.
You passed.
I'm a hard worker.
Well, that used to be the... "I'm a hard worker."
We used to have him do a little thing with his jaw, like, a little cunnilingus joke.
I don't know that we actually took that out for the MPAA.
I think we took it out in fear that we might have to take it out for the MPAA.
Amy!
And again, you know, when you have actors on sets, you know,
playing with computers that just have blue on them,
you kind of go, "God, I wonder if this is actually reading or playing."
And then you finally see it with a Facebook page and you go,
"Okay, that..." She's just wonderful here.
Are you kidding me? I could've been killed.
How?
By running too fast and getting twisted in the curtain.
What do you need to ask me?
I just love that response. It's like, "Getting twisted in the..."
"I'm so still mad about that, and..." She's so present.
It's really awesome, except it's freakishly addictive.
Seriously, I'm on the thing like five times a day.
Mind if I send myself an e-mail?
Yeah, is everything okay?
Everything's great.
I just need to find you, Mark Zuckerberg.
This is Johns Hopkins as well. Beautiful Johns Hopkins.
We're sitting in chairs.
An odd scene here, in that,
as it's described to me, this is exactly how it happened,
that the Winklevosses went to, hopefully, get some kind of executive interference,
and that somebody... In hopes that Larry Summers would see them,
the wisdom of their position, and step in,
intercede on behalf of them and on behalf of Harvard,
to say, "This is not fair what it is that's happened,"
and that he couldn't have been less interested
in what they'd come to talk to him about.
Which is a funny idea.
And there was a lot of to-ing and fro-ing about what actor should play Larry Summers,
and there was a lot of talk about Alfred Molina,
and powerful, very skilful great actors who we all would have been lucky to have.
But I kept coming back to my good friend Douglas Urbanski, who is a manager,
who manages Gary Oldman, who's a friend of mine.
And I've had dinner with Douglas and I've been in the presence of Douglas
in situations where he holds court,
and I thought he has this spectacular intellect,
and he does not suffer fools, and I kept coming back and saying,
"You know, I want to get Douglas Urbanski in to read this."
And so we brought Douglas in to read, and we put him on videotape,
and we sent him around to the producers and the studio to say this,
and they kind of were like, "Why don't you get Gary Oldman?"
"Why would you want Gary Oldman's manager?"
And I said, "He's just this guy. This is the guy that we have to have."
And we would have him come in. I think he read five or six times.
And he would come in, and one time he read with me,
and another time he read with Aaron,
and finally when we had Armie and Josh, he came and he read with Armie and Josh,
and it just became this inevitability that it was gonna end up being Douglas Urbanski,
and he came in for two days to look at these two guys
and say these lines over and over and over.
I probably shot 40 takes of everything on this,
to get those little things where he's just a little more fed up probably
than he would... As a human would want to portray Larry Summers as.
But I just kept kind of pushing it till he was just a little,
"God, David, do we have to do it one more time?"
And then we cut this scene for probably about six months,
just a little bit more here, a little bit less there, little bits there,
see a little bit more of the two-shot, see him in the middle,
see this wide eye-line, tight eye-line.
We just kept playing until we came up with this version of the scene,
and I would grab people off the streets and just show them the scene,
and they would howl with laughter at Douglas Urbanski,
because he somehow manages to be funny,
and you get this idea from him that he's just not having it.
"It's gonna be Darwinism, and we're really sorry about that."
"I feel very bad for the entitled, but we're not intervening."
It's not worthy of Harvard. It's not what Harvard saw in you.
You don't get special treatment.
- We never asked... - Just start another project?
Like we're making a diorama for a science fair?
If you have a problem with that, Mr. Winklevoss...
We never asked for special treatment.
The courts are always at your disposal. Is there anything else I can do for you?
You can take the Harvard Student Handbook and shove it...
Ty.
Thank you very much for your time, sir.
Whoops.
Broke your 335-year-old doorknob.
Eduardo, spring break, you and Mr. Zuckerberg took a trip to New York.
- Yes. - What was the purpose of the trip?
This is a scene with Andrew, we were shooting and I said,
"Do you really want to have your hand up on the table like that?"
"It looks like you're giving blood."
He said, "Yeah, I really do," and I said, "Okay." I don't know why.
Midday, I don't think he had any feeling in his hand,
'cause we had probably shot 30 takes of each of those set-ups.
Mark was asleep.
I was not asleep.
Can I rephrase my answer?
I wish he'd been asleep.
So we're in 29 schools now, with over 75,000 members.
People who go on The Facebook...
So, this scene, originally, he was doing some sort of "tsk" thing
and Aaron and I started talking about it. I said, "It should be more of an affront."
"It should be somebody who's just so bored that he just can't help himself."
So he's just going... And he describes it as a glottal stop, almost a gag reflex,
and Aaron loved the idea of somebody whose disdain for someone else
is described as almost a gag reflex.
And Aaron Sorkin did not ask to be in the movie.
In fact, I think he tried, on many occasions, to talk me out of putting him in the movie,
but when he's impatient, he's funny to me.
Here's a guy who...
"Yeah, we want to talk to you about this thing called The Facebook."
It's like, "The Face... I don't have time for The Facebook",
"whatever The Facebook is."
And here he is, he's listening to these two kids,
you know, hawking their wares, and he just would rather be at lunch.
He's 25 minutes late.
So this is the beginning of the fork in the road for Eduardo and Mark,
and I think it's really even-keeled and played appropriately,
which is, one of them believes that the way to do this is the way
that successful networks or successful inventions have always been funded,
as a Trojan Horse for advertising.
And my hat's off to Mark Zuckerberg. I think he was right.
It's a way more forward-thinking thing,
to try to move on without sucking corporate tit.
And you gotta love this.
I mean, this is the scene that I had to cast. I had to cast Sean Parker.
I had to cast somebody who could walk into a restaurant
and look like... It's not that he owns the place,
it's that he thought of the place, he financed the place,
and he sold it before the opening weekend, which was a raging success.
It's gotta be that. It's not a guy who's...
He's not walking into a restaurant like he... He has to be beyond slick.
And this was a really hard thing. We looked at a lot of different actors,
and all of them very, very talented people, to play Sean,
and I just felt I needed somebody who understood what it is,
that if you park the right two people at the right table
at a cocktail party or at a dinner, that money is going to flow from that,
and that that money will flow to you.
He needed to have that Hollywood producer, studio executive,
music producer, agent kind of understanding,
and it's one thing to articulate that to an actor and have them play it,
and it's another thing to have a guy who's a music producer
who knows what that is, and it's effortless,
and his effortlessness was the thing that, you know, I finally was like,
"We're hiring him."
So we said screw it, declared bankruptcy.
- But you made a name for yourself. - And you are dry.
- Tori! - No, no, I'm good.
And then he went on to his second business venture,
which was an online Rolodex that he got thrown out of by Case Equity.
And I wanted to do it nice this time.
I put on a tie and I shined my shoes, but nobody wants to take orders from a kid.
So let me tell you what happens to a 20-year-old at the top of a hot dot-com.
- I'm not a psychiatrist, but... - I'm glad we've got that on the record.
You're not a psychiatrist, but what?
A psychiatrist would say that he was paranoid.
They'll hire private detectives who'll follow you day and night.
You're a target for high-priced escorts.
Andrew Garfield, I think some of the best work that he does in this movie,
and, you know, again, it's a totally subjective opinion,
but he does some amazing things in this first scene with Justin,
where he's just watching and incredulous, and can't believe
that this is the guy that his friend is falling for,
this is guy, this is the... The seduction, the ultimate seduction.
And the nice thing is that you don't get the feeling
that he feels Sean's wrong in his assessment,
it's just very different from where...
And he tries to bust him, and I love how he tries to bust him.
When he says, "You want to buy a Tower Records, Eduardo?"
And I love how he gets put back in his place.
It's hard stuff to do. It's not the kind of stuff that normally people look at and go,
"Wow, that's great acting,"
but to me it's... You know, 'cause it's just moving that rock up a hill.
It's just moving the narrative along. And the way he gets shut down
was when Timberlake changes the attention off of him and goes to Jesse,
and Andrew does this thing where he sinks back into his chair,
and it's so exquisitely simple,
and you get the hurt, but you also get the understanding of...
He understands why his attention is at the other side of the table.
And then he tries to get back in to part of the conversation where he says,
you know, "Settle a score for us. I'm thinking this."
And he's both attentive and dismissive. And then Jesse, of course, you know,
it's the most comically winning performance in the movie,
where he just can't shut up.
"That's what I can do. That's exactly what I said."
It's like you're throwing the greatest party on campus
and someone's saying it's gotta be over by 11:00.
That's exactly right.
- You don't even know what the thing is yet. - Exactly.
How big it can get, how far it can go. This is no time to take your chips down.
A million dollars isn't cool. You know what's cool?
You?
"A billion dollars."
I love the fact that Sean Parker never has to say, "A billion dollars."
That he's just about to, and you cut away, and somebody else steals his thunder.
It really makes the flashback work.
A chain of very successful yogurt shops.
When you go fishing, you can catch a lot of fish or you can catch a big fish.
You ever walk into a guy's den and see a picture of him standing next to 14 trout?
- No, he's holding a 3,000-pound marlin. - Yep.
- That's a good analogy. - Okay.
But we all know marlins don't really weigh 3,000 pounds, right?
Have you seen the big ones up close?
That's a great little cutaway.
I love Timberlake where he's like, "Wow, guys, I don't want to witness a fight."
"Mom and Dad are fighting, and it's just awkward."
He owned Mark after that dinner.
Now, this was an issue.
I know Sean Parker's eyes are probably... I mean, he doesn't need glasses,
but we had so many photos of him with glasses and without glasses,
and it's not like we did it as reading glasses. I don't think his eyes are failing him.
It's just we couldn't decide... We had to get the glasses in there somewhere,
so that's where we put it.
Goodbye, sweetie.
Yeah.
I love this. I love what Brenda does here, where she has her head on his shoulder
and then she just can't stand it.
If he's gonna continue to talk about this, she can't give him any love.
So, what do you think?
Yeah, sure, let's drop the "The."
I meant to catching the marlin instead of the 14 trout.
Doesn't that sound good?
If you're a trout.
I'm going to enter this into the record.
Incorporation papers for Facebook, an LLC registered in Florida.
Denise Grayson plays Gretchen, the litigator.
She came in to read. She was one of the only people where...
We had a couple of very, very fabulous actresses
who have done, you know, years and years and years worth of work,
but none of them had the kind of dismissiveness of the terminology.
I mean, she could just motor through that stuff and she just...
It was like she just wanted to get progress.
She wanted the billable hours, but she wanted to get to the end of her agenda
by the end of the day,
and she was so real. She was just so awesomely real.
No.
You were accused of animal cruelty.
- Wait. - You weren't?
This is not happening.
There's a little creation here which is...
In the script, I don't know that Zuckerberg was sort of fighting to stop Sy, his attorney,
from bringing up the chicken initiation,
but I liked that they added that. That was such a great little thing
in the rehearsals where Jesse wants to sort of go, "Wait, let's not."
And then it pays off at the end of the scene, where he says, "Oops."
is probably bad for business.
I did not torture the chicken. I don't torture chickens. Are you crazy?
No, and settle down, please. I have here an article from The Crimson...
This is one of the scenes where you have the chicken noise
going in the background.
You haven't seen the chicken yet, you don't know if the chicken's in the room,
but you just have it, like...
And you don't know whether it's the sound of a computer or,
"What is that?" And then...
And then by the time you see it, it's... Starts to kind of make sense.
Well, I took little pieces of chicken and I gave it to the chicken.
Someone must have seen me, because the next thing I knew
I was being accused of forced cannibalism.
I didn't know you couldn't do that.
I dealt with the various animal rights groups,
I dealt with the associate dean of the college.
This was all resolved.
988.
Someone from the Porc or the Fly must have reported it.
For all I know, it was the Winklevosses.
All right, let's just forget about it.
This is absurd. I'm being accused of animal cruelty.
It's better to be accused of necrophilia.
It is better to be accused of necrophilia.
I wrote the necrophilia line just because I like to get the word "necrophilia"
into PG-13 movies whenever possible.
I think it's one of those things where you sort of owe it to yourself as a film maker,
and as a content provider.
Mr. Zuckerberg was cheating on his final exam?
- I'd rather not answer that, Gretchen. - And why not?
Because I'm not suing him for cheating on his final exam.
- That's not what friends do. - Well, you just told us he was cheating.
Andrew Garfield came to my attention from Scott Rudin.
Scott Rudin sent me Boy A and some of Red Riding,
and I saw it, obviously. He was a skilful, wonderful young actor,
and I met with him initially to talk about him playing Zuckerberg,
and felt that he was... As skilful as he was, as a skill set,
he is so wonderfully, emotionally connected.
You know, he's sort of wonderfully, emotionally, kind of, put together,
and he has incredible access to that,
and I just felt like it was a tragedy
to take that thing that is so wonderful about him
and bury it so deep in a character who can't have that access.
And so, at the point in time, then, I felt that we were moving toward Jesse,
I went to Andrew and I said,
"You know, I would love you to be in this movie,"
"and I would love you to consider playing Eduardo."
And, you know, I don't like to say that actors only read...
Only read the lines of their character,
but I don't know that it had ever occurred to him that...
I don't know that he'd read Eduardo. So he said, "I'll think about it,"
and I said, "Well, would you do it in a read-through,"
"and would you come and read Eduardo and tell me how you feel about it afterwards?"
And at the end of it he was just really sweet, and he heard...
You know, we had David Selby, we had John Getz, and we had most of...
I think most of the people that are in the movie,
and he heard them all, and he came out of the read-through and said,
"No, I mean, I get it. I'd love to play Eduardo."
You can do one more! One more!
We just loved the idea of this bacchanal.
It's taking place with all these hackers, and unsupervised.
Down at the end of the hall, there's this giant, alcohol-fueled
hacking orgy happening.
And again, we rehearsed this scene and these guys were great,
and they just did it and, you know...
I don't think Jesse... Maybe flubbed two lines over two takes
over an entire night of shooting.
And just to get the vibe of it, you know,
we had to do this a couple times with everybody screaming,
so they could get an idea of how much energy they were gonna have to overcome
in their discussion.
But it's wonderful, these guys, Jesse and Andrew are friends,
became friends and were fast friends, and you feel it so much.
And in this scene, I really feel like they're making something together.
You get this idea that they're building something,
and the happiness they have for each other.
Welcome to Facebook.
- $18,000? - Yes.
In addition to the $1,000 you'd already put up.
- Yes. - A total of $19,000 now.
This is my favourite line in the whole movie.
"I'm just checking your math on that. Yeah, I got the same thing."
And it was funny to try and get the snottiness of it,
because we probably did it 20 times, you know,
and I just kept saying "No, snottier, snottier."
And Jesse wanted to be funny and he wanted it to be condescending,
but he just kind of wouldn't be as condescending,
and finally he gave me one that was really... You know, just that little squint at the end.
Go, go, go, go, go.
This is a house in San Fernando Valley that just reeked of being from...
It seemed so much like Palo Alto.
You know, the trees around it and the sunlight and the color of it,
and how close the pool was.
We needed to obviously be able to have the proximity
that we could destroy the chimney and it would be near the pool,
but obviously not so near that we'd have to clean the pool out
and get all the broken glass out of it.
So it was a very specific production need.
- Andrew, get the door! - No, he's wired in.
I've never seen anybody loop like Joe Mazzello.
He had done, like, 55 hours of The Pacific.
He's the single most skilled looper I've ever seen.
In two or three takes he could hit every little nuance that he'd done.
In the future, I'm gonna get Joe to loop everyone.
- Is anybody hurt? - No. You live across the street?
I'm Sharon.
This is my... Sharon. She lives across the street.
I love Timberlake when he says, "This is my Sharon."
It tells you so much in so little time.
You made the right choice.
So this scene, not only is it a little homage to Animal House,
but it was a tricky thing, because we had to have one beer bottle
that flew past her head and crashed into the fireplace,
but then he had to throw another one and alter the trajectory in some way
that made sense and still have it break,
and so we gave Jesse a mark on the top of the radar range,
the underside of a microwave or whatever that he's...
And he had to hit it, and I think we probably did 10 or 11 takes,
and he probably hit it three or four times, and that last one was just perfect.
It was like the bottle just exploded right where it needed to be.
Transamerica Pyramid I've already abused once in a movie that I made,
and it was not in homage to Zodiac that we chose it again.
It's just... As it turned out,
it was this beautiful stock footage that we could buy, and so we did.
This is supposed to take place at a night club in San Francisco called Ruby Skye,
and the real Ruby Skye is a converted theater that has go-go dancers
who hang from trapezes, and we weren't able to do that
for, I think, insurance reasons,
so we ended up finding a club in downtown I. that we dressed,
and had a day to shoot this conversation between Sean and Mark.
And to me this is a pivotal scene, and I think it's so important
to the notion of this kind of entrepreneurship is...
I don't see it, and again, this may be my shortcomings as a human,
but I don't see Sean Parker as doing anything particularly nefarious at all.
I think he's saying...
And how I directed the scene, and how I chose the takes that are in it,
I think he's saying,
"I have an incredible appreciation for what you're trying to do, Mark,"
"and I believe that you're going to get there,"
"but I also believe there's a tiny window of opportunity."
And he tells him this story about Roy Raymond and Victoria's Secret.
"If you have this failure of imagination and if you can only see"
"four or five million dollars as the buyout, as the cash-out,"
"and you're not willing to know that the planets align themselves"
"for something like this once, you know, in a millennium,"
"you just need to ask yourself,"
"are you giving your idea, are you giving your baby"
"the most support that it needs to become"
"as big as you can imagine it? And I can imagine it being really huge,"
"and I'm sure you can imagine it being really huge,"
"but I'm not sure Eduardo can,"
"and I'm sure that the way that Eduardo is going about"
"showing his support, by insisting on advertising and Madison Avenue dollars,"
"I'm not so sure that that's what this needs."
"It's up to you. It's your thing. I don't have any stake."
But this is what makes him an important partner to Mark in this,
in that he's able to say, "This is just one man's opinion,"
"and I'm gonna tell you a story about somebody else who missed the boat,"
"and when they missed that boat, the only recourse that they had afterwards"
"was to throw themself off the Golden Gate Bridge."
There are people who see this scene as particularly Mephistophelian,
and I don't. I think he makes a whole hell of a lot of sense.
This is a once-in-a-generation, "holy shit" idea.
And the water under the Golden Gate is freezing cold.
Look at my face and tell me I don't know what I'm talking about.
Do you ever think about that girl?
What girl?
The girl from high school with the lacrosse thing.
No.
If you guys are gonna talk about bandwidth, we need shots.
A hundred schools by the end of the summer?
Yeah.
Tell you what. Gesture of good faith.
While you're getting into 100 schools, I'll put you on two continents.
Two...
If you don't have a place to crash,
I think you should definitely come and live with us.
Let's line up some shots.
- Excuse me! - Yes, sir.
You can take this away and bring back the 1942.
Absolutely, Mr. Parker.
The Henley Royal Regatta were incredibly good to us,
and they allowed us to actually shoot the race at Henley.
I had no idea how huge the Henley Royal Regatta was.
I'd only seen photographs of it, and a lot of them are telephoto,
so you don't really get the idea of this mile and a half of grandstands
and corporate sponsors and... I mean, it's a huge thing.
And we had originally thought we would shoot, probably,
a bunch of inserts on the Charles, and then...
And then use that footage to intercut with wide shots we had shot at Henley.
The trick of this scene, and the thing that made it so difficult was,
it's not like the fight in Rocky, where it's been talked about forever,
and its importance has been established,
and you know what it means to the Winklevosses.
You get dropped in the middle of this race, you know,
and I joked with Aaron about it a lot, you know.
How do I make people care about whether or not these guys win or lose a race
that we don't know where it is, we don't know what it means,
and he was kind of like "Well, that's your problem."
You know, I mean, to me it's just...
He was using it as a way of saying, "You missed by that much."
And then to have the Winklevosses miss by that much with Zuckerberg,
they miss by that much with Larry Summers,
they're missing by that much at Henley, and it's the final straw.
But it is a tricky thing to design a sequence around,
missing by that much when you literally get dropped into the middle of it.
You really don't know where you are. I mean, it requires a...
It requires a subtitle to tell you you're now in Henley
for the Henley Royal Regatta, which you probably don't know
is the Super Bowl of boat racing.
Anyway, so this was one of those sequences where the only time we could shoot it
was July 4th, 2010,
so it was literally five to six weeks before we had to, you know, finish the movie.
The movie had to be done so it could get it in theaters.
And they were incredibly helpful to us, and made it all possible.
We'd shot this scene, we'd shot the post-Henley scene,
where they hear about Facebook,
but the actual race itself was literally a one minute and 40 second slug.
I think when we showed the film to the New York Film Festival,
when we showed the film to a lot of long-lead press,
it had a card that just said,
"Incredibly thrilling sequence at Henley Royal Regatta,"
and that...
"Incredibly involving and thrilling sequence at Henley Royal Regatta."
That was it, just a black card with white type on it.
So when we finally got to shoot the scene, it was a mad scramble to finish it,
and one of the reasons it's done in this faux
swing-and-tilting lens board style was because all the close-ups
of the Winklevosses and the Dutch rowing were done in Eaton,
on a man-made lake there that doesn't look anything like Henley.
It doesn't have any of the... It just has green grass.
So we would shoot the close-ups of all the people,
and then we had to matte in still photographs that we'd shot at Henley.
There was a team of, you know, probably 20 or 35 artists who worked,
toiled around the clock, to finish that sequence
so that we could get it out and get the movie done,
and they did a great job.
It was so convincing that Armie and Josh actually said to me,
"That shot where I... When I collapsed... Where? Is that when we shot at..."
"Did you get that piece while we were at Henley?"
I was like, "No, none of that stuff. That was all Eaton."
Stop it, Cam.
Knock it off.
I don't mind that we lost to the Dutch today by less than a second.
That was a good race, and that was a fair race.
And they'll see us again.
What I mind, and what you should mind,
is showing up on Monday for a race that was run on Sunday.
We tried talking to him ourselves, we tried writing a letter,
we tried the Ad Board, and we tried talking to the president of the university.
Now, I am asking you for the last time,
let's take the considerable resources at our disposal and sue him in federal court.
Come on.
I need a real drink.
Screw it.
Let's gut the friggin' nerd.
That's what I'm talking about!
No, no, no, no, no.
But check it out, I saw him today.
Manningham, Mitchell Manningham, my Case Equity guy.
Hang on.
Are you guys using Spikes or Ghost Missiles?
We don't know, we're just shooting at each other.
Use Sweet Kamikazes.
Like we know what that is.
I saw him getting into his Turbo Carrera and he saw me, too.
I know he did.
We had a big conversation before we shot this scene,
because I thought it would be funny that we see Sean Parker making guacamole.
It just felt like he was...
You know, he was kind of the master of ceremonies,
and he was getting the margaritas going, had the blender,
and Justin came up to me and he took me aside very seriously
and he said, "Now, he's allergic to peanuts." I said, "He's allergic to peanuts?"
He said, "Yeah. That's why he has an EpiPen. He can't have peanuts." I said, "Oh."
And he said, "Well, I don't know if that extends to avocados."
I was like, "I don't know either."
"But I don't... I think if he just makes it..."
He said, "But should I lick my finger? Should I lick my finger if I'm making that?"
I said, "Well, I think, given everything, if he doesn't forgive us for the avocados",
"that'll be the least of our problems."
Hey, man.
- Back to work. - Okay.
The more bad I get at this, the more wasted I get.
I mean the more wasted that I get...
We understand.
How old are they, Sean?
It's not polite to ask.
Sean, how old are they?
When we were shooting this sequence where Jesse arrives in the background
as we're watching Andrew and he's supposed to have been asleep
and he can't believe that Eduardo's come out,
and he kind of slaps him, Jesse was doing this sleepy-sleepy thing,
which, in the context of when you have a 12-foot plastic bong in the background
and two girls sucking on it,
when Jesse comes around the corner, it looks a little like Jesse's stoned.
And I was really worried about this,
and I was like, "Well, did it read enough that he's tired,"
"or does he look like he's just baked or..."
"Where is that gonna lead us with Sony legal?"
I don't care if he's an actual angel. Why is he setting up business meetings?
- You've had a long flight. - No, I had a long wait on the tarmac at JFK,
then a long wait at the passenger loading and unloading zone at SFO,
and in between there was a long flight.
I'm the business end of this company.
And he is a house guest living here rent free
on a very generous grant from the Eduardo Saverin Foundation.
I heard about your big-ticket ad buys. Gary's Tuxedos.
- Hey, man... - Harvard Bartending Course.
You're just a small step away from bagging Snookies Cookies, I can feel it.
- You wanna talk to me alone for a minute? - Sure.
This is a scene that was designed to be a oner.
I knew we were gonna do this beginning part where he closes the door,
'cause I love the idea of walking 10 feet in order to have some privacy,
and yet there's still this cacophony of bull... happening.
In the other room they're playing video games,
girls are screaming, and you know, they're having a great time,
and you want to have it out with your partner friend you've come out to see,
and I knew that this was gonna happen in basically one take,
and that I would just button it at the end with, you know,
"How's that going so far?" And then him asking the question,
"Wait a minute. What did you mean, 'get left behind?"'
So we shot this... We probably shot it 22 times. A lot.
And to get the overlaps to be in the right place...
And I was never quite satisfied with how they were able to talk over one another.
Part of it was just the setting.
Part of it was just being in this little, you know, shoebox of a hallway.
I mean, basically what you see...
There's one light that's over their head that's turned on and that's kind of it,
and then it's whatever reflects off the white walls
and bounces onto their faces, but it's the proximity of it
and the fact that they're fighting at the end of this little hallway,
to me, that makes it kind of work,
and at the same time it also added this weird timbre to their voices
that sort of gave with one hand and took away with the other.
I'm in New York riding subways 14 hours a day, trying to find advertisers!
And how's it going so far?
What did you mean, "get left behind"?
- Hi. - Can I help you?
I'd like to freeze this bank account
and cancel all existing checks and lines of credit.
I could never decide the degree to which Eduardo should be upset
when he goes the next morning to close the bank account.
We had takes where he was less upset, we had takes where he was more upset,
but it was one of those things you just could never quite decide
where exactly the pitch should be.
That's comforting.
Hey, guys. Come on back.
- She offer you some waters? - Oh, yeah. We're cool.
This is Wallace Langham,
who I met years ago making television commercials,
and who's one of the most skilful comic actors.
He's a truly great comic mind,
and of course we were hiring him to do none of that.
We wanted him to play this venture capitalist.
But he had to have a little wit with this last line.
"Who's Eduardo Saverin?"
And you just know somebody's on the chopping block.
So this scene, this is Brenda Song's audition tape,
and when I looked at this angle of her, she walks forward, crosses her arms,
and the camera's about a foot off the ground,
she's, like, the scariest, most dynamic, powerful person ever,
and she's in heels here.
And you'll see, when Andrew stands up and walks over to the table and she meets him,
just how tiny she is.
You have no understanding of how powerful a presence she is.
And the hilarity of it for me was watching her videotape,
I had no idea that she was five feet tall. I mean I thought she was, like, 6'1...
And she's just strong.
And you just never bothered to change it?
What?
I don't know how.
Do I look stupid to you?
No, calm down.
You're asking me to believe that the CFO of Facebook
doesn't know how to change his Relationship Status on Facebook?
It's embarrassing, so you should take it as a sign of trust that I would tell you that.
- Go to hell. - Take it easy.
No, you didn't change it so you could screw those Silicon Valley sluts
every time you go out to see Mark.
Not even remotely true, and I can promise you that the Silicon Valley sluts
don't care what anyone's Relationship Status is on Facebook.
Please, open your present.
Your phone does work.
It's Mark.
Okay, this is gonna be tricky.
They were wonderful together, these two.
They had so much fun, like, playing with the timing
of when they were gonna say this and when they were gonna say that,
and both Brenda and Andrew realised that this was a meal,
and they got lost in it, appropriately.
'Cause they're only giving them this hilarious little pit stop.
We don't crash ever!
If the servers are down for even a day, our entire reputation is irreversibly destroyed.
- Look... - Users are fickle. Friendster has proved that.
Even a few people leaving would reverberate through the entire user base.
The users are interconnected. That is the whole point.
College kids are online because their friends are online
and if one domino goes, the other dominoes go.
So the tissue paper that wraps the box that has her scarf in it
is treated with some kind of solution so that it burns a little easier
than it should,
and then there's a little bit of alcohol or something in the actual trash can itself.
She is there to make a point,
but I needed her to be able to set fire to this thing without ever looking at it.
Like, I needed the flames to crawl up the tissue paper
and crawl up the ribbon on it,
and for her hands to be nearly engulfed in flames
as she looks at him to make her point with those giant eyes of hers,
and bats her eyelashes and drops this thing into the little wastepaper basket,
they burst into flames.
I think there were two or three times where she was so close to setting her hair on fire.
Everybody around the monitor, you know, took a step forward, like...
And Brenda, who... You give her something to focus on and she is there.
I need my CFO.
I'm on my way.
- Wardo? - Yeah?
We did it.
Wardo?
You're going back there already?
Yes.
And also, I'm breaking up with you.
That was a tricky line, that, "Also I'm breaking up with you,"
'cause it's Sorkinese.
I don't understand people who start a sentence by saying "also."
"Also I'm breaking up with you."
And Aaron had to read it for me a million times,
and I finally kind of made peace with it then.
I had to have... Unfortunately I had to have Andrew
say it a million times, 'cause it just never made any sense to me.
And then, I love the notion of a character who's left
by making this incredible impression,
setting fire to this guy's apartment and waltzed out of there,
and then finally he hears the words that he wants to hear
from Zuckerberg, you know?
Eduardo finally hears, "Get your ass on a plane. I need my CFO."
And he's moved beyond any description,
and then he wheels around and she's still there.
There was such a great construction in that.
Dustin Moskovitz owns 6.81 %.
Sean Parker, 6.47%.
I can live with that.
And Peter Thiel, 7%.
So the attorneys that meet with Eduardo and explain to him
the new division of spoils, as it relates to his latest stock offering
in the new, new Facebook.
I don't think that anyone is actively looking to screw Eduardo out.
I'm sure, having been involved in these kinds of dissolutions
where a partnership obviously has no future,
I saw in my head, I honestly believe I think that somebody took Zuckerberg aside
and just said, "Do you want your friend to own 30% of something"
"that's worth $5 million,"
"or 0.003%, or 0.0003%,"
"of something that's worth $15 billion?"
This is what I informed Jesse he was playing.
I just said, "I don't think they came to him and said, 'Let's... Eduardo."'
I think what they said is, "We can do this in a big, real way,"
"or we can do this in an independent, grassroots,"
"three-guys-from-their-dorm-rooms kind of way,"
"but I think you're gonna be happier if we do it in a big way,"
"and if we do it in a big way, it's gonna require different players."
And I'm sure that Mark Zuckerberg at that point said,
"God, I have so much that I'm working on, I can't even think about this."
And they said, "Well, go back to what you're doing,"
"let us handle the business side, and we'll make it work for everyone."
Again, we are talking about a drama where no one lost their lives,
there was no accidental death or dismemberment.
We are talking about the degree to which a handful of people got rich.
So, I understand that there are different points of view
and people have different views or different feelings about how we've dramatized it,
but I feel like it's fair, given the facts that we know.
Walk out.
Okay.
In late November, I got the e-mail from Mark
telling me to come out for the millionth-member party.
What else did the e-mail say?
It said that we had to have a business meeting.
That Mark and Sean had played some kind of revenge stunt on Case Equity,
and that Manningham was so impressed
that he was now making an investment offer that was hard to turn down.
So I went to California, and I went straight to the new offices.
I didn't know whether to dress for the party or for the business meeting,
so I kind of dressed for both.
- But it didn't matter. - Why not?
Because I wasn't called out there for either one.
Initially there was an emotional beat that happened
where Eduardo turns around and spins in his chair
and says, "I was your only friend. You had one friend."
And we shot it a number of different ways, with varying degrees of an emotional state,
and it was odd
that we finally ended up going with the most subdued performance
that we could find, because it just undercut this,
this moment, where he finally gets to lose it.
And it felt to me like we were rushing to upstage ourselves,
and when we dialed it back,
it suddenly seemed like it gave enough room for the real catharsis.
The movie needed to have this catharsis, these two guys needed to have this out.
It needed to be lanced, for better or worse.
And it's a tricky thing, you know. I think Jesse plays this scene very boldly,
and I do think that the character of Mark Zuckerberg
in this movie, The Social Network, I think he's fed up.
Really, he's hurt by this lack of commitment that Eduardo has had,
or Eduardo has not believed in him as much as he needs Eduardo to believe in him,
and someone else comes along who does believe in him
and sees an even bigger thing than maybe he even imagined,
and now it's come to a head,
and it's being done in this incredibly public place,
and it's so painful for him.
And I feel like Jesse Eisenberg is a brilliant actor,
and I think it takes incredible courage as a brilliant actor
to do what he's doing here, and to just be that guy.
So many people, especially actors, want to be liked,
and it's really hard to play this out
and make it... And I'm not saying that he had to play Zuckerberg as unlikable.
I'm just saying that there's an obsequious attempt
at some kind of dispersal of this energy,
and I don't think that Jesse ever fell victim to that,
and I think that's what makes it a great character.
I think that's what makes Mark Zuckerberg the character in this movie,
and probably not Mark Zuckerberg, the guy in real life,
the imagining of him here,
this is what makes him, to my way of thinking, a great cinematic character.
So the completion of the triptych and Hand Covers Bruise,
and this is the final kind of assertion of this theme.
Again, it's that weird, creepy, anxious energy
that has this melody that comes over, this piano melody that is very innocent,
but now it's almost an echo of its innocence, and really, that's what this movie is.
It's a loss of innocence for everyone involved.
You know, I think that Trent and Atticus really came up with something
that so helped tell this story.
It's funny, when I contacted Trent and we started talking about the movie,
and originally I think he was like, "Facebook movie."
And then I sent him the script, and he was intrigued,
and then I started showing him some of the cut scenes.
And it was funny, because I needed to have a collaborator
who was a technologist, to a certain extent, and who was a great communicator,
and he communicates a kind of anger, he communicates a kind of dissatisfaction,
he communicates a kind of need or want for the world
or art or music to be a certain way, and I needed that for Mark Zuckerberg.
I needed that to be part of the tapestry of it.
I felt he would be a kindred spirit
in not only what Jesse was trying to do, what I was trying to do,
but also what the movie was trying to contextualize.
You know you didn't have to be that rough on him.
There's a beautiful moment that I saw as a real, kind of, transference of power here,
once Eduardo is gone and he's been led out of the building by the security,
and Mark's very upset with how it went down.
I saw it as, there's no reason to have an outburst like that
in front of everybody.
Did it have to be handled in the conference room,
did it have to be handled during work hours?
That's why I think, at one point, there was discussion
of whether or not Jesse would see Andrew as he goes into the conference room.
And I said, "No, he's got his headphones on. He doesn't... He's working."
And then this guy comes and rips the computer out of his hands
and throws it on the ground, and it's just shocking.
And he's completely caught off balance.
And so that's what we decided to play.
But I feel like there's this interesting moment
where he says, "You didn't have to be that tough on him."
He goes, "No..." He's just... Not making excuses,
but he's just explaining sometimes bad... happens to good people,
or bad... happens to bad people,
or people get upset about the way... And he stops him. He didn't have...
And you sort of see him assert himself. You see Jesse assert himself for the first time
as somebody who has an opinion about the policy decisions.
And I thought that that was a more valid thing
than having a scene where he sits down with the attorneys
and says, "Okay, this is what I value Eduardo's contribution at."
"This is what I value Sean's contribution."
You know, it seemed better that it...
To me, it seemed more honest that it happened in retrospect,
that he becomes the leader of Facebook in that moment.
The next transformative development, a picture-sharing application.
A place where you view pictures that coincide with your social life.
It is the true digitalization of real life.
- You can use a CD. - You can do it off of me.
You don't just go to a party any more.
You go to a party with a digital camera, and then your friends relive the party online.
And tagging. The idea...
- Would this be easier without the bra? - It's worth finding out.
All right, shut the music down!
This is probably the most polite bugging out of a college party that I've ever seen.
Most of the time people go through the windows,
they're out through the mail slots.
Changed their profiles, changed their photos...
Seriously, what happened to the music?
We lived on farms and then we lived in cities,
and now we're going to live on the Internet!
Sean, stop. I think something's going on downstairs.
This is the one handheld shot in the whole movie,
because it follows the perspective of somebody who's maybe, maybe,
inebriated,
and it felt like the idea of walking out in that slightly tipsy state,
it might best be described by humans sloppily shouldering cameras.
Good to see you, Officer. What can I do for you?
What's going on?
Was the music too loud? We were having a celebration.
Miss, I need you to button your blouse.
I can tell them to turn the music down.
That's not mine.
Okay, we're gonna need identification. Keep your hands where we can see them.
So the EpiPen is a bit of research that Justin did,
and he sort of added it into the scene at the end,
and I love him scrambling to get all of his stuff
and put it on the table so the police officer can see it,
and then of course the police officer goes right for, "What is this?"
"It's my EpiPen." "And this?" "It's my inhaler."
And I just thought, it makes me love Sean Parker.
Twenty-one.
- Twenty-one. - I'm 21.
Lying only makes it worse.
I'm sorry, I shouldn't have lied.
And I love the way he gets rid of the evidence by wiping it into his hair.
He's no dummy.
Hello.
We had scheduled to shoot in this police station,
an abandoned police station in Glendale, and we got there and the lights were put up,
and we'd sort of staged what it is that we were doing,
and Justin went away and came back with red eyes
and circles under his eyes like he'd been up all night,
and a little clammy, and his hair was a kind of... up,
and he came in and he was this guy.
He just came in and did this shockingly vulnerable
and defensive and... It felt so...
I was so impressed. I just thought this feels so much
like that conversation that you would have on the phone
with somebody who had just been busted, you know,
or had been a part of a bust, or had been on the fringe of a bust.
And I just thought he did a smoking job.
I remember walking away from that day of shooting
and just thinking, "I could not have foreseen it being that, kind of, concise and real."
It's ugly. It's ugly and he's helpless and hopeless.
Mark?
Mark.
We're done for the day.
Yeah. Yeah, I was just sitting here.
What happened to Sean?
He still owns 7% of the company.
All you had all day was that salad. Do you wanna get something to eat?
I can't.
I love Jesse in this last scene. I don't feel it's a Band-Aid at all.
I don't feel like we're trying to take away anything that we've said
previous about Zuckerberg. I think that he's just 25 now, 26.
He's a different guy than he was when he was 19.
He's not that much more confident, he's just a little more human
and a little more engaged, and he's been around more people,
and he knows his way around a conversation.
And I love Rashida. I think Rashida completely brings this whole thing home.
I now know, I didn't know at that time that we were shooting it,
but I now know that it was one of the communications directors
at Facebook who actually offered the idea
that creation myths need a devil, and I thought, "That makes so much sense."
It was a great thing for Aaron to be able to lock onto and go, "This frames it."
"This is our other bookend."
I've been licensed to practice law for all of 20 months,
and I could get a jury to believe
that you planted the story about Eduardo and the chicken.
Watch what else.
Why weren't you at Sean's sorority party that night?
- You think I'm the one that called the police? - Doesn't matter.
I asked the question, now everybody's thinking about it.
You've lost your jury in the first 10 minutes.
Farm animals.
Yeah.
I was drunk and angry and stupid.
I was in Paris doing press.
I got into a sort of heated exchange with one of the journalists
who took great umbrage with the notion
that we had taken any dramatic license in terms of creating dialogue or scenes
for a character who was readily available to ask what got said
and was only 26 or 27, so his memory should be good,
and it was inexcusable for us to create any drama outside
of what really happened.
And I said, "Well, to what end would that conversation..."
"What would that buy us?" And he said,
"Well, a way more humane look at him as a person."
And I said, "Well, to my knowledge, the greatest liberties that we've taken"
"are in his trying to give an apology"
"to the girl that he wrote about on his blog at the beginning of the movie,"
"in the middle of the movie,"
"and then trying to friend her at the end of the movie."
"So the things that we've created that you're taking the biggest issue with"
"are things that are actually, to my mind, things that make him humane."
He had no response.
So, I hadn't initially thought of Trent Reznor. It was only when I was preparing the movie
and working on the script and was putting the cast together
that I started listening to Ghosts, kind of ad nauseam,
and that was kind of the thing that made me go,
"Maybe this is the sound, this is the sound of the world."
And the connection that I saw between what he had done with his music,
what he had done with his band, what he had done with his sound,
and he, as a producer, that he had the influence that he had had,
and I needed that to be part of... I wanted that to be part
of what we were talking about in the movie.
And when I first talked to Trent, I talked to him about the idea seriously.
I said, "You know, it has to be like Risky Business,"
"or it has to be like a John Hughes movie. It's a coming-of-age movie."
It's a little bit of those... That kind of '80s synthesizer thing,
you know, that I was sort of hearing him, and he laughed and I laughed,
and yet it did sort of inform a lot of places that we ended up going.
And I told him not to be afraid of synthesizers,
because I just thought it's the sound of technology.
I didn't search out Trent with the intention
of dictating to him how he would compose,
but I felt that given the movie that I was seeing in my head,
and it's kind of antecedent, you know, Risky Business or a John Hughes movie,
that it would be the kind of thing that he could do
in his studio at his house, and he could generate stuff that way.
And then, you know, if he decided he wanted it to be with an orchestra,
obviously we wouldn't have stopped him,
but I thought the stuff that we were getting was so good and fun.
And maybe I'm just too much of a groupie, but I liked everything.
I was like, "Wow, that's cool. That's awesome. That could go over here."
You know, and part of it also was Ren. Ren would take things and move things
and put them into places that you would kind of go...
So much of it is context. And so a lot of times with Trent's music
it was when you heard it raw, it was kind of like...
The best way I can describe it is when I used to do music videos,
I couldn't listen to a track sent to me by an artist in my office.
I'd have to go out and get in my car and drive around
and listen to the radio, and then at a moment in time
just push the cassette tape in and listen to it play
in context to the radio,
'cause you needed to feel it in the context of driving in your car and hearing radio,
and then it made sense to me.
But whenever I would listen to music, and it was just an audio file in my home,
I could never, kind of, get a gauge on what the video could be.
So we went through the movie and we talked about where we saw music
and sort of what the thing was that we wanted to support,
and he and Atticus went away and they came back
with so many sketches, so much,
and we just started cutting that stuff, and that ended up being the score.