What did Mark Zuckerberg think of ‘The Social Network’?
Rooted in coding software and conference rooms, the story behind the creation of Facebook never seemed particularly Hollywood-friendly. When director David Fincher took on the tale of Mark Zuckerberg for The Social Network in 2010, he had a mammoth task on his hands. How could he contain all the thrills and tension of his distinctive filmmaking style into boardrooms and rowboats?
With ease, apparently. Forging a collaborative relationship with The West Wing creator Aaron Sorkin, Fincher turned a potentially bland tale of corporations and coding into one of the most entertaining movies of the decade. The film was perfectly paced, punctuated by impossibly tight dialogue and a captivating score contributed by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, but its true merit came from its diverted thematic focus.
The Social Network wasn’t really the story of Facebook. Instead, it was a story of narcissism, friendship and betrayal. Elevated by lead performances from a smirking Jesse Eisenberg and a naive Andrew Garfield, the film finds its tension and emotion in real life rather than online. Rightfully, the film was met with award-season success and huge numbers at the box office, but there was one viewer who wasn’t a fan of Fincher’s work.
Perhaps expectedly, the subject of The Social Network was unimpressed with its depiction of Facebook’s early days. Zuckerberg once revealed that the film did not accurately portray his experience of making the site, which he stated was far less glamorous than it seemed on-screen.
Speaking about the film during a live Q&A session, Zuckerberg suggested that his love life – which forms one of the fictional Zuck’s motivating factors behind the creation of Facebook – was changed for the purpose of the plot. At the time, he was actually dating his future wife, Priscilla Chan. According to Zuckerberg, this wasn’t the only element of the plot that was fabricated.
“I think the reality is that writing code and then building a product and building a company is not a glamorous enough thing to make a movie about,” he suggested, “So you can imagine that a lot of this stuff they had to embellish or make up.” While Zuckerberg shared his admiration for the attention to detail in production – the office design, for example – he maintained that “they just kind of made up a bunch of stuff that I found kind of hurtful.”
As a consequence, Zuckerberg suggested that it was hard to take The Social Network seriously. Luckily, for those of us who weren’t privy to the early development of Facebook, it’s extremely easy to take The Social Network seriously. Though it might contain some historical inaccuracies, it remains one of the most entertaining and well-written films in recent memory, a narrative of lost friendship through the destructive lens of social media and business.