The walk-and-talks. The soaring monologues. Aaron Sorkin has, for the last quarter-century, dramatized the institutions at the center of American society. From his first play, “A Few Good Men,” in 1989, which he then adapted into the blockbuster movie (and is now bringing back to Broadway), to “The West Wing,” “The American President,” “The Newsroom” and beyond, Sorkin has created work that in many ways has shaped our understanding of how politics, the media and the military work. Or should work.
Sorkin’s script for the 2010 film “The Social Network” not only won Sorkin an Oscar for best adapted screenplay but became the defining story of how Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook, even if it wasn’t all exactly true. Now Sorkin has returned to Facebook with “The Social Reckoning,” which opens on Oct. 9 and focuses on the real-life Facebook product manager and whistle-blower Frances Haugen, who leaked thousands of internal documents to the Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horwitz, showing that the company knew its platforms were having a number of negative effects and resisted doing anything to address them.
Sorkin’s movies and television shows are often more idealistic than realistic, and “The Social Reckoning” is no exception. This impulse to romanticize is something Sorkin is often dinged for, and on the two occasions we spoke — once before Meta settled a landmark lawsuit about harms its social media platforms cause teenagers, and once after — he defended and explained his trademark uplift to me in ways that surprised us both.
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Andrew Breitbart, the founder of the right-wing website Breitbart News, would often say that politics is downstream from culture — essentially that Hollywood has more sway over our politics than Washington does. How do you view your role in that equation? It’s not a political agenda. Before a movie can be anything else — before it can be thought-provoking or relevant — it has to be good. It has to work as something that you watch while you’re eating popcorn. That’s what I’m thinking about while I’m writing. Beyond that, I write idealistically and romantically. I find that these areas — government, the news, journalists — are where the stories are that really suit the way I like to write.
I want to talk about how that view fits into your new movie, “The Social Reckoning.” In 2022, you told The Guardian: “I very much doubt that I or anyone else is going to write a sequel to ‘The Social Network.’” What changed your mind? First, I’m not really sure you can call this a sequel. This is another movie about Facebook, written by the same writer who wrote “The Social Network.” And one of the characters from “The Social Network” is in this as well, but played by a different actor. It’s as if the character of Henry Hill [from “Goodfellas”] showed up in “Casino.” To answer your question, there were two reasons in 2022 I said that. There had been a few people in my world asking me for a while to write something else about Facebook after Cambridge Analytica. I just didn’t want to be the writer of “Jaws 2.” I was afraid of that. But mostly I just couldn’t find the story. I couldn’t find the movie part of what they were talking about, until I started learning about Frances Haugen and Jeff Horwitz and what they uncovered.
I went back and watched “The Social Network” again. I was really shocked by how skeptical you were of social media back then. This came out in 2010, the height of tech optimism, when we were still happily connecting with our high school friends and former sweethearts. What did you see that the rest of us didn’t? What I remember is that I thought, Here’s an interesting story: This very successful social network is being built by an extraordinarily antisocial guy. That this person who was uncomfortable in the social structure of college, the way many of us are, invented his own social structure that he couldn’t be shut out of. And he’d be the mayor of that social structure.
You’ve been asked before about your responsibility to be fair to people when you’re writing stories that involve real-life characters, and you’ve said you’re making a painting and not a photograph. But looking back, some of the details you changed are pretty big. That idea of this antisocial person creating this social network — Zuckerberg was dating his now-wife, Priscilla Chan, at the time. So it wasn’t exactly true, but it’s become the origin story that everyone understands about Facebook now. Whether Mark was dating Priscilla Chan at the time or not, I honestly don’t know. In all of the research, her name never came up, but I think broadly speaking, your question is: What am I willing to fictionalize when I’m telling the story of a real person who’s still living?
Right, because it is the way so many people understand things. I would never defame someone. By the way, I could never defame someone. It’s a really interesting area for me because I have especially lately done a lot of nonfiction, and in some cases about people who are still alive: “The Trial of the Chicago 7,” “Molly’s Game,” “Steve Jobs.” One critic once said — and they didn’t mean it as an insult, and I didn’t take it that way — that when I write nonfiction, I am really just using the characters for parts. And they had a point. There’s an idea that I’ll get about a character’s motivation, like Mark’s. I’ll do my research. I’ll learn everything I can about the reality. But in the process of thinking about it, and then the process of writing it, it becomes the same as a fictional character for me. It becomes my character that I’m creating. The studio’s legal department will make sure that I’m staying inside the lines. But it’s this imaginary thing, and it has my voice, and eventually it’s going to be played by an actor and it’s going to have that face. But I will tell you that in terms of Mark, in both cases, “The Social Network” and “The Social Reckoning,” or any antihero — which is what Mark is, not a villain — I, as the writer, can’t judge that character. I write that character as if they’re making their case to God why they should get into heaven.
You don’t think Mark Zuckerberg is a villain? Are we talking about real Mark or my Mark?
Well, tell me what the distinction is. I don’t want to pass judgment on real Mark. I’m not here for that. The Mark in “The Social Reckoning” is an antihero, not a villain. And I just want to add that the character and the person not only have me trying to defend them, but Jeremy Strong, who blows the doors off the place playing this part, was constantly defending Mark to me. Not just on the set. He’d write to me late at night. And as soon as his last shot was over, on his last day of shooting, as soon as I called, “Cut!” Jeremy Strong marched up to me — and this was the first time I heard him use his own voice on the set, not Mark’s voice — and in his own voice said, “If I’d been playing Jeff, I’d have been defending Jeff.”
What is Mark Zuckerberg’s case to God now? That’s he’s bringing people closer together. That’s been his mission from the beginning, and I imagine that the advances that he’s making with A.I. and with the dumb glasses, he imagines those are steps forward for all of us.
Just to stay with Jeremy Strong’s portrayal, Jesse Eisenberg turned down the role. Part of the reason he said he didn’t want to do it is because he felt like he had been so identified with that role and he was tired of people coming up to him and saying —— It’s the only reason he said he didn’t want to do it. He does not want to be conflated with this character anymore. He really doesn’t like Mark Zuckerberg. He would talk about being in airports at the baggage claim and young kids coming up to him, wanting him to sign a business card that said “I’m C.E.O., bitch,” and things like that. He doesn’t like that he kind of looks like the guy. Just wouldn’t do it. And he meant it, too, because he was offered every incentive that usually works with actors. Jeremy was the next call, and as it turned out, it was like replacing Joe DiMaggio with Mickey Mantle.
In a recent interview, Strong said he reached out via email to Zuckerberg, and Zuckerberg wrote back. Yeah, I read that.
Did you know? No, I had no idea.
That’s interesting. Why do you think he didn’t tell you? I don’t know. I’m not shocked that he didn’t. Jeremy does a lot of his own work. He does a tremendous amount of work before he shows up on your set. He did not speak in his own voice on the set or walk the way Jeremy walks. I told all the other actors in his scenes: “Guys, he’s not going to be hanging out with you at craft service. He’s not going to be yucking it up with you between takes. He’s probably not going to speak to you at all. He is going to treat you the way he imagines Mark treats the people around him.” And that’s what happened. You cannot argue with the results.
Was it hard to get the movie made? Because we’ve seen other films about technology companies having trouble in Hollywood these days. I’m thinking of “Artificial,” the film about Sam Altman, which got dropped by Amazon MGM Studios, and Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of Steve Jobs, tried to kill your biopic of Steve. Has Meta ever warned or threatened you over “The Social Reckoning?” It’s my understanding that Sony did get letters from Meta, and I do not think those letters said: “We’re wishing you all the luck in the world. Send us some tickets for opening night.” Under ordinary circumstances, with a piece of nonfiction, the studio’s legal department would do a thorough vet. With this movie, they hired an outside law firm just to handle the legal vet to make sure that every single thing that is presented as a fact is a fact.
Was that nerve-racking? Oh, it’s agonizing, and the things that I wasn’t able to say or do are agonizing. The irony wasn’t lost on anybody that we were doing a thorough fact check of a movie about a company unwilling to do the same thing.
In 2019, you had this very public back-and-forth with Zuckerberg. You wrote an open letter to him in The New York Times Opinion pages where you said that Facebook was “assaulting truth” by allowing lies to be pumped into the ecosystem. And then in what seemed like a response, Zuckerberg posted a quote from your “America isn’t easy” speech from “The American President,” which talks about the value of free speech. Is this new film a continuation of that argument that you two seem to be engaged in over time? As a matter of fact, it is. I wrote that in 2019 as a response to Facebook announcing that they were no longer fact-checking political ads, which is an argument that happens in this film. I saw the response that you’re talking about where he quotes [President] Shepherd’s speech from “The American President” about free speech and about how American citizenship is hard. I found it a little aggravating because there’s no chance that Mark, who’s a very smart guy, and the people around him, who are very smart people, don’t know the difference between an unpopular opinion and a lie. The First Amendment doesn’t protect lies. If it did, nobody would ever win a libel suit.
So in some ways this is your response? I found a story to tell. [Smiles] I found a good story to tell where you can eat popcorn and Milk Duds.
This is a classic underdog story, and there is something really hopeful about a regular person taking on a behemoth like Facebook. But I was just reading an interview that Frances Haugen gave [this past spring] and she said that we “may be worse off today than when I leaked the documents.” And Jeff Horwitz, the watchdog reporter who is also lionized in the film, was effectively downsized out of his job at The Wall Street Journal. He’s now working at Reuters. And Congress doesn’t seem to be anywhere close to regulating online safety. You’re saying it hasn’t been fixed? [Laughs] I thought it was fixed!
Aren’t things bleaker than perhaps you’re portraying in the film? Yes. But let me just expand a little bit on what you just said. Frances Haugen is someone who is an incredibly employable person, a young woman who could have gotten a job anywhere, wanted to come work at Facebook because Facebook had at the time something called a Civic Integrity Team, the one team at Facebook that does not care about growth — their only thing is safety. It was the Civic Integrity Team that came to Mark and said, We have found ways to reduce misinformation. The Civic Integrity Team was dissolved, and that’s part of what sent Frances on her way to being a whistle-blower. As she says in the movie, she did this because she wanted to help Facebook and not hurt it. She really believed in its mission, believed in what it could be, and believed that people like her could help it get there. This movie — and I want to say this without giving away the end or really anything in the third act — but it ends on an optimistic note. Because of who wrote it. [Laughs]
I’m glad to hear you acknowledge that. It ends on an optimistic note, but not a rose-colored one. It’s up front about what’s still wrong. It’s just that David threw a rock at Goliath and connected.
Why do you keep on being attracted to those particular types of characters? You are asking me a very interesting question, and I don’t know the answer. I think it has something to do with my father. I always felt like he had one foot in another century, you know? He was just a very sweet, very bright man for whom decency was the measure of a man.
I actually wanted to talk about the way you grew up. Part of your family fled the Russian ghettos to come to the U.S., right? Yeah, my father’s parents were chased out of Russia by the czar’s police because they were Jewish, and they came here with $3 in their pocket, as teenagers. Then they had my father, who on his 18th birthday signed up for the Army in the middle of World War II. When the war was over, he went to college on the G.I. Bill and then law school. In the course of one generation, the Sorkins went from lower middle class to upper middle class.
What did your parents understand about patriotism and duty? What they understood about patriotism wasn’t the kind of bumper-sticker patriotism that we get sold so often. I was very little at the time of the Watergate hearings, but I do remember watching them that summer, and I didn’t feel like my parents thought this was a national shame. I thought my parents felt like, Look at these guys railing against the most powerful person in the world. And on that day in August, when Nixon resigned, it was nothing but pride that the most powerful person in the world is giving up power and there isn’t a tank in the street. And so, Jan. 6 becomes a lot more heartbreaking.
Without giving too much away, Jan. 6 plays a role in your new film. It comes up. But I believe in all of us, even now. I believe in this country, I really do. A couple of years ago, I was reading an interview with Adam McKay, who is one of my very favorites, and the interviewer asked him: Who is you in Hollywood but a Republican? Who’s the Republican Adam McKay? And Adam said, Aaron Sorkin. I thought: What?! Are you out of your mind? And it was because of this romantic idea I have about our institutions, which I do have.
I’m going to come back to this, but I want to talk a little bit about your writing. You have this very recognizable style of dialogue: supersmart people exchanging supersmart quips, super fast. Have you been tempted to go on a chatbot and ask it to do an Aaron Sorkin scene? Because I can imagine that is a prompt that it would know exactly how to emulate. Thanks!
Emulate, not improve on! “I imagine a robot would be able to do what you do.” [Laughs]
Because you have a very distinctive style! It would understand what the prompt meant. I appreciate that. No, I haven’t done it. But would you like to hear my theory of why I’m optimistic about A.I.? It’s because I don’t think it’s going to work. I remember being at a dinner party a while back and there was an abstract painting on the wall. I kind of liked it. Whatever you’re supposed to get from art, it was happening. And the host of the party came up to me and he said, “A machine painted that.” And I was impressed with the technology, but whatever I was feeling about that painting was gone. If you’re someone who plays video games, those people you’re shooting in Call of Duty, you don’t have an emotional connection to them. And that would be your experience watching A.I. “Schindler’s List.”
But people are using this technology in ways that shortcut the difficult process that you do to try to come up with an idea. And the fact of the matter is, especially given how difficult it is for me to get started, if I went to one of these sites and said, “Hey, do me a favor, write an opening scene for a story about … ” and it was able to do it, or even come close in a way where all I had to do is a little dialogue polish, I think that would be all I’d ever do. I don’t think I’d ever try to have an idea again.
So why are you optimistic? First of all, it’s how I earn a living. [Laughs] At first I thought, Well, maybe the future is going to be that you’ll just find non-A.I. films in art houses. Every once in a while, you’ll hear about a town that’s got a great non-A.I. theater, but I don’t believe it. I want a Scorsese movie, I want a Spielberg movie, I want an Adam McKay movie, I want a Greta Gerwig movie. And I’m going to feel about an A.I. movie the same way I felt about that A.I. painting.
I want to talk about how your writing has evolved. In your 20s and 30s, you would take drugs and stay up all night writing. You’re sober now. It did make me wonder what the difference is between writing high and writing sober. Did you find that there’s a certain level of creativity that is more accessible to you sober, contrary to the myth that a lot of addicts have that the only way they can get the creative juices flowing is through chemical intervention? Well, that’s what I thought. It was the creative juices and also the energy. I mean, there was a time when I would not begin writing until after the sun went down and my dealer came over. And I was using coke. I was a late bloomer when it came to drugs. I went through high school, college, even my early 20s without ever having even tried marijuana, and it all changed in one night.
What was the night? I was 25 and I was sharing an apartment in Hell’s Kitchen in New York. One of my roommates got a job on a national tour or something and sublet their third of the apartment out to someone else. I was trying to write “A Few Good Men,” and I was probably complaining about having some trouble. And she said, “Here, smoke this, relax.” I had been offered weed a million times before in my life and had said no every time. For some reason, this particular time, I said yes. About a half-hour later, she laid out some lines on the table, and I said yes. And in my mind, I did the coke and wrote “A Few Good Men” the next day. That’s how my mind thought of it. And I thought: “I know this is bad for me. But if it’s the difference between being able to do this and not being able to do this, I’m sorry.” And I lost a decade of my life to drugs.
It must have been very frightening to get sober with that connection, that your livelihood and your addiction were so closely aligned. It was. I got a phone call out of the blue from someone I’d never met or spoken to, Carrie Fisher. I’d become friends with Warren Beatty. He has a gravitational pull, and people come into his orbit. And I began to be one of the people in his orbit. I got a phone call from Carrie Fisher because Warren told her to call me. And she said, “I know you think you can’t write without it, and I’m telling you, you’re going to write better than you’ve ever written before.” So I went to rehab. And when I got out, my big fear was relapsing — you’re always terrified of relapsing — and going through the “trying to have an idea” phase again, and that I was going to get frustrated and think, “I know the secret, I know how to get past this, I know the phone number to use.” So at the beginning, I just took uncredited dialogue polish, like two weeks on a Jerry Bruckheimer movie, to get back in the groove of it.
What was the first time that you thought: “OK, this is good. I’m writing it and I’m OK writing it sober?” The “West Wing” pilot. Not even the whole pilot, just a couple of scenes in there, in particular the last five or 10 minutes. I was like, I can do this sober.
We’re going to talk again, but before we end —— Oh, no. I was hoping we were going to talk more about my drug use. [Laughs]
The reason I ask about the drug use is that it informs the way you think about things. It does, and I thought this was where you were going, actually, which is that, yes, I am a suburban kid who’s been very lucky in my life, but there was a lot of terrible darkness. My drug use wasn’t partying. I never did it with anyone else. It was something I did alone, isolated. I went from snorting coke to smoking coke, freebasing. That’s a rough place to go. I thought you were going to say: “I don’t understand how that squares with the optimism and romanticism in your writing. Why aren’t you writing more about the darkness?”
It’s a great question from Aaron Sorkin about himself. Let me ask you the question. Why? Why did I bring this up? [Laughs] There have been plenty of times where I’ve thought, Why aren’t I writing about that? Here’s what I think it is. Honestly, I’ve always been aware of it, but right now is the most thought I’ve ever given it. So here goes. I think the problem is that if I write more autobiographically, you’re not going to like that character. And I want you to like me from my writing. [Pause] How’s that for a confession?
It’s a good one. Damn it. There’s someone off-camera letting me know just how wrong that was [to say]. But I think that’s what it is. For instance, my second movie [“Malice,” 1993] is one I’m not proud of at all. Everything went wrong. This movie starred Alec Baldwin and Nicole Kidman. It was an R-rated thriller. We were in rehearsal, we’re about a week away from shooting, and the director, Harold Becker, said, “We need a sex scene with Alec and Nicole. It’s ridiculous that there’s no sex scene with Alec and Nicole. So I want you to go to your hotel room and write one.” So I went back to my hotel room and I wrote four pages of sexy banter, ending with “they fall onto the bed as we cut to the quad the next morning.” Harold read this and said, “No, no — I mean a sex scene.” I was young, early in my career, and he saw the panic in my face, and he said, “It’s no big deal. Just go to your hotel room and write down what you’d like to see Nicole do.” And I thought, You want me to write down what I’d like to see Nicole Kidman do and then distribute it to the cast and crew, including Nicole Kidman and her husband, Tom Cruise, who I just did a movie with? I was simply unable to do it. As a result, Alec and Nicole and the director went into the director’s trailer and they mapped out what they were going to do. It’s not sexy. It’s not erotic. It’s just crude. It’s bad writing! And I hate that people seeing that movie — fortunately not many of them did — think that that’s what I think is charming or sexy or a come-on. That’s not me.
I talked to Sorkin again a few weeks later, just after Meta agreed to pay up to $17.1 billion in a landmark settlement.
Meta agreed to a major settlement where it has promised to make changes to its apps and how they are used by teenagers. This comes out of one of the things that Frances Haugen brought to light, which is how Meta’s apps negatively impact young people. What did you think when you saw that? It’s great news. It’s terrific. A couple of things: Yes, Frances provided some of the information that served as the foundation for those lawsuits. This settlement was about the addictive nature of Facebook and that Mark and senior people there knew it was addictive, just like the tobacco companies and nicotine. What “The Social Reckoning” is about is Facebook’s role in the rise of divisiveness, extremism and hyper-partisanship. It’s about something a little different. But the settlement is great; it’s a step in the right direction. I was listening to someone who’s an expert the other day say this is a terrible problem that just got 5 percent better. It does nothing for what the movie is about.
I’m assuming then that the news hasn’t changed the way that you ended the film? No.
I do wonder about how you tell the story of real events. Too soon, and you don’t have the full context; too late, and things have moved on and the story can feel dated. I don’t want the movie, or any movie I do, to be timely. I want it to be timeless. I don’t want it to feel like it was ripped from yesterday’s headlines. I want this movie to be just as good 10, 20 years from now as it is when you see it in October and November. I make decisions based on that. In fact, you asked me if we changed the end of the movie because of the settlement. A couple of people at the studio had suggested, Well, there’s a postscript on the end of the film and you should put there that Meta settled for $17 billion, and I didn’t do that, because I didn’t want to feel like we just made the movie yesterday.
Last question: You’ve said that you’re romantic about the institutions of American democracy. I want to confess that watching “The Social Reckoning” was a little bit disorienting because of its reverence for working within the system — Congress, the courts, journalism — to achieve this goal. We’re at this moment where people are angry at our institutions. They feel the system is rigged. Do you not despair sometimes that your reverence is misguided? It may well be, but what’s the alternative? I mean, what would I do if it was misguided? If I said, “Hey, these institutions, they’re terrible, they’re rigged,” what do we do? All we have are elections. Other than taking to the streets, that’s the only time we get to raise our hand.
This interview has been edited and condensed from two conversations. Listen to and follow “The Interview” on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, iHeartRadio or Amazon Music. Follow us on Instagram and TikTok.
Director of photography (video): Aaron Katter
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