Full Transcript for A Friend Request From Aaron Sorkin ('The Social Reckoning')

the social network, and we also look to the future, because Aaron's films to me are invariably about American decency and the moral conundrums that arise around its institutions. 03:04.111 --> 03:20.607 [SPEAKER_02]: With that in mind, I was really fascinated to ask, having kind of guessed he might do January 6th in our last interview, whether or not he might one day tackle the case of Luigi Mangione, the man currently awaiting trial for the murder of healthcare CEO Brian Thompson. 03:21.899 --> 03:29.263 [SPEAKER_02]: A big thank you to Aaron for joining me thanks to everyone who I've worked with recently providing comprehensive feedback on their screenplays. 03:29.683 --> 03:38.488 [SPEAKER_02]: If you'd like to get actionable suggestions and detailed notes on your script, get in touch by heading over to scriptapart.com forward slash coverage. 03:39.208 --> 04:03.903 [SPEAKER_02]: A big shout out also to everyone who signed up to the Scriptapart Substack over its Scriptapart.substack.com Since launching a few weeks ago, there have been exclusive interviews, exclusive essays, it's been a ton of fun and it'll also be the place soon where you can listen to Scriptapart ad-free for just $5 a month So head to Scriptapart.substack.com if you'd like to get involved there 04:05.211 --> 04:07.833 [SPEAKER_02]: With that all out the way, how about we jump in? 04:08.173 --> 04:12.837 [SPEAKER_02]: This is Aaron Sorkin discussing the first rough secrets of the social reckoning. 04:13.517 --> 04:15.999 [SPEAKER_02]: My name's Al Horner, you're listening to Script Apart. 04:16.279 --> 04:17.700 [SPEAKER_02]: Thank you so much for being here guys. 04:18.020 --> 04:19.722 [SPEAKER_02]: I hope you enjoy the conversation. 04:24.370 --> 04:25.772 [SPEAKER_03]: And well thanks, that was great to be here. 04:26.572 --> 04:35.442 [SPEAKER_02]: So the social reckoning, obviously involves a lot of scenes in which Mark Zuckerberg is being prepped by a big team to go up in front of Congress and be grilled. 04:36.283 --> 04:39.807 [SPEAKER_02]: How big was the team that perhaps you feel grilling on scripted part today, Aaron? 04:41.587 --> 04:47.210 [SPEAKER_03]: And just, just me, I'm, as we're about to find out that there's been no preparation. 04:48.271 --> 04:57.456 [SPEAKER_02]: Well, we're speaking over the phone so I can't see you, but I like to imagine there was a lot of deliberation over Thai choices, and shades of burgundy, yes, exactly. 04:58.556 --> 05:08.722 [SPEAKER_02]: In all seriousness though, big congrats on the social reckoning, it was really fun for me as a fan of the social network to see you grappling with this subject matter again. 05:09.761 --> 05:26.042 [SPEAKER_02]: Let me start by asking a couple of questions about your relationship to that old film because well, the two movies are not sequels, they are companion pieces, that's an important distinction, but there is one red thread that I felt running from one film into the next. 05:27.183 --> 05:37.051 [SPEAKER_02]: So the social network was of course about the origins of Facebook, and it showed how that whole platform began appealing to some very ugly base instincts within people. 05:37.431 --> 05:44.817 [SPEAKER_02]: So Zuckaberg began his entire assent by building face mash, which was a platform inviting users to rate women's attractiveness. 05:46.058 --> 05:58.482 [SPEAKER_02]: My question for you, Aaron, is whether or not 16 years later the place we've ended up in in terms of meta, in terms of social media, in terms of the story that you tell in the social reckoning. 05:59.282 --> 06:06.004 [SPEAKER_02]: Whether or not all of this is the inevitable end point of building a house on those shaky foundations. 06:06.564 --> 06:09.805 [SPEAKER_02]: Because the social reckoning is about Facebook making the decision, 06:10.365 --> 06:15.806 [SPEAKER_02]: to kind of lean into content that's all about appealing to people's basically instincts again. 06:16.306 --> 06:21.367 [SPEAKER_02]: And the just seems to be such interesting circularity to that connecting the two films. 06:22.247 --> 06:23.867 [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, like you're 100% right. 06:24.348 --> 06:25.548 [SPEAKER_03]: A shift happened. 06:26.448 --> 06:33.289 [SPEAKER_03]: And it happened in the 2010s when with the social network back, first of all, let me go back to the beginning of what you said. 06:34.469 --> 06:37.470 [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, it's not really a sequel. 06:38.450 --> 06:46.797 [SPEAKER_03]: It's another movie about Facebook written by the writer who wrote the social network, and one of the characters, Mark Zuckerberg from the social network is in this too. 06:46.837 --> 06:50.761 [SPEAKER_03]: So it's as if Henry Hill showed up in Casino. 06:51.241 --> 06:51.481 [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah. 06:51.661 --> 06:52.902 [SPEAKER_03]: Right. 06:53.463 --> 07:06.194 [SPEAKER_03]: Back in 2010, Facebook was still a place where you, you know, kept track of high school friends and you met a girl a few years after that. 07:07.055 --> 07:22.132 [SPEAKER_03]: is when Facebook introduced news feed, and that's what would change everything, or at least start us down the road of changing everything, because that news feed was still controlled by an algorithm. 07:23.073 --> 07:26.216 [SPEAKER_03]: And the algorithm, of course, was showing you what you wanted to see. 07:26.296 --> 07:33.442 [SPEAKER_03]: So each of us had our own bespoke news feed, and each of us started living in our own reality. 07:33.943 --> 07:35.164 [SPEAKER_03]: It's already a problem. 07:35.604 --> 07:41.169 [SPEAKER_03]: But where that problem became compounded as Francis Hogan, it's played by Mikey Madison. 07:41.810 --> 07:45.834 [SPEAKER_03]: And Jeff Harrow, it's just played by Jeremy Allen White, revealed in this movie. 07:46.953 --> 07:52.787 [SPEAKER_03]: is that not only is Facebook blasting a tremendous amount of misinformation. 07:53.659 --> 08:07.368 [SPEAKER_03]: into the air supply, but it is, it wants to

send you content that's going to make you angry because it's the thing most likely that you'll most likely re-share, which is what they want. 08:08.208 --> 08:13.272 [SPEAKER_03]: The ones you re-sharing stuff, it's what keeps you on the engagement, the platform, the longest. 08:13.612 --> 08:20.676 [SPEAKER_03]: And really all we need in the world right now is more misinformation and more things that are 08:22.227 --> 08:23.388 [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, you can say that again. 08:23.408 --> 08:31.192 [SPEAKER_02]: I am curious, Aaron, though, what that shift that you just described, what that's meant for your relationship with the social network? 08:31.312 --> 08:45.421 [SPEAKER_02]: Because presumably, there's a lot of pride that you must feel over the fact that, like, for a lot of people, that film was their first nudge towards thinking about the power that social media could wield over the world. 08:46.061 --> 08:52.048 [SPEAKER_02]: and also contemplating the fact that these are very valuable human beings in charge of that power. 08:52.328 --> 08:59.195 [SPEAKER_02]: Like the Zuckerberg you depicted in that movie, he's very much driven by the wound of not feeling accepted. 08:59.636 --> 09:00.757 [SPEAKER_02]: And we 09:00.757 --> 09:16.192 [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I can imagine you having a lot of pride in that film, but maybe also they're being a little bit of disappointment maybe that you didn't move the needle enough almost because, well, since 2010, Facebook and it's kind of sister platforms. 09:16.732 --> 09:17.393 [SPEAKER_02]: They've grown. 09:17.673 --> 09:27.743 [SPEAKER_02]: They've amassed millions and millions and millions more users and it's led to some of this social corrosion that is depicted in the social reckoning. 09:27.823 --> 09:30.686 [SPEAKER_02]: So yeah, is that a tool accurate? 09:30.706 --> 09:36.152 [SPEAKER_02]: Like I am I in the right ballpark at all in terms of how you might feel about the social network today? 09:37.196 --> 09:37.736 [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, I know. 09:37.756 --> 09:40.138 [SPEAKER_03]: You're in the right ballpark for sure. 09:42.100 --> 09:45.822 [SPEAKER_03]: Obviously, I look back on the movie with Pride. 09:45.842 --> 09:47.304 [SPEAKER_03]: I had a great time making it. 09:47.324 --> 09:50.766 [SPEAKER_03]: I love my collaboration with David Fincher and with those actors. 09:51.467 --> 09:55.329 [SPEAKER_03]: What you're talking about is the reason Jesse Eisenberg isn't in this movie. 09:57.171 --> 10:02.333 [SPEAKER_03]: He did no longer want it to be conflated with Mark Zuckerberg. 10:03.454 --> 10:04.335 [SPEAKER_03]: He doesn't like the guy. 10:04.695 --> 10:05.595 [SPEAKER_03]: He doesn't like that. 10:05.675 --> 10:13.119 [SPEAKER_03]: He physically resembles the guy that people kind of know him as Mark Zuckerberg. 10:13.560 --> 10:14.640 [SPEAKER_03]: And he would tell me that 10:16.383 --> 10:34.653 [SPEAKER_03]: young boys, 12, 13, 14 year old boys would come up to him and airports with business cards that said, I'm CEO, bitch, wanting Jesse to sign them and we didn't really realize until after we had made the movie and we were seeing people's reactions. 10:35.393 --> 11:00.650 [SPEAKER_03]: That there were two very different reactions from the movie and it broke on generational lines That an older generation saw it as a cautionary tale a younger generation saw it as an inspirational tale That here's a guy a quick college made a billion dollars that kind of thing What none of us I want to say when none of us what I certainly my failure of imagination was in what it would ultimately become 11:01.741 --> 11:08.705 [SPEAKER_02]: By that, you mean you could never anticipate it, the level of kind of chaos it could spawn. 11:09.025 --> 11:09.245 [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah. 11:09.465 --> 11:10.206 [SPEAKER_02]: Disinformation. 11:10.446 --> 11:13.527 [SPEAKER_03]: The disinformation that would be spread couldn't imagine. 11:14.408 --> 11:17.549 [SPEAKER_03]: First of all, again, this was before there was a news feed. 11:19.030 --> 11:20.311 [SPEAKER_03]: So, you know. 11:20.571 --> 11:25.933 [SPEAKER_03]: how bad could things be on a website where you track down your college girlfriend. 11:26.554 --> 11:33.997 [SPEAKER_03]: It turned out things were going to be pretty bad when again we were all experiencing different news. 11:34.757 --> 11:41.380 [SPEAKER_03]: And what are now called traditional or legacy media outfits, which just used to be called newspapers in the network news. 11:43.593 --> 11:53.876 [SPEAKER_03]: There are people professionals who we've all seen the scene in movies where the editors all sit around the table and decide what tomorrow's headlines are going to be what's going to be on tomorrow's front page. 11:54.537 --> 12:00.238 [SPEAKER_03]: These professionals who are deciding what's important for you to see. 12:01.539 --> 12:04.020 [SPEAKER_03]: You live in a democracy, what's important for you to see. 12:05.420 --> 12:07.701 [SPEAKER_03]: that isn't the case in Facebook. 12:07.941 --> 12:22.927 [SPEAKER_03]: Facebook is showing what you want to see and they're spiking that punch with things that are going to make you mad and nowadays it's going to be a lot of stories about immigrants committing crimes. 12:23.047 --> 12:32.054 [SPEAKER_02]: I've actually drank that spiked punch you mentioned first hand this year, this is a bit of an overshadow, so bear with me. 12:34.156 --> 12:39.600 [SPEAKER_02]: My partner was diagnosed with stage two cancer earlier this year, and I'm sorry. 12:39.841 --> 12:41.022 [SPEAKER_02]: I appreciate that, thank you. 12:41.842 --> 12:49.208 [SPEAKER_02]: But yeah, basically during her hospitalization, I was really racking up quite a lot of social media hours, I think, just because 12:50.349 --> 12:58.031 [SPEAKER_02]: I don't know, there was so much like down time in the hospital, and she was asleep a lot of the time, and you just reach for that quick dopamine hit. 12:59.071 --> 13:10.114

[SPEAKER_02]: And it's interesting, like, I really, I really did feel like this internal temperature in me rise as I was kind of fed all these videos whose entire 13:13.375 --> 13:26.127 [SPEAKER_02]: and it was when I kind of stepped away from social media at a various point so kind of decided like, right, it's too frustrating seeing the world continue a pace while we're marooned on the chemo wood. 13:27.168 --> 13:29.249 [SPEAKER_02]: I kind of gave up Instagram, et cetera, et cetera. 13:30.010 --> 13:43.218 [SPEAKER_02]: And when I did, it was really noticeable, like just how that internal temperature in me dropped and even amidst everything else going on at that time, like a new calm surfacing. 13:43.698 --> 13:53.043 [SPEAKER_02]: And it really underlined for me the kind of, well, the Facebook algorithm, the Instagram algorithm, the kind of Zuckerbergian thinking in action. 13:54.804 --> 14:09.513 [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, and I mean, I wouldn't expect you are in to have two analogous a an experience of social media like that, but I am curious if you've had any experience like that where you've seen, you've seen the thing you wrote about in the social network up close. 14:09.813 --> 14:21.520 [SPEAKER_02]: Like tell me about your your own experiences, your own uses of social media, and the things you've seen on it that have underlined for you, the need to make this film, the need to tell this story. 14:23.126 --> 14:23.767 [SPEAKER_03]: Well, you're right. 14:25.028 --> 14:28.931 [SPEAKER_03]: I don't have any social media accounts at all. 14:28.951 --> 14:32.014 [SPEAKER_03]: I had a Facebook account for the period that I was writing the movie. 14:33.155 --> 14:36.859 [SPEAKER_03]: And I had a Facebook account for the period I was writing the social network too. 14:36.899 --> 14:41.924 [SPEAKER_03]: But other than that, I just did something that just never really caught my interest. 14:42.124 --> 14:43.825 [SPEAKER_03]: But that doesn't matter. 14:43.946 --> 14:45.167 [SPEAKER_03]: You still get to see. 14:46.936 --> 15:12.167 [SPEAKER_03]: even if you're not on social media, it's going to drip through to your life and I've been a lot pretty long time and when I've never seen is a population unable to reach consensus about facts and that's incredibly scary, we've seen the results of it. 15:13.205 --> 15:35.285 [SPEAKER_02]: Well, I'm not surprised to hear you say that an absence of consensus around facts is scary to you because well, that's kind of been the lifeblood of your films like your movies today have very much been about people trying to uphold certain decency certain institutions that have either been eroded or will stand to be eroded. 15:36.346 --> 15:42.327 [SPEAKER_02]: Is that then what kind of pulled you back into the world of Facebook and Zuckerberg? 15:42.387 --> 15:46.789 [SPEAKER_02]: Like, did you notice these things being eroded in our world? 15:46.829 --> 15:50.329 [SPEAKER_02]: Did you notice decency and truth under attack?

15:50.789 --> 15:54.450 [SPEAKER_02]: Because of Facebook and think, I need to get back into this. 15:54.510 --> 15:55.511 [SPEAKER_02]: I need to tell another story. 15:55.531 --> 15:57.211 [SPEAKER_03]: I do gravitate, art to that. 15:57.531 --> 15:57.671 [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah. 15:57.771 --> 16:01.056 [SPEAKER_03]: I was not looking to get back into the world of Facebook. 16:01.316 --> 16:03.899 [SPEAKER_03]: I wasn't looking for another Facebook story to tell. 16:03.919 --> 16:07.744 [SPEAKER_03]: I wasn't looking to write a follow up to the social network. 16:07.924 --> 16:14.192 [SPEAKER_03]: What I was was in the middle of a period of epic writers block where I just 16:15.932 --> 16:17.293 [SPEAKER_03]: Didn't know what I was going to write next. 16:17.333 --> 16:19.834 [SPEAKER_03]: Didn't have any ideas when I don't have an idea. 16:19.995 --> 16:22.796 [SPEAKER_03]: It's impossible for me to imagine ever having an idea. 16:24.237 --> 16:31.662 [SPEAKER_03]: And someone asked me to meet with a woman named Francis Hauge, and she's got this book proposal. 16:32.662 --> 16:35.684 [SPEAKER_03]: I didn't know who Francis was. 16:35.964 --> 16:38.226 [SPEAKER_03]: I hadn't been paying attention to the Facebook files. 16:38.906 --> 16:42.248 [SPEAKER_03]: So I met with Francis, and she's a brilliant woman 16:45.110 --> 17:10.233 [SPEAKER_03]: uh... what she was trying to tell me and i didn't see where there was a story but i went ahead and met with jiff harwoods too and uh... and i would keep meaning every few months uh... with jiff and with frances and they kept trying to teach me what was in the facebook files what it was they discovered when i was trying to get tell them what i was trying to get them to tell me the story of how they got there 17:11.794 --> 17:20.102 [SPEAKER_03]: What turned Francis into a whistleblower, how did she, you know, enlist Jeff Harwoods and all this? 17:20.863 --> 17:33.556 [SPEAKER_03]: And I was about a year or a year and a half into this, you know, I have a lot of research, I have a lot of data, but none of it is in the shape of a movie, yet. 17:34.705 --> 17:43.912 [SPEAKER_03]: When I asked Jeff a question I wish I had asked him a year earlier, the dramatist question, which is what was the inciting action for Francis? 17:44.633 --> 17:45.914 [SPEAKER_03]: One day, she wasn't a whistleblower. 17:45.934 --> 17:57.863 [SPEAKER_03]: The next day, she was what was the inciting action and his answer was she had a friend who had been radicalized by Facebook and Francis wanted to find that exactly what happened. 17:58.864 --> 18:07.851 [SPEAKER_03]: And at that point, not that second, but at that point, I got an idea for the opening scene for a prologue in this movie. 18:08.652 --> 18:18.299 [SPEAKER_03]: And I would have been happy just writing that scene, but the only way you can get people to see that scene is if you write the next 100 scenes that come after that. 18:18.820 --> 18:21.602 [SPEAKER_03]: If you write a full movie, so I was committed at that point. 18:22.222 --> 18:22.502 [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah. 18:23.202 --> 18:25.523 [SPEAKER_02]: Can I tell you something about that opening scene? 18:25.783 --> 18:26.743 [SPEAKER_02]: Sure. 18:26.763 --> 18:34.725 [SPEAKER_02]: So I found myself reflecting on my versions of that character, the white girl, wasted, that have been in my life. 18:34.745 --> 18:37.526 [SPEAKER_02]: Oh yeah, who've been changed by the algorithm, right? 18:37.546 --> 18:44.207 [SPEAKER_02]: Like who people who've been nudged in the direction of different political extremes by social media and there's been a few of them. 18:45.047 --> 18:51.309 [SPEAKER_02]: And I asked a whole bunch of people who had seen the film, if they had a similar experience watching that scene 18:52.589 --> 19:11.322 [SPEAKER_02]: Pretty much every single person I spoke to could name a person from their life, like a colleague, a relative of a friend, an ex, someone who, like that woman that we see in that opening scene, has kind of had their brain rewired by like the incitement treadmill that is social media today. 19:11.342 --> 19:13.604 [SPEAKER_02]: And my question for you, Aaron, is... 19:14.364 --> 19:21.988 [SPEAKER_02]: whether or not there are people in your life who've had that transformation happen who've been changed by the algorithm. 19:22.088 --> 19:23.089 [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, there are. 19:26.050 --> 19:33.094 [SPEAKER_03]: That's the scary part that you think of people who've drifted to the far right. 19:34.007 --> 19:48.383 [SPEAKER_03]: has looking a certain way being from a certain social strata, an economic strata and to see that they were also existing in Beverly Hills was shocking. 19:48.810 --> 19:49.710 [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, yeah. 19:50.971 --> 20:02.635 [SPEAKER_02]: Have you had any insight or are in telling this story and kind of researching this subject matter as to why people are susceptible to being radicalized by online content? 20:02.815 --> 20:12.258 [SPEAKER_02]: Like, I'm really fascinated by what emptiness, or what lack of purpose, what lack of meaning, some people must have in their lives, 20:13.058 --> 20:20.228 [SPEAKER_02]: to be able to be manipulated by the algorithm. 20:20.248 --> 20:22.952 [SPEAKER_02]: Have you had any thoughts on that? 20:22.992 --> 20:26.617 [SPEAKER_02]: Maybe as a dramatist, it's not your question to have to answer. 20:26.717 --> 20:29.802 [SPEAKER_02]: But I'd definitely be interested to hear your take. 20:31.564 --> 20:33.425 [SPEAKER_03]: it's a great question to answer. 20:34.065 --> 20:35.366 [SPEAKER_03]: I can't, I don't have an answer. 20:36.126 --> 20:40.709 [SPEAKER_03]: I can't answer it except let's set the Beverly Hills people aside for a second. 20:41.249 --> 20:43.310 [SPEAKER_03]: There are some people that they're struggling. 20:43.690 --> 20:44.771 [SPEAKER_03]: They struggle every day. 20:44.811 --> 20:46.232 [SPEAKER_03]: They're living paycheck to paycheck. 20:47.332 --> 20:48.012

[SPEAKER_03]: They're struggling. 20:49.433 --> 20:51.094 [SPEAKER_03]: Government isn't working for them. 20:51.134 --> 20:52.715 [SPEAKER_03]: Politicians aren't working for them. 20:54.047 --> 20:55.209 [SPEAKER_03]: and they're angry. 20:56.430 --> 21:05.560 [SPEAKER_03]: And so that's generally how populism and the dark part of populism takes root. 21:08.843 --> 21:13.709 [SPEAKER_03]: As for the people, the examples that I'm using, the people in Beverly Hills, 21:16.142 --> 21:17.203 [SPEAKER_03]: I think they're just assholes. 21:17.943 --> 21:18.163 [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah. 21:18.823 --> 21:20.364 [SPEAKER_03]: Honestly, I think they're just assholes. 21:20.544 --> 21:20.925 [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah. 21:22.405 --> 21:25.167 [SPEAKER_02]: So obviously, I've got to ask about Zuckerberg. 21:26.648 --> 21:28.949 [SPEAKER_02]: The social network was very much his film. 21:29.029 --> 21:33.511 [SPEAKER_02]: He was the protagonist that we experienced that story through. 21:33.772 --> 21:37.213 [SPEAKER_02]: And the same is obviously not true of this story. 21:38.294 --> 21:45.520 [SPEAKER_02]: How did you work out how much or how little of Mark to deploy in the social reckoning compared to the social network? 21:45.720 --> 21:54.046 [SPEAKER_02]: Because as I say, it is like a real kind of noticeable difference the amount of screen time that he has in one film versus the other. 21:54.647 --> 21:56.889 [SPEAKER_03]: I knew that Mark was going to be a supporting character. 21:56.929 --> 22:00.492 [SPEAKER_03]: This movie was about Francis and Jeff. 22:01.072 --> 22:03.494 [SPEAKER_03]: A lot of Mark to be in the story. 22:04.094 --> 22:05.776 [SPEAKER_03]: Even he and Francis had never met. 22:06.690 --> 22:13.535 [SPEAKER_03]: And so I got this idea of a very unusual structure, which is that there are two timelines. 22:13.735 --> 22:18.319 [SPEAKER_03]: That's not that unusual, but in this case, one timeline is chronological. 22:18.379 --> 22:22.462 [SPEAKER_03]: It goes from the end of 2019 to the beginning of 2021. 22:23.283 --> 22:29.327 [SPEAKER_03]: And inside of that, fitting inside of that, there's a one-act play taking place. 22:29.968 --> 22:31.409 [SPEAKER_03]: It all takes place on the same morning. 22:31.989 --> 22:33.991 [SPEAKER_03]: And we find out by the end of the film, what morning that is. 22:35.578 --> 22:38.121 [SPEAKER_03]: But it's all taking place in the same day. 22:40.002 --> 22:43.766 [SPEAKER_03]: That was the first draft of the script that I turned in. 22:44.787 --> 22:51.773 [SPEAKER_03]: And one of our producers Peter Rice had said, You know, this is all great, where we're moving forward with this. 22:52.974 --> 22:55.116 [SPEAKER_03]: But I'm this Mark. 22:56.297 --> 22:59.540 [SPEAKER_03]: I feel like there needs to be more Mark. 23:00.402 --> 23:03.605 [SPEAKER_03]: Well, just more Mark, it isn't helpful. 23:03.625 --> 23:05.186 [SPEAKER_03]: I don't know what to do with that. 23:05.206 --> 23:13.334 [SPEAKER_03]: And it was Tom Rothman, the head of the studio, who said, right now, the villain in the piece is Facebook. 23:14.475 --> 23:17.217 [SPEAKER_03]: And it needs to be personified somehow. 23:17.297 --> 23:20.840 [SPEAKER_03]: And, you know, it's helpful that Mark is Facebook. 23:20.860 --> 23:23.763 [SPEAKER_03]: Nobody else makes decisions there, Mark is Facebook. 23:24.404 --> 23:24.644 [SPEAKER_03]: So, 23:26.033 --> 23:47.908 [SPEAKER_03]: I wrote a couple of more scenes, including the scene I like a lot, that takes place in his office, where he's actually presented with the opportunity to reduce misinformation by 34% and only lose 1% in engagement and for him 1% is way too much to lose. 23:48.668 --> 23:50.310 [SPEAKER_03]: So he passes on that opportunity. 23:51.810 --> 24:01.716 [SPEAKER_02]: Well, what's interesting about that moment in the film is before we even get to the cruelty and the recklessness of his decision and the 34% etc. 24:01.736 --> 24:02.196 [SPEAKER_02]: etc. 24:02.976 --> 24:17.725 [SPEAKER_02]: He's already very economical, very well borderline machine like borderline cruel in how he deals with the other people that met it around him and it's a scene that really kind of establishes him as the villain of the piece. 24:18.705 --> 24:32.889 [SPEAKER_02]: But I'd love to know what kind of calibration and their recalibration there was to work out just how villainous to make him in this film because in that scene he is treating people like data sources instead of human being. 24:32.949 --> 24:33.369 [SPEAKER_03]: That's right. 24:34.209 --> 24:39.691 [SPEAKER_03]: You want to, first of all, you never want him to be a mustache twirling of villain. 24:40.011 --> 24:42.832 [SPEAKER_03]: And then he becomes silly and it's not really any more 24:48.546 --> 24:49.387 [SPEAKER_03]: as an anti-hero. 24:50.990 --> 25:00.583 [SPEAKER_03]: The distinction is a villain has bad intentions and anti-hero is trying to do something good, but it's terrible. 25:02.426 --> 25:04.549 [SPEAKER_03]: Mark in the social network, 25:05.810 --> 25:12.295 [SPEAKER_03]: was a guy who didn't fit into the social structure of college life. 25:13.316 --> 25:21.201 [SPEAKER_03]: He did not get invited to the cool kids table and so he invented his own cool kids table and became the mayor of it. 25:23.883 --> 25:27.806 [SPEAKER_03]: And I kept that idea going in the social reckoning. 25:29.911 --> 25:39.004 [SPEAKER_03]: Only now, like I said, it's just much bigger, much more powerful, and it's in the news business. 25:40.860 --> 25:51.988 [SPEAKER_02]: Hey everyone, this is Al, just jumping into a mind, the writers among you that scripted a part offers screenplay coverage, meaning if you've got a script in a wondering, hey, what about this is working? 25:52.228 --> 25:53.649 [SPEAKER_02]: What's perhaps not working? 25:53.889 --> 25:58.212 [SPEAKER_02]: And what are the actionable steps I can take to make it the best it can be? 25:58.872 --> 26:06.898 [SPEAKER_02]:

I've got you covered, I've worked on over 150 projects, many of which are now in development at Netflix, Hulu, Apple TV and more. 26:07.538 --> 26:09.099 [SPEAKER_02]: But don't take my word for whether it's good. 26:09.440 --> 26:13.383 [SPEAKER_02]: This is what people who've used the service recently have had to say. 26:13.403 --> 26:19.708 [SPEAKER_01]: I had the pleasure of working without earlier this year and I cannot say enough good things about working with him. 26:19.868 --> 26:27.253 [SPEAKER_01]: He was so quick in his turnaround time and offered such nuanced feedback that legitimately enhanced our story so much. 26:27.834 --> 26:29.775 [SPEAKER_01]: And beyond that, he's just a gem of a human being. 26:29.835 --> 26:35.140 [SPEAKER_01]: He is such a good person to talk to and to work with and I just cannot recommend him highly 26:36.733 --> 26:47.363 [SPEAKER_02]: head to scriptapart.com forward slash coverage to reach out that address one more time is scriptapart.com forward slash coverage or you can click the link in today's show notes. 26:48.404 --> 26:50.226 [SPEAKER_02]: Okay, let's get back to the conversation. 26:52.987 --> 26:57.390 [SPEAKER_02]: Imagine there how an anti-hero is trying to do something good. 26:57.970 --> 26:59.772 [SPEAKER_02]: There's just paths going around it in the wrong way. 27:00.532 --> 27:07.737 [SPEAKER_02]: That's articulated in the film, like the possibility of Facebook attempting to be a utopian thing is set allowed. 27:07.957 --> 27:17.083 [SPEAKER_02]: Like Francis really believes in the beginning of the film, even as she starts to whistle blow, that Facebook can connect people and that it can be a force for good. 27:18.268 --> 27:26.990 [SPEAKER_02]: Why is it that you felt the need to make that clear in the movie like is there some utopian version of social media that could exist? 27:27.410 --> 27:35.132 [SPEAKER_02]: But is constantly derailed by the forces of capitalism and the forces of greed that you wanted to get at by threading in that detail? 27:35.952 --> 27:36.952 [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, sure. 27:37.112 --> 27:40.353 [SPEAKER_03]: Well, first of all, it's the truth, Francis. 27:41.705 --> 27:52.075 [SPEAKER_03]: took a job at Facebook specifically because they have this particular division, the Pacific integrity team, which is supposed to be the one team at Facebook that doesn't care about growth. 27:53.376 --> 27:56.980 [SPEAKER_03]: They only care about safety, but it just being true. 27:57.260 --> 28:00.042 [SPEAKER_03]: That's not enough to dare into a movie. 28:01.533 --> 28:14.501 [SPEAKER_03]: I wanted her to start from a position of being as far away from being a little slower as possible, right, if she was a character who had an axe to grind with Facebook that would be different. 28:14.741 --> 28:20.585 [SPEAKER_03]: But she is, as she tells Jeff at their first meeting, she is trying to help Facebook not hurt it. 28:21.496 --> 28:35.144 [SPEAKER_02]: you invoke the Greek myth of

Cassandra around Francis and I love how that plays out in the film, especially in how she forces Covid before anyone else and reacts to it before anyone else. 28:35.684 --> 28:41.007 [SPEAKER_02]: I should ask about the Covid of it all because you fold it into the movie in a way that 28:41.707 --> 28:55.432 [SPEAKER_02]: isn't just in service of narrative, like there's also a theme that it's in service of, like you seem to draw a line from the spread and contagion of that virus in 2020 to the spreading contagion of disinformation in social media. 28:55.452 --> 28:56.533 [SPEAKER_02]: Tell me how that idea can to be. 28:57.013 --> 29:03.883 [SPEAKER_03]: But I hate to say that there's about something that killed so many people, but it did fit in nicely. 29:04.945 --> 29:11.855 [SPEAKER_03]: After the reasons that you just said, she begins the first time we hear about 29:11.935 --> 29:13.275 [SPEAKER_03]: COVID. 29:13.335 --> 29:17.156 [SPEAKER_03]: It's spent halfway through the movie. 29:17.276 --> 29:21.898 [SPEAKER_03]: She asked Jeff, you know, are you reading about this novel virus? 29:21.938 --> 29:29.140 [SPEAKER_03]: And she has created a Facebook group so that people compose data, trying to track its infectiousness. 29:29.680 --> 29:30.300 [SPEAKER_03]: And she's... 29:31.461 --> 29:37.027 [SPEAKER_03]: She's trying to give Jeff a lesson in COVID while just paying attention to something. 29:37.067 --> 29:38.889 [SPEAKER_03]: I'll say he's just not listening. 29:39.269 --> 29:40.431 [SPEAKER_03]: He doesn't care about COVID. 29:40.451 --> 29:45.416 [SPEAKER_03]: He's sort of representing the rest of us in January of 2020. 29:45.496 --> 29:48.920 [SPEAKER_03]: We weren't caring about COVID a few weeks later. 29:48.940 --> 29:51.583 [SPEAKER_03]: We were all caring about COVID a lot. 29:53.332 --> 30:09.676 [SPEAKER_02]: And tell me about Jeff as well, like he's a very classic Sorkean character, right, in that like he's very noble, he's in pursuit of the truth, he's in pursuit of justice and yeah, he's an upholder of threatened American ideals in this case, like a free press. 30:10.117 --> 30:12.557 [SPEAKER_02]: All very, all very Aaron Sorkean. 30:12.917 --> 30:15.578 [SPEAKER_02]: Ah, what did you hope to do with his arc and, um, 30:15.898 --> 30:19.480 [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, how did you see his relationship with Francis blossoming? 30:19.760 --> 30:24.042 [SPEAKER_02]: Because she's initially someone that he's leveraging for a story. 30:24.182 --> 30:27.023 [SPEAKER_02]: But by the end, there's a protectiveness there. 30:27.123 --> 30:32.305 [SPEAKER_02]: Like he had rather put his story on ice than have her life ruined by meta. 30:32.585 --> 30:34.886 [SPEAKER_02]: And there's genuine affection. 30:35.266 --> 30:38.688 [SPEAKER_02]: There's genuine warmth between them in this sort of handholding at the end. 30:39.388 --> 30:40.229 [SPEAKER_02]: Tell me about all of this. 30:40.269 --> 30:41.789 [SPEAKER_02]: Tell me how you grew their story. 30:44.087 --> 30:45.947 [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, he's a professional. 30:46.007 --> 30:48.528 [SPEAKER_03]: He, she's a source. 30:48.728 --> 30:56.269 [SPEAKER_03]: They are a fun duo to hang out with because they make each other very frustrated. 30:56.850 --> 30:59.470 [SPEAKER_03]: He is a tech reporter who doesn't know anything about tech. 31:01.411 --> 31:08.052 [SPEAKER_03]: And she can barely have a conversation with them because of how little he knows. 31:08.792 --> 31:27.317 [SPEAKER_03]: he comes to like her a lot and you know what he sees there also is someone who was never invited to the cool kids table as she puts it herself she's the kid in the class with her hand raised that nobody wants the teacher to call on. 31:28.297 --> 31:30.758 [SPEAKER_03]: And and and and 31:32.607 --> 31:38.311 [SPEAKER_03]: and he likes her so much so that by the end of the film he's worried about her. 31:38.591 --> 31:48.077 [SPEAKER_03]: He doesn't want her to be a whistleblower to get whistleblower status, which will protect her except it means two things. 31:48.957 --> 31:54.440 [SPEAKER_03]: One, she'll have to testify publicly and this is an awkward shy young woman. 31:55.581 --> 31:55.841 [SPEAKER_03]: Two, 32:02.105 --> 32:11.754 [SPEAKER_03]: Love's tech, it's the only place she's comfortable is sitting in front of a keyboard, sitting in front of her computer screen and she was born to do this. 32:11.874 --> 32:14.237 [SPEAKER_03]: She's extremely well-educated and trained. 32:14.257 --> 32:20.803 [SPEAKER_03]: You know, she obviously got 100s on all of her math tests. 32:22.206 --> 32:35.376 [SPEAKER_02]: There are actually really interesting parallels I'm realizing now between Francis and Mark in that like, there are two people who both felt like they were on the outside looking in, they weren't part of the cool club at school. 32:36.276 --> 32:47.405 [SPEAKER_02]: Mark responded to that feeling with a form of bitterness and something harsh, whereas like, there's something softer to how Francis is responded to that feeling from her early life and, um, 32:47.831 --> 33:06.887 [SPEAKER_03]: yeah it's interesting that's right uh uh uh with market became uh kind of an anger uh at people who were invited to the cool kids table uh right when his best-branded wardo uh gets invited to uh come join 33:07.860 --> 33:19.250 [SPEAKER_03]: one of the final clubs at the Harvard campus marks bond with him as two kids who weren't invited to the cool kids table is rupture there. 33:20.691 --> 33:26.496 [SPEAKER_03]: And it goes all the way to marks growing him out of hundreds of millions of dollars. 33:26.856 --> 33:27.256 [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah. 33:27.497 --> 33:27.777 [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah. 33:29.197 --> 33:50.128 [SPEAKER_02]: The big reveal that this film is all building up to is of course the revelation that was in the Facebook files that Facebook as a company made the purposeful decision to serve us all content that's meant to in rage because as we've been

talking about like that creates more engagement even if it does a road society and stoke division. 33:51.288 --> 33:54.750 [SPEAKER_02]: An interesting texture of the film that I found myself thinking 33:58.982 --> 34:11.767 [SPEAKER_02]: is the fact that back when the Facebook files dropped, that was a revelation, but today, incitement to anger, like, that's a content strategy. 34:11.807 --> 34:12.728 [SPEAKER_02]: That's mainstream. 34:12.788 --> 34:15.549 [SPEAKER_02]: It's not like covert anymore. 34:15.569 --> 34:20.651 [SPEAKER_02]: I imagine if it's not already the term rage bait will soon be in, 34:22.792 --> 34:24.554 [SPEAKER_02]: Um, how do you reflect on that? 34:24.654 --> 34:42.028 [SPEAKER_02]: Like the fact that the weaponization of outrage that's a bombshell in 2021, like it's now commonplace amongst social media users, like, that's a weird thing to reckon with, like, it's almost as if we didn't learn the right lesson from the Facebook files. 34:43.073 --> 34:44.654 [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, I know what you mean. 34:46.474 --> 34:49.676 [SPEAKER_03]: There was a fear of mine that because of what you're saying. 34:50.676 --> 34:55.818 [SPEAKER_03]: There was a fear of mine that the audience reaction would be less thick. 34:55.878 --> 34:58.139 [SPEAKER_03]: And we supposed to think that rage bait. 34:59.381 --> 35:03.222 [SPEAKER_03]: is a big deal, or that Jeff has uncovered something important. 35:03.843 --> 35:13.026 [SPEAKER_03]: But then I think when you get the last scene of the movie, we see, hey, wait, this is much, much bigger than I thought. 35:14.107 --> 35:17.248 [SPEAKER_03]: This is much more dangerous than I thought. 35:17.628 --> 35:23.590 [SPEAKER_03]: And what we're seeing at the end of the movie, that might not be the worst thing that could happen. 35:28.960 --> 35:47.677 [SPEAKER_02]: I suppose the biggest illustrator, the fact that rage-bait one, I suppose, is the fact that I'm a journalist who exists in the world that Meta built, and I'm going to have to publicise this episode on Meta platforms to get it heard, and 35:48.578 --> 36:06.299 [SPEAKER_02]: The best thing that could happen for me to publicize this episode would be if you and I had a big argument right now Like if you were to insult me like that would shoot to the straight to the top of the Instagram algorithm because again confrontation is the currency right? 36:10.010 --> 36:12.692 [SPEAKER_03]: If you feel free, it's okay. 36:14.414 --> 36:22.641 [SPEAKER_03]: I understand, but there is a difference between a podcast and a news source, okay? 36:22.761 --> 36:33.070 [SPEAKER_03]: When Facebook went into the news business, when meta went into the news business, which they did by introducing the news feed and somewhere in the 2010s, they, they, they, 36:36.147 --> 36:41.288 [SPEAKER_03]: they should have had a whole new set of responsibilities. 36:41.829 --> 36:49.071 [SPEAKER_03]: Okay, you know, the New York Times doesn't put rage bait on its front page. 36:49.291 --> 36:51.211 [SPEAKER_03]: They have a different set of responsibilities. 36:52.291 --> 37:01.174 [SPEAKER_03]: And I also wondered, listen, people who are struggling in one way or another, 37:03.443 --> 37:06.306 [SPEAKER_03]: It's hard for them sometimes to do the right thing. 37:06.766 --> 37:11.890 [SPEAKER_03]: When the alternative is, well, let me do the thing that will get me a paycheck next week. 37:12.871 --> 37:19.056 [SPEAKER_03]: When you're worth $120 billion, it should no longer be hard for you to do the right thing. 37:19.076 --> 37:23.099 [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, shit is the opposite word there. 37:23.519 --> 37:27.142 [SPEAKER_02]: We've got to talk about the ending and the January sick to be all. 37:27.623 --> 37:30.125 [SPEAKER_02]: The entire film is building towards that assault, 37:32.486 --> 37:40.370 [SPEAKER_02]: It's used as a crescendo for this movie, and one thing that struck me is Trump goes unnamed in all this. 37:40.670 --> 37:47.234 [SPEAKER_02]: We see Zuckerberg in his war room wondering whether or not to shut his account down, he stokes this insurrection. 37:48.615 --> 37:52.517 [SPEAKER_02]: I'm curious about the decision not to invoke his name and all the baggage that comes with it. 37:52.657 --> 37:53.057 [SPEAKER_02]: Like, uh, 37:54.057 --> 38:06.022 [SPEAKER_02]: I'm also curious about the sort of emptiness that Zuckerberg seems to possess in that moment, because well, you seem to use your camera to frame him with a certain smallness, Aaron, like a part. 38:06.282 --> 38:12.864 [SPEAKER_02]: He is a small man being confronted with the real world consequences of his decision-making in that moment. 38:13.264 --> 38:17.086 [SPEAKER_02]: That's kind of what the framing of your camera seems to be articulating. 38:17.504 --> 38:17.984 [SPEAKER_03]: Well, good. 38:18.104 --> 38:19.225 [SPEAKER_03]: I'm glad you got all that. 38:20.025 --> 38:26.467 [SPEAKER_03]: I, um, the studio did not tell me, uh, don't use Trump's name. 38:26.988 --> 38:37.191 [SPEAKER_03]: They probably would have, but, um, on, uh, I, I delivered the script and I think it was just two days later, uh, I was sitting in Tom Rothman's office. 38:37.211 --> 38:39.432 [SPEAKER_03]: He's the chairman of, uh, of Sony. 38:48.484 --> 38:49.245 [SPEAKER_03]: on solicited. 38:50.766 --> 38:55.110 [SPEAKER_03]: In the January 16th, we are not going to see any Trump signage at all. 38:55.790 --> 38:57.011 [SPEAKER_03]: No, make America great again. 38:57.412 --> 39:01.055 [SPEAKER_03]: It's just going to see, it'll be American flags, Confederate flags. 39:01.575 --> 39:02.456 [SPEAKER_03]: Don't tread on me. 39:02.516 --> 39:05.238 [SPEAKER_03]: Maybe a Q&A thing once in a while. 39:05.859 --> 39:13.004 [SPEAKER_03]: But I didn't want it to, by the end of this whole thing to, I didn't want to reduce it to, 39:14.710 --> 39:25.977 [SPEAKER_03]: Trump versus not Trump or Democrats versus Republicans, it's about something bigger and more timeless

than that. 39:26.897 --> 39:38.985 [SPEAKER_03]: So I kept Trump signage out of the January 16th and they don't use his name in that war room that they set up, but we sure know who they're talking about. 39:39.946 --> 39:45.431 [SPEAKER_03]: As for the framing of Mark, yes, he is alone. 39:45.452 --> 39:47.534 [SPEAKER_03]: He's a deer in headlights. 39:51.077 --> 39:55.903 [SPEAKER_03]: I thought, you know, I, I, I, I thought very briefly about, 39:58.305 --> 40:15.854 [SPEAKER_03]: just very quick shots from the social network of him in his dorm room, creating Facebook, this site that was just going to be your social life online, to show Mark thinking about what the thing has become. 40:16.735 --> 40:19.216 [SPEAKER_03]: And I decided, yeah, that's going to distract us too. 40:19.636 --> 40:20.476 [SPEAKER_03]: It'll take us out of it. 40:28.181 --> 40:29.222 [SPEAKER_03]: I talked to about that. 40:29.343 --> 40:41.758 [SPEAKER_03]: I talked to about when I was younger, the way the president to dress the country, it wasn't done. 40:42.582 --> 40:57.494 [SPEAKER_03]: Twitter or Twitter social, he went on the networks and imagine I said to Jeremy that you don't like what the president of the United States is saying, so you just don't plug the camera. 40:57.634 --> 40:59.676 [SPEAKER_03]: That's what you're doing in this room. 40:59.696 --> 41:01.257 [SPEAKER_03]: You're making that decision. 41:01.597 --> 41:04.200 [SPEAKER_03]: You don't like what the president is saying, so you're unplugged me. 41:06.802 --> 41:09.784 [SPEAKER_03]: And if you watch the other film, if you watch his 41:11.876 --> 41:14.778 [SPEAKER_03]: Um, you, you can kind of feel all that in it. 41:15.418 --> 41:15.718 [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah. 41:15.958 --> 41:16.118 [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah. 41:16.138 --> 41:30.726 [SPEAKER_02]: The framing reminded me of, um, the Adam McKay movie don't look up like, there's a story that in that film in which like, a billionaire genius is supposed to have will be answers, but in the, the final scene like when his big ideas kind of come on stop. 41:30.766 --> 41:31.887 [SPEAKER_03]: Stop violence is character. 41:32.087 --> 41:32.807 [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, that's right. 41:32.827 --> 41:33.067 [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah. 41:33.767 --> 41:45.830 [SPEAKER_02]: In that scene, this man who's lauded almost as a tech god, who sees the answers the rest of us don't because of course he does look how much money he has, all of a sudden he's just a man in a suit. 41:46.110 --> 41:51.291 [SPEAKER_02]: He's so fallible and so futile and Jeremy kind of looks like her in that scene. 41:52.391 --> 41:56.612 [SPEAKER_03]: He does, and the last shot in that room, which I think is what you're referring 42:02.413 --> 42:19.169 [SPEAKER_03]: uh... who's just sitting there staring at the screen all by himself uh... i don't think he's aware that there are no people in the room anymore and he's aware of anything else i don't even know what he's thinking uh... but he's just by himself uh... with all these screens around him showing what the world became that day 42:21.408 --> 42:24.471 [SPEAKER_02]: This is perhaps an unanswerable question. 42:24.611 --> 42:28.735 [SPEAKER_02]: Okay, but I hit it something I found myself thinking about during the film. 42:29.656 --> 42:38.644 [SPEAKER_02]: There's a school of thought among Zuckerberg biographers that the social network in 2010 caused this pivot in Zuckerberg's behavior. 42:38.804 --> 42:39.985 [SPEAKER_02]: He didn't like the film. 42:40.285 --> 42:41.607 [SPEAKER_02]: He didn't like how it portrayed him. 42:42.587 --> 43:00.780 [SPEAKER_02]: And he kind of resulted in like a doubling down on certain characteristics within him and like some attempts at a public kind of narrative shift and I'm curious for you Aaron does the movie the social network exist in the world of the social reckoning 43:01.560 --> 43:03.860 [SPEAKER_02]: And is this Mark Zuckerberg we're watching on screen? 43:04.401 --> 43:08.641 [SPEAKER_02]: One who is in part a product of yours and David Finch's previous movie. 43:08.661 --> 43:12.522 [SPEAKER_02]: I don't know if that makes sense, but hopefully you get what I'm getting at. 43:13.522 --> 43:16.423 [SPEAKER_03]: That's such a, you know, I've never thought of that. 43:17.143 --> 43:20.983 [SPEAKER_03]: It does the social network exist in the world of the social reckoning. 43:21.584 --> 43:28.165 [SPEAKER_03]: And well, it makes your brain hurt on thinking about what it would take for that to be true. 43:30.730 --> 43:46.158 [SPEAKER_03]: But I cannot speculate on what is going through Mark's mind that have motivated just outwardly some of the changes that we've seen. 43:46.638 --> 43:52.401 [SPEAKER_03]: The way he dresses, he's, you know, he's really into MMA fighting now. 43:55.883 --> 44:02.046 [SPEAKER_03]: And, you know, maybe it's a billionaires who's bored and needs to do this stuff. 44:02.846 --> 44:14.292 [SPEAKER_03]: Maybe he's still trying to fill that cool kid's table, shaped hole in his soul. 44:14.632 --> 44:14.692 [SPEAKER_02]: Mm. 44:15.412 --> 44:16.233 [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, very nice. 44:18.115 --> 44:32.243 [SPEAKER_02]: Despite the fact that there are so many reasons to perhaps end this film on a note of morning, Aaron, like January 6th, was obviously such a stain on America's history, and the Facebook vials didn't dissuade meta in the end. 44:32.283 --> 44:34.044 [SPEAKER_03]: So I still had to give it an upbeat ending. 44:34.584 --> 44:35.705 [SPEAKER_03]: I can't help myself. 44:36.465 --> 44:37.866 [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, you were going there. 44:38.186 --> 44:39.067 [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah. 44:39.627 --> 44:47.772 [SPEAKER_02]: But my question for you is, and maybe it's a chicken or the egg question, but... Do you insist upon optimism in your work and in your endings? 44:48.152 --> 44:50.333 [SPEAKER_02]: Because that's truly how you see the world. 44:50.433 --> 44:52.274 [SPEAKER_02]: You see it through that optimistic lens. 44:52.354

--> 44:55.656 [SPEAKER_02]: You see Francis's story here as a win. 44:56.477 --> 45:03.381 [SPEAKER_02]: Or do you see the need to send audiences out of movie theaters, armed with some kind of hope, because how else do they keep fighting? 45:03.761 --> 45:05.802 [SPEAKER_03]: Well, that's exactly right. 45:07.343 --> 45:09.504 [SPEAKER_03]: First of all, it being a movie. 45:11.345 --> 45:18.549 [SPEAKER_03]: I want, I want to give the audience that goosebumps experience, that lump in your throat of the sort of experience at the end. 45:19.350 --> 45:24.252 [SPEAKER_03]: I want the audience to somehow just feel two inches taller than they were when they came in. 45:27.114 --> 45:34.137 [SPEAKER_03]: The vehicle for that in this movie is, yeah, we just showed you the calamity. 45:36.538 --> 45:47.922 [SPEAKER_03]: But David, Elias, and landed a punch, you know, we, there are Francis Huggins in the world. 45:48.203 --> 45:51.504 [SPEAKER_03]: There are heroes who don't wear capes, there are heroes who don't have 45:57.125 --> 46:10.853 [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, yeah, the last time we spoke Aaron, I actually asked you about January 6 and how you might approach a dramatization of an event like that because it did feel so sorky into me. 46:11.094 --> 46:18.158 [SPEAKER_02]: And you indicated that it was a possibility that there was indeed something that felt ripe about it for your storytelling. 46:18.818 --> 46:33.183 [SPEAKER_02]: And I asked that question, I think, because there are certain stories within our new cycle, that are these flashpoints of American decency, which is your entire storytelling modus operandi, as we've been talking about. 46:34.303 --> 46:51.530 [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I was thinking about what the current American flashpoint is in regard to American decency and the institutions that we hold there and one story left out of me, and I wanted to ask you whether you would ever tackle this as a drama test. 46:52.710 --> 46:54.071 [SPEAKER_02]: The Luigi Manjouini story. 46:54.951 --> 47:07.138 [SPEAKER_02]: Is there something too complicated or too naughty about that tale to bring to the screen or can you see how they could be in our in-sawking movie about that whole situation? 47:07.159 --> 47:09.720 [SPEAKER_03]: I wouldn't rule it out. 47:10.320 --> 47:15.744 [SPEAKER_03]: I wouldn't rule anything out, especially at a time when I have no idea what I'm going to do next. 47:16.804 --> 47:19.286 [SPEAKER_03]: I don't have any ideas at all, so I'm open. 47:25.483 --> 47:36.766 [SPEAKER_03]: Even though this subject, even though the social reckoning feels awfully timely, I'm really not interested in timeliness, I'm more interested in timelessness. 47:37.386 --> 47:41.847 [SPEAKER_03]: I want social reckoning to be a movie which 10, 20, 50 years from now. 47:42.408 --> 47:46.969 [SPEAKER_03]: You can still watch and say, as a good movie, just like we can with all the president's been. 47:48.089 --> 47:51.110 [SPEAKER_03]: So, yeah, sure why not. 47:52.712 --> 48:07.440 [SPEAKER_02]: This has been a period for you, Aaron, in which you've been very much reconnecting with previous work of yours, like the social reckoning places you back in, the world of the social network, and you're also bringing a few good men to the stage. 48:08.421 --> 48:18.066 [SPEAKER_02]: As you've looked back at these examples of your storytelling from decades previous, what have you noticed about the ways you've changed or not changed as a storyteller? 48:18.446 --> 48:22.129 [SPEAKER_02]: Like, you're obviously directing now as well as writing, and that's a key difference. 48:22.210 --> 48:28.195 [SPEAKER_02]: But I'd love to hear what the other differences might be in how you see yourself now. 48:28.275 --> 48:30.797 [SPEAKER_02]: This is who you see when you look back. 48:31.598 --> 48:33.480 [SPEAKER_03]: I think it's selfishly. 48:36.363 --> 48:40.226 [SPEAKER_03]: One of the things I really love about being a writer is you do get better as you get older. 48:40.607 --> 48:44.430 [SPEAKER_03]: It's the opposite of an athlete, you get better as you get older. 48:44.991 --> 48:48.014 [SPEAKER_03]: So I like doing that. 48:48.554 --> 48:53.679 [SPEAKER_03]: I wish I would hurry up to the next step and you mentioned the directing. 48:54.420 --> 48:59.905 [SPEAKER_03]: That's where it's really agonizing because I am learning on the job. 49:01.086 --> 49:11.152 [SPEAKER_03]: And I'll sit in the editing room and look at a scene and say, oh my god, if I can just get another chance, I know how to do that scene now. 49:11.192 --> 49:12.073 [SPEAKER_03]: I know what not to do. 49:14.554 --> 49:25.121 [SPEAKER_03]: So, I was a freshman film student and now I'm a junior and I'm looking forward to my scene right here. 49:26.453 --> 49:28.255 [SPEAKER_02]: Well, that's a lovely note to end things on Aaron. 49:28.835 --> 49:30.737 [SPEAKER_02]: Thank you so much for coming back on script to part. 49:31.257 --> 49:39.524 [SPEAKER_02]: I guess for promotional purposes, on meta platforms, all that's left for us now to end this episode is for Ragebait. 49:39.945 --> 49:43.007 [SPEAKER_02]: You have to call me a hack in the storm off Aaron. 49:43.828 --> 49:49.092 [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, out there you say that thing to me, that you just said, my God. 49:50.033 --> 49:50.374 [SPEAKER_03]: How's that? 49:50.714 --> 49:51.595 [SPEAKER_02]: That's perfect. 49:52.296 --> 49:53.537 [SPEAKER_02]: Okay. 49:53.637 --> 49:54.118 [SPEAKER_02]: We did it. 49:54.158 --> 49:55.319 [SPEAKER_02]: Thanks again for coming on Aaron. 49:55.339 --> 49:56.040 [SPEAKER_02]: It's great. 49:56.060 --> 49:56.981 [SPEAKER_03]: Thanks very much for this. 49:57.061 --> 49:57.942 [SPEAKER_03]: I appreciate you. 49:59.524 --> 50:00.185 [SPEAKER_02]: There you have it. 50:00.285 --> 50:06.492 [SPEAKER_02]: That was my conversation with Aaron Sorkin discussing the first off secrets of the social reckoning. 50:07.342 --> 50:22.300 [SPEAKER_02]: But now, at the risk of being a massive hypocrite, given that I have just spent the best part of an hour of badmouthing social media, if you would like to shout about us on your social channels, that word of mouth really does help the show continue to grow. 50:22.700 --> 50:26.924 [SPEAKER_02]: So, please feel free to make some noise about Script Apart if you're so inclined. 50:26.944 --> 50:30.627 [SPEAKER_02]: Or a reminder as well that Script Apart is now on Substack. 50:30.847 --> 50:35.251 [SPEAKER_02]: You'll find exclusive interviews, exclusive essays, and a lot more. 50:35.511 --> 50:38.774 [SPEAKER_02]: Your dress for that is scriptdepart.substack.com. 50:39.335 --> 50:42.578 [SPEAKER_02]: I'll be back in a couple of days with another new episode. 50:43.218 --> 50:46.141 [SPEAKER_02]: In the meantime guys, thank you so much for being here. 50:46.521 --> 50:47.422 [SPEAKER_02]: I'll catch you soon. 50:47.662 --> 50:48.443 [SPEAKER_02]: Take it easy out there.