A friend once pointed out that if you read Robert Caro’s books on LBJ and Robert Moses, you might admire each volume individually — but both Moses and LBJ are essentially the same character in Caro’s retelling. Can that really have been the case? Is Caro a window onto these two giants’ personalities, or a dramatist creating character?
For “The Social Network,” Aaron Sorkin did an extensive interview with New York magazine that makes it clear that anytime reality gets in the way of Sorkinland, reality loses.
It’s kind of funny how many different ways Sorkin has of saying “never let the facts get in the way of a good story.” Sorkin says he hoped the movie’s lead character, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, wouldn’t participate — because that would interfere with his ability to make up stuff: “We did not want Mark participating, because we did not want to give the sense that this was a Facebook-endorsed movie, a puff piece of some kind.” Sorkin [says writer Mark Harris] had had some experience with a real-life subject looking over the shoulders of filmmakers and saying ‘But that’s not how it happened,” on 2007’s Charlie Wilson’s War, and didn’t particularly relish another round.”
Sorkin also says: “I don’t want my fidelity to be to the truth; I want it to be to storytelling.” Uh-oh.
And: “I was mostly picking a fight with David [Fincher] because I wanted to have it out with him on the question, what is the big deal about accuracy purely for accuracy’s sake, and can we not have the true be the enemy of the good?”
And: “I struggled before I started writing this. I tried to sound like a 19-year-old, which I don’t know how to do, and eventually I abandoned the idea and thought, This is just going to sound like me, the way I write.”
And: “This isn’t a documentary. Art isn’t about what happened, and the properties of people and the properties of ‘characters’ are two completely different things. There’s a set of facts I’m dealing with, and I try to imagine motivations and fill in blanks that none of us can see. But the question of truth … the very first words out of Mark’s mouth in the present-day part of the movie are, ‘That’s not what happened.’ And that’s my signal to the audience that there are going to be any number of unreliable narrators.”
