Mark Zuckerberg On David Fincher’s ‘The Social Network’: “I Found It Kind Of Hurtful”
Way back whenThe Social Networkwas about to come out, there was all this talk about howMark Zuckerbergwas pissed off about it and never planned to see it. But he did, and he’s spoken out a few times about how inaccurate it was. Now he’s gotten even more in-depth with his thoughts, frankly admitting that he found the whole thing “kind of hurtful.”
Read the reaction from Mark Zuckerberg onThe Social Networkafter the jump.
The Vergereports Zuckerberg touched uponThe Social Networkin a Q&A session this week. Here’s what he had to say:
I haven’t met the writer of the movie. I met [Jesse Eisenberg] once. They went out of their way in the movie to try to get some interesting details correct like design of office, but with overarching plot about why we’re building Facebook or how we did it, they just kind of made up a bunch of stuff that I found kind of hurtful. I take our mission really seriously. We’re here not to just build a company, but to help connect the world and help people connect to people they love. The thing that I found most interesting about the movie was that they made up this plotline about how I decided to create Facebook to attract girls.
One important piece of context is the woman I’m married to who I’ve been dating for ten years, I was dating her before starting Facebook. If somehow I was trying to create Facebook to find more women, that probably wouldn’t have gone over well in my relationship. There were glaring things made up about movie that made it hard for me to take seriously. But we had some fun with it. We knew everyone at Facebook was gonna want to see it. So we actually took the whole company to go see it the day it came out.
Zuckerberg often repeats that bit about having been with now-wife Priscilla Chan since before he started Facebook, but it’snot technically true. He did meet her before he started Facebook, but they didn’t begin dating until he hired her to work on Facebook.
That’s not to sayDavid FincherandAaron Sorkin’s version of events is any more accurate, though. Sorkin and Fincher are filmmakers, and while they worked hard to get the visual details right onThe Social Network, their first priority was making a good movie — not telling the unvarnished, unembellished truth from Zuckerberg’s perspective.
Overall, it’s entirely understandable that Zuckerberg would be “hurt” by the film’s depiction of him, since it wasn’t exactly flattering. But he seems to have taken it in stride. He even had enough of a sense of humor about it all tocameo on Eisenberg’s episode ofSaturday Night Livea few years ago. And lord knows the film hasn’t harmed Facebook any.
