Has Frances seen the movie?
Yes, we screened it for her just a couple of weeks ago. That was a scary two hours for me. Fortunately, she really loved it.
Did she come to set?
No. I didn’t want Mikey to have to play Frances in front of Frances or Jeremy Allen White to have to play Jeff in front of Jeff. She stayed away from the set. They both did.
You told me you joined Facebook when you were researching this one.
I was on Facebook for the period that I was writing The Social Network, and then I was on Facebook again for the period that I was writing, and I think maybe shooting the movie. I can’t remember. At some point, my assistant pulled the plug on it.
Because it’s addictive.
It is. In my case, on my first day back on Facebook now, Facebook 2.0, because, wow, was it different back in 2009 when I was writing The Social Network. But the first thing that came up in my feed happened to be a picture of a dachshund. I like dachshunds, so I thought, Well, okay, you got to start training the algorithm. And I liked it. And from that point forward, all Facebook was for me was pictures of dachshunds. My entire Facebook experience is just pictures of dachshunds.
You’re a dachshund extremist now.
Right, I’ve been radicalized.
Sony hired an outside legal firm for this specific film. What didn’t you get to include that you wish you could have explored?
Under ordinary circumstances, the studio will do a thorough legal vet of the script. These were extraordinary circumstances. They decided to hire outside counsel just to handle this movie. There were a couple of things in my original draft: In the second-to-last scene, the scene ends with Teddy—Billy Magnussen—saying, “I don’t know what the fuck that girl thinks she’s doing.” That line was originally, “I don’t know what that bitch thinks she’s doing.” And the lawyer said, “Unless you can show me that at one point a senior Facebook executive referred to an ex-employee as a bitch, you can’t do that.” So it was that.
So only little details.
I’ll tell you a big one, but I just want to be careful about how I do this. Of the people I spoke to a lot: There’s Frances, Jeff, and a man named Roger McNamee. He was a big early investor in Facebook and became a kind of consigliere to Mark until they had a big falling out over the direction of the company. Roger published an op-ed and a book called Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe. Originally, it was made clear to me that I couldn’t call Bill Burr’s character Roger McNamee, not because there was going to be a problem with Roger, who was on board, but because there might be a problem with Facebook and the situation that I have Mark and Bill Burr’s character in the movie. So that character had to become inspired by Roger McNamee, which is what it is now.
