David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin have talked about what a natural Jesse Eisenberg was at delivering Sorkin's dense, mile-a-minute dialogue in "The Social Network." And a conversation with the 27-year-old actor will convince you that there's good reason for that.
Eisenberg isn't anti-social or awkward like Mark Zuckerberg, his real-life character and founder of Facebook, but the words spill out of him in torrents – even when Sorkin isn't writing the dialogue.
Fincher's film has turned the indie-bred Eisenberg into a serious Best Actor contender, and already landed him awards from several critics groups and the National Board of Review.
Zuckerberg is a pretty public figure. How careful were you to pick up his mannerisms, his style?
It was important to me initially, but I soon realized that it was not important to David. I asked him if I could dye my hair red to look like Mark, and he said, "You need to think about what it's like to start this company and to be 23 and be defending it. You need to think about what it’s like to be in awe of somebody who might be a little bit dangerous, and what it's like to have to cut a friend out of a company. You should be focusing on the psychological aspects of the character, rather than the outward appearance or vocal style of the character."
It's a lot more interesting to go into the psychology of somebody so unique, rather than to do some kind of mimicry.
So, in the end, do you think the movie is honest, and fair to Zuckerberg?
I have no idea. First of all, I've only seen the movie once. But I don’t know the real story. I wasn’t in those rooms. My only concern, really is the character of Mark: did I do the character justice? Is the character consistent? Is the character acting in a way that feels authentic? Are the character's desires and hopes and conflicts all evidenced in what I did?
And that's kind of hard to judge, because I have all this other stuff in my head about what I intended to do and what I thought I was doing and how I thought what I was doing would be perceived. So its impossible for me to think about how the real person would feel, and to gauge the accuracy of what we were doing.
Fincher's known for doing 40 or 50 takes. How do you not think, "What am I doing wrong?"
You think that the first scene, and then right away you realize, oh, this is just how he works. And then it becomes immediately enjoyable, because you have a wonderful opportunity to experiment.
The first scene we did 99 times, and that gave us the opportunity to try different characters out. There's the character of somebody who's really emotionally detached, or somebody who's maybe more personable.
