“I was my second-choice to direct it,” Aaron Sorkin candidly admitted as we sat down last week at the the Newport Beach Film Festival to record an episode of The Hollywood Reporter’s Awards Chatter podcast and began discussing the film for which he was receiving the fest’s Maverick Director Award: The Social Reckoning, which he also wrote.
This film about Facebook — specifically, about the social media company’s knowledge and cover-up of its harmful effects on society, and the whistleblower (Mikey Madison) who brought them to the attention of a journalist (Jeremy Allen White), creating problems for Mark Zuckerberg (Jeremy Strong) — comes 16 years after another that Sorkin wrote, the massively acclaimed The Social Network, which David Fincher directed.
Of The Social Reckoning, Sorkin explained, “I would have rather David Fincher directed it — I would rather David Fincher direct everything — but David has an exclusive deal at Netflix, and this was owned by Sony.” And so it was that Sorkin himself ended up helming the $40 million film that Sony released nationwide on Oct. 9, which, to his disappointment, was greeted with considerably fewer enthusiastic reviews (it’s at 54 percent on Rotten Tomatoes) and ticket sales (it has grossed just $15 million worldwide) than the earlier film.
Sorkin has been writing movies for 35 years — among them 1992’s A Few Good Men, 1995’s The American President, 2007’s Charlie Wilson’s War, the aforementioned The Social Network (for which he won screenplay Oscar and Golden Globe awards), 2011’s Moneyball (screenplay Oscar nom), 2015’s Steve Jobs (for which he won a screenplay Golden Globe), 2017’s Molly’s Game (screenplay Oscar nom), 2020’s The Trial of the Chicago 7 (screenplay Oscar nom) and 2021’s Being the Ricardos — and is widely regarded as one of the greatest screenwriters of all time, in a league with his heroes Paddy Chayefsky and William Goldman. (He also wrote some of the most admired and provocative TV series of all times, most notably every episode of the first four seasons of NBC’s The West Wing.)
But over the past decade, as Sorkin stepped behind the camera to helm Molly’s Game, The Trial of the Chicago 7, Being the Ricardos and The Social Reckoning, he has taken more than a few knocks for his directing. And in Newport Beach, he was candid about how it has made him feel: “There’s a big part of me that feels like I just got into the movie business a few minutes ago, and that there’s so much I don’t know. From time to time, I get to speak with screenwriting students, and I’ll be asked, ‘Is screenwriting something that can be taught?’ And the answer is, ‘There are parts of screenwriting — important parts — that can be taught and can be learned, but there are parts that can’t be. And those parts that can’t be? That’s usually what we mean when we use the word ‘talent.’ I’m very worried that the parts of directing that I’m not good at are those parts that you can’t learn.”
Sorkin, whose pre-Molly’s Game films were directed by Rob Reiner, David Fincher, Bennett Miller, Mike Nichols and Danny Boyle, emphasizes, “I’m not done wanting to work with great directors, but when you work with the lineup of directors that you just read, you’d really have to not be paying attention to not learn anything.” Still, he admits, the learning curve has been greater than he anticipated — not in terms of working with actors, but in terms of knowing how to artfully use a camera. “I was surprised by how little of the science of filmmaking I’d managed to absorb.” He adds, “I have no visual sensibility, it turns out.”
The 65-year-old says that he relates to football coaches he has seen being interviewed after a losing game who insist that the elements for a win were all there, but just didn’t come together: “That’s how I feel about directing. There are things that I’ve been doing right along the way. Just give me one more chance, and one of these days I’ll be able to put it all together.”
Sorkin also weighed in on a number of other topics, as you can hear from yourself via the audio player above, or read select excerpts of below…
On potentially reviving The West Wing…
“I always want to rekindle the show. I love the show, I love those people and I miss it, especially nowadays. The problem is, you’ve got to have a story. They won’t let me just write dialogue. Also, the cast has gotten older; I didn’t know that was going to happen.”
On the demise of the mid-range-budget movie…
“This [The Social Reckoning] is my 11th movie, and except for A Few Good Men, I’m not sure if any of them would be feature films today; I think they would all have to be streaming.”
On the new Lincoln Center revival of A Few Good Men…
“This production is very different than the original Broadway production… I made my Broadway debut and became addicted to cocaine at roughly the same time… When I was 25, I was trying to write my first play, and I was having a hard time, and someone just kind of put a joint in my face, and I smoked a little of that, and then they laid out a couple of lines of coke, and I would end up losing a decade of my life to drugs, just gone. So I’m happy, this time around, to be working on it clean and sober. I’ve also been rewriting it, because I was very young when I wrote it — it was my first play — so in some ways, it’s a new play.”
