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It's been awhile since David Fincher's The Social Network came out, but it was recently brought up in a Q&A with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg that The Verge was attending. When talking about the movie he admitted that he "kind of found it hurtful." Yes, believe it or not, even the incredibly rich people of the world have feelings too.
When the movie first opened up there were rumors of Zuckerberg being so pissed off about it that he was never going to see it. Of course, he went out to watch it. In fact, he took the whole company along with him.
He has talked about the movie before, but this time around he's a little bit more open about his thoughts and feelings. This is what he said:
I haven’t spent a lot of time thinking about this in a while. I kinda blocked that one out. It was a very interesting experience to watch a movie that was supposedly about my life. The reality is that writing code and building a product is not a glamorous enough thing to make a movie about. A lot of the stuff they probably had to embellish and make up. If they were really making a movie, it would’ve just been me at a computer coding for two hours straight. And these people want to make money.
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 [for the] 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.
I do find it interesting that he continues to say that he started dating his wife Priscilla Chan before he started Facebook, because it's been revealed that they didn’t start dating until after he hired her to work for Facebook. I guess it doesn't matter.
The thing is, Hollywood always embellishes the "true story" films to make them more interesting. The main priority of Fincher and writer Aaron Sorkin was to make a great movie, which they succeeded in. I could see why Zuckerberg would be hurt by the film's depiction of him though. Hey, he's still more wealthy than everyone involved with making the film combined, so that should make him feel a little better.
