And I feel like that's what I'm covering, right? This world where everyone only believes what's in their feed.

The idea that everyone knows only what's in their feed.

Somewhere in the 2010s, remember, Facebook was a cool idea, a way to keep in touch with your friends from school.

And somewhere in the 2010s, they added the news feed.

But that news feed is powered by an algorithm.

So you're getting the news you want, and I'm getting the news I want, and she's getting the news she wants.

even if that news is constantly feeding you, for instance, an immigrant committing a crime, right? So that you're going to feel like, wow, immigrants committed a lot of crimes.

I get that.

but seamlessness is their favorite word.

I- if in The Social Network in 2010, uh, the idea essentially was here's a, a guy who is not really comfortable in the social structure of college, a lot of us feel that way.

Feels there's a cool kids' table someplace, and he's not at it, and they're not gonna let him at it.

Uh, so he is a genius.

He builds his own digital virtual cool kids' table that he's now the mayor of.

Uh, what seems to be happening now, two things.

One, he's trying to get not only as many people as possible to his cool kids' table, growing the number of users.

First you, Aaron, and then Jeremy.

Yeah

... uh, I wanted to write.

Um, but one day, uh, uh, again, climbing the walls, I, I, I, I don't know what the shape of any of this is, uh, I, I asked Jeff a question I wish I'd asked him a year earlier.

It was a dramatist question.

What was Frances' inciting action? One day she wasn't a whistleblower, and the next day she was.

What happened?

Yeah.

Roger McNamee, he's a Silicon Valley VC, early investor in Facebook, and became kind of a consigliere, uh, to Mark.

Yep.

And she enlists the help of a Wall Street Journal reporter who's played by, uh, Jeremy Allen White.

Together, uh, they uncover these very dark secrets that, uh, Facebook has been keeping from us.

Uh, and in there, Mark Zuckerberg is in there, who's played by Jeremy Strong, who gives a thunderous performance in the film.

I mean, they are very deliberate, correct?

No, they are.

Um, a- and sometimes for the good.

Uh, you know, 16 years ago when The Social Network came out, about two weeks before the movie opened, uh, in order to, uh, kind of mitigate the bad press that, that Mark knew was coming his way, he donated $200 million to the Newark public school system.

Yep.

And she enlists the help of a Wall Street Journal reporter who's played by, uh, Jeremy Allen White.

Together, uh, they uncover these very dark secrets that, uh, Facebook has been keeping from us.

Uh, and in there, Mark Zuckerberg is in there.

He's played by Jeremy Strong, who gives a thunderous performance in the film.

I mean, they are very deliberate, correct?

No, they are.

Um, a- and sometimes for the good.

Yeah.

Frances Haugen, she was a mid-level, uh, engineer, product manager at Facebook.

She took the job at Facebook.

She h- t- she had the kind of credentials where she'd get a job anywhere, and she took the job at Facebook because they had created the Civic Integrity Team, one team at Facebook that was not supposed to be, uh, interested in growth, that there was always supposed to be a tension between growth and safety, and she was gonna be on the safety side.

These, these things were very important to her.

They would end up dissolving the Civic Integrity Team, and she began to see these, uh, uh, terrible things, uh, happening.

Uh, she tried to get her, the attention of her superiors, was unable to, and so was just going to, "Let me just talk to this reporter," which is something at, at Facebook you do not, uh, ta- I, I mean, they have NDAs with teeth.

... you're starting to envision being in New York or Los-- You're starting to envision where you are.

500?

Yeah.

Because here's what's happened since 2010.

Facebook added the newsfeed somewhere in the middle of the 2010s.

It was back in 2010, 2010, when we did the social network.

It was a neat way for you to keep up with friends you went to school with.

They added the newsfeed.

If Frances Hogan stayed at her job, she would be mind-blowingly wealthy right now.

yeah and what about you know your research they're obviously a key part of that but what else for you was important to kind of get to the elements of the world the truth that you wanted to have is you know to take forward for your creative interpretation

it's not so much the truth of who was wearing what hat yeah that kind of thing You're looking at somebody who, it takes me five minutes in the morning to find the power button on my computer.

I am technologically, digitally, illiterate.

You're Jeff.

I am.

I am.

And it's helpful to have a character like Jeff who knows as little as the audience does so that there's a reason to explain things.

It's kind of,

Yeah,

well, yes.

And it's handy with something like this.

You need a character who knows as little as the audience does, like Jeff, so that there's reason to explain things to him.

What suddenly got me going from meetings and conversations with Francis and Jeff to, wait a second, I think I can see the story now, is I asked Jeff, this was about a year after talking to them both and still not seeing what the story was, I asked Jeff, a dramatist's question that I wish I'd asked him a year earlier.

I said, what was the inciting action for Frances? One day she wasn't a whistleblower, the next day she was.

What happened exactly? And he said, she had this friend who got radicalized by spending time on Facebook and Frances wanted to figure out how and why that happened.

I'm always curious about writers who direct their own work.

I sat down with him outside the New York theater where the first stage revival of A Few Good Men since the classic 1992 will debut, where I asked him how his new movie, The Social Reckoning, is different from its predecessor.

The Social Network was about the invention of Facebook.

This is about what it's become, uh, and centers on a young Facebook engineer named Francis Haugen, she's played by Mikey Madison, uh, who just discovers this one thing, uh, a- about Facebook, this, this one terrible thing, and she can't get the attention of the people she works for.

And she finally has to do what at Facebook is the unthinkable, which is talk to a reporter.

Absolutely not supposed to do that.

She talks to Jeremy Allen White's character, an investigative reporter for the Wall Street Journal, and things just begin to snowball from there.

They uncover together these very dark secrets that Facebook's been keeping from us, and she becomes a whistleblower.

How do we break free of all these people making money and gaining clout and power and, uh, and riches by successfully tapping into our worst impulses, the need to have enemies?

... and what is the ultimate conclusion, I mean, that it makes about the impact of Meta, Facebook, on our politics?

Uh, well, it's having a big impact o- on our politics.

The, what d- what the film's about is, uh, a young Facebook engineer, Frances Haugen, is played by Mikey Madison, discovers something terrible, and can't get the attention of her bosses, so she enlists the help of a Wall Street Journal investigative reporter, who is played by Jeremy Allen White, and together they uncover even more really dark secrets that Facebook is keeping, including, uh, the b- beyond the tons of misinformation, uh, what they did was tweak the algorithm so that it would give you more content that you wanna reshare, knowing that the things you're most likely to reshare are anything that makes you angry.

Mm-hmm.

Uh, i- if, if the inspiration, the motivation for Mark at the outset to build Facebook was he was a guy who wasn't comfortable in the social world of, of college, w- a lot of us can identify with that.

Uh, wasn't being invited over to the cool kids' table, and a lot of us can identify with that.

He's a genius.

He invented his own cool kids' table that he would be the mayor of.

How did you envisage her as kind of being the centre of this film around which everyone else kind of revolves?

Yeah, well, I think that Mikey put it beautifully.

She's, Frances is brilliant and obviously courageous and her head and heart are in the right place.

But she just moving through the world and, is not as comfortable doing it as most people are.

There's just something she feels at least that doesn't quite fit.

And Mikey embodies that so beautifully.

Her first, actually her second line in the movie is correcting someone into a microphone.

We should remind people.

When you're telling a true and very sobering story about things in recent living history, how do you balance that while also trying to make a film that's inherently entertaining?

You have to make it fun.

Like I said, before it can be anything else, a movie has to be good.

It has to be, in some manner, fun to watch.

And when I say fun, that can apply to the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, too.

So what I'm doing is...

I create a strong intention and obstacle, right? Somebody wants something, something standing in their way of getting it.

Was a sequel something that had floated around your mind? Was it a thing that other people were presenting to you as an option? And when was it that you were like, this is a story here? Was it January 6th? Was it...

Yep.

And she enlists the help of a Wall Street Journal reporter who's played by, uh, Jeremy Allen White.

Together, uh, they uncover these very dark secrets that, uh, Facebook has been keeping from us.

Uh, and in there, Mark Zuckerberg is in there.

He's played by Jeremy Strong.

He has a thunderous performance in the film.

I mean, they are very deliberate, correct?

No, they are.

Yep.

And she enlists the help of a Wall Street Journal reporter who's played by, uh, Jeremy Allen White.

Together, uh, they uncover these very dark secrets that, uh, Facebook has been keeping from us.

Uh, and in there, Mark Zuckerberg is in there, he's played by Jeremy Strong.

He has a thunderous performance in the film.

I mean, they are very deliberate, correct?

No, they are.

Um, a- and sometimes for the good.

And now, A Few Good Men playwright Aaron Sorkin comes to the microphone to reflect on the indelible work that put him on the map as a scribe.

Okay.

Time to speak.

A couple of times over the years, I've been approached about a revival of A Few Good Men, and...

I haven't aggressively pursued it because I felt like the play needed work.

Yes, I feel like the things you write, they're never finished or confiscated.

And A Few Good Men was the first thing I ever wrote.

I just pitched a line to him out in the lobby.

Alors,

non...

Je ne le qualifierais pas de monstre.

A mes yeux, c'est un héros tragique, un héros de tragédie plutôt qu'un traître ou un méchant.

Le traître, le méchant a de mauvaises intentions.

Il veut l'argent, il veut se venger.

Le héros tragique, ses intentions sont bonnes.

Qu'est-ce que vous en pensez ?

How did you go about doing that with this when you're making a movie about algorithms and whistleblowers?

Yeah.

Well, you know, before a movie can be anything else, before it can be thought-provoking or relevant, it has to be good.

It has to work as a movie.

It has to work as something that you watch while you're eating popcorn.

So, uh, that was my top priority, giving the audience, uh, an exciting, fun experience, uh, uh, in a theater.

You do that by d- uh, d- telling a story.

Do you think, though, that, that this is going to be one of those films that, that people watch through a political lens nonetheless?

Hmm.

There are two chairs in a living room, uh, and they do this amazing one-act play, uh, every week.

Uh, and, uh, what stayed with me, uh, from Rob is what he called pressing on it.

Pressing on it.

Um, uh, we would go through every page line by line and make sure there wasn't a logic problem, uh, at, at all.

Um, make sure does that, does that joke really work or was it just like the best you could do in that moment?

Unbelievable.

Uh...

What do you listen for in a scene like that?

Well, you used the word listen, uh, uh, which i- is what I'm doing.

I'm very conscious of the music of the language.

My parents started taking me to see plays starting from when I was very little, and I loved the sound of dialogue.

It sounded like, uh, music to me, just these great actors saying words that are crashing, uh, against each other, and I wanted to imitate that sound.

And so, uh, when I'm writing, what a line of dialogue sounds like is as important to me as what it means

also seems to directly apply to The Social Reckoning

I think the theme is you're not getting the truth in The Social Reckoning.

[laughs]

Uh, I, for me, uh, i- i- it's the writing of the screenplay where, uh, w- w- where I feel that the, that the movie is made, uh, or most of the movie, uh, is made, uh, in the writing of the screenplay.

And then if you ...

I- the writing of the screenplay is, is for me like the, the, the drawing of, uh, of a, of a blueprint to, to build a house.

Yep.

First of all, I don't understand, you know, losing your temper in front of the, uh, uh, the crew and yelling at, at, at Gary Shandling.

But what I really don't understand is, I, I remember being at a reading of that script, um, uh, just at somebody's office, a whole bunch of people, including Shandling and, a- and these very funny people, uh, uh, in the room, reading through the script, which was plainly terrible.

Uh, it, it, it was plainly terrible.

Yeah, I mean, I kind of know 'cause, uh, you said that Jesse didn't wanna do it.

Jesse didn't wanna do it because, uh, Jesse over the years, he, he's, he's distressed that he's been conflated, uh, with this person, uh, uh, who he doesn't really like that much.

Um, and, you know, he's become...

Jesse's now a very well-respected writer and director, uh, himself.

Um, ha- as it happens, um, I hadn't told Jesse what I was doing, uh, over the last two or three years that I was writing this script.

Uh, I ran into him at, um, an Oscar party on Oscar night when he was nominated.

Uh, and I said, "Listen, I'm gonna be sending you something in a couple of weeks." And he smiled and said, "Great." And just a few minutes later, I ran into Jeremy Strong, who asked me what I was up to.

You can't change the notes.

Okay.

In that I don't write an outline.

And I hope no one hearing this is taking this as a recommendation.

If you can write an outline, yeah, sure, go ahead.

What I do... is when I can get there, and this is after a long period of time of not doing anything, but when I can get there, index cards and a cork board.

It's kind of like walking through the woods at night with a flashlight.

You can only see as far ahead as the beam will go, but the further you walk into the woods, the more you can see.

And that

What happened?

[laughs] Here's what happened.

Uh, I'm very physical, uh, when I'm writing.

Uh, I'm, I'm saying it all out loud.

Um, uh, and, uh, this is on those occasions when it's going well.

For me, most the, the, the...

It's I love writing.

Oh

What happened?

Here's what happened.

Uh, I'm very physical, uh, when I'm writing, uh, I'm, I'm saying it all out loud.

Um, uh, and, uh, this is on those occasions when it's going well for me, most of the, the, the, I love writing.

I hate not writing.

And that's what most of writing is for me.

Most of writing is climbing the walls, pacing around.

What do you think the play has to say about this moment now?