Understanding Aaron Sorkin

When The Social Network came out, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg told 60 Minutes that it was amazing what the movie got right — and what it got wrong. The details, he admitted, were perfect. "I think that they got every single T-shirt that they had the Mark Zuckerberg character wearing right. I think I actually own those T-shirts," he said.

But the core of the story — the how and they why of inventing Facebook — was fiction. "There are hugely basic things that they got wrong, too," he said. "[They] made it seem like my whole motivation for building Facebook was so I could get girls, right? And they completely left out the fact that my girlfriend I've been dating since before I started Facebook." Steve Jobs is the second Aaron Sorkin film about tech founders. Like The Social Network before it, the film is about the wreckage that genius leaves in its wake. The Social Network was about intellectual theft and personal betrayal; Steve Jobs is about personal destruction and parental abandonment. Both films enmesh the audience in a kind of complicity: We purchase and even love the products, so aren't we enabling the callous, ruthless men who created them?

The two movies, however, act as a strange echo of their subjects. They're wonderful, vivid works — The Social Network won Aaron Sorkin an Oscar for Best Screenplay, and Rolling Stone says that Steve Jobs is "sure to rank with the year's very best films." They've been watched and loved by millions, and they've further cemented Sorkin's status as Hollywood's premier writer. But they are also cruel, unsparing fictionalizations of the lives lived by real people. They are anchored by moments that never happened in which the characters say words they never really said. The Social Network "made up a bunch of stuff that I found kind of hurtful," Zuckerberg said later — and it completely wrote Priscilla Chan, Zuckerberg's girlfriend and now his wife, out of Facebook's founding story. Jobs's widow, Laurene Powell Jobs, reportedly tried to stop Steve Jobs from being made. It does not excuse the sins of Jobs or Zuckerberg to say they don't deserve to have crueler words than they really uttered put into their mouths, or pettier motivations than they really had written over their origin stories.

He’s very interested in time

Particularly in movies like Inception, Interstellar, Memento, and his 1998 debut feature Following, Nolan likes to mess with the ways we’re conditioned to think about time, particularly at the movies, where we expect a relatively straightforward progression of time that mirrors real life: Start at the beginning, proceed in an orderly fashion, and end at the end.

So frequently, what you’re seeing in a Nolan film feels like it’s chronological, and then you get to experience the thrill (or maybe annoyance) of realizing that what you assumed about the movie isn’t true: These two scenes don’t follow each other logically, or that event actually happened at a different time. It’s usually not just a neat trick, but rather an integral part of the storytelling. You’re supposed to suddenly feel dislocated, realizing that all of your assumptions about the world are a matter of perception.

One of the key features that sets Dunkirk apart from other war films is how it treats time: The movie moves along three separate planes of time, which it lays out right at the beginning of the film and cuts between throughout. We observe one set of characters over the course of a week, another set over a day, and another set over just an hour. The film itself is only about two hours long, which means “time” is moving much more quickly for some characters than for others.

He's defination for "moderately fast pace"

Sorkin doesn't hide the fact that he is fictionalizing the lives of real people to such a degree that their friends and colleagues can't recognize the result — but many who see these films will never know they are deeply untrue; they'll assume that people as powerful as Zuckerberg and Jobs have lawyers who can prevent filmmakers from rewriting their lives in a major theatrical release.

There is a reason Sorkin is so good at writing ruthless geniuses. He is one himself, and, as with his subjects, he is practiced in excusing the pain he inflicts on the few by pointing out the joy he brings to the many.

He's a political creator

Asked what the real Steve Jobs would think of the movie if he were alive today, Sorkin replied, "If this movie were about someone else, he’d like it." It's an unintentional echo of a scene in the film, when Jobs's ex-wife asks why the money Jobs made off the Mac isn't supporting his daughter, and he says Apple is donating trucks full of computers to poor and underserved kids — if his daughter were someone else, the Mac would be helping her.

Asked what the real Steve Jobs would think of the movie if he were alive today, Sorkin replied, "If this movie were about someone else, he’d like it." It's an unintentional echo of a scene in the film, when Jobs's ex-wife asks why the money Jobs made off the Mac isn't supporting his daughter, and he says Apple is donating trucks full of computers to poor and underserved kids — if his daughter were someone else, the Mac would be helping her.