Director David Fincher ("Fight Club," "Benjamin Button") and his crew rolled into Baltimore earlier this week to film part of their latest project on the Hopkins campus. "The Social Network," written by Aaron Sorkin (creator of "The West Wing") is about the popular networking website, Facebook, the birth of which took place at Harvard.
The movie stars Jessie Eisenberg - who recently shot to fame as the overly cautious survivor of a zombie apocalypse in "Zombieland" - as creator Mark Zuckerberg, as well as Andrew Garfield as Zuckerberg's friend and co-creator of Facebook, Eduardo Saverin. Hopkins was one of three schools chosen to stand in for Harvard.
Fincher, Director of Photography Jeff Cronenweth and actors Eisenberg and Garfield took time out of their schedules on Tuesday afternoon to hold a question and answer session for some of the theater students in Hodson Hall.
Of course, individual inspirations and motivations behind entering the movie business were among the first things discussed.
Fincher's interest began when he was eight years old. "I had seen a movie, and since I was eight years old, I always assumed everything was made in real time. I thought it maybe took a couple of days to make a movie . . . then I realized all the stuff that went into it." He then credited his first inspiration to a special effects shot in another movie. "They had this train explode, and to do it, to make it look good, they had to build this entirely out of balsa wood. I just thought that was so cool."
Ultimately, though, the appeal of directing a movie to Fincher is being able to tell a convincing story on film. "You own someone's eyes and ears for a few hours. Whatever they see and hear is what you're giving them. You need to trick them, pull them in, involve them in this story."
Next, the question everyone was waiting to ask: Why Hopkins?
"Harvard has a no filming policy, which we chose to ignore," Fincher replied. "We started filming there, but we got caught pretty quickly and were told, essentially, to get out."
Additionally, the proximity of the buildings around Cambridge proved to be impossible, as it did not allow for any wide-angle shots of the architecture that Fincher was adamant about getting, so the crew did a Google search to find the same style of Colonial architecture seen up at Harvard.
"Tufts, Milton [College], and Phillips [Exeter] also came up on the search," Fincher said on the set later that night. "We came to Hopkins to get the vistas, the bigger shots."
The discussion then turned to Fincher's creative process when he takes on a new project. The director said that while he has the utmost respect for writers such as Sorkin, the words themselves are not the most important part for him. Instead, the visual aspect takes precedence.
"In my experience," Fincher said, "language is created for the purpose of lying. When you know something, you know it. That's what you have to get out of it. The words have to support that, but they're a separate channel."
Fincher explained that the scenery and detail surrounding the characters is just as important to the story as the actors. It's all about portraying the truth, even the parts of it that aren't aesthetically pleasing.
"Those blue lights are so annoying," Fincher said, jokingly commenting on the blue light phones around campus. "Every time, I'm like, 'Oh that's a beautiful building, aww what is that blue light?' I don't know what goes on [at] this campus that you need those blue lights there, or up in Cambridge, for that matter, but it's real, it's there, so it's included."
When asked if either actor had the opportunity to meet with or speak to the real-life counterparts of the characters they portray, Garfield said, 'Not really. He [Saverin] got really scared and disappeared [during] the legal issues the creators faced. I couldn't contact him beyond, you know, Facebooking him. I never got a response."
Both Hopkins students and the general public can look forward to seeing Homewood on the silver screen next year.
