Actor-director Jesse Eisenberg, who is at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival as the recipient of this year’s President’s Award, spoke about not reprising his role as Mark Zuckerberg in Aaron Sorkin’s upcoming “The Social Reckoning,” the sequel to David Fincher’s 2010 drama “The Social Network.”
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During an in-conversation event, the actor was asked if he felt any “responsibility” for changing the image of the technology mogul through his performance in Fincher’s drama chronicling the origins of Facebook. Eisenberg responded to the question by stating he doesn’t want to reprise the role as he no longer wants “to be associated” with Zuckerberg. “Succession” star Jeremy Strong stepped into the role of Zuckerberg for Sorkin’s upcoming film. Best actress Oscar-winner for “Anora” Mikey Madison plays young Facebook engineer Frances Haugen, who blows the whistle on the social network’s most guarded secrets to a Wall Street Journal reporter, played by “The Bear” lead Jeremy Allen White.
Eisenberg then recalled first being attached to the film, saying he made an audition tape alongside his young sister and then got a call to meet with the film team in California. “I think they were having trouble finding the person to play the part or something,” he said. “It’s a very strange kind of role.”
“They flew me out to California. I memorized 15 pages of dialogue, and then, when I got into the room with [Fincher], I said: Do you want me to read anything? He was like, ‘Nah, put that away. I just want to tell you about this guy I knew,’” he went on. “And he told me about this guy who was running a studio at the time and said: ‘You have to play a guy like that.’ I was like: What is he like? And he was like: ‘You just never know what he’s thinking and he could just stare at you and you have no idea what he’s thinking. It’s very unnerving.’”
Faced with the chance of playing such a role, Eisenberg said: “Oh, that sounds great. I would love to do that. And that was it.”
As for whether he feels any “responsibility” for helping popularize Eisenberg’s persona in the public consciousness, the actor mentioned how the mogul “wasn’t very known at the time” they made the film.
“In fact, at the time, the movie seemed like such a strange thing to me because no one really knew who he was,” he said. “He was interviewed on ‘60 Minutes,’ which is our big news show, but otherwise he wasn’t in the public a lot. I thought of it like an interesting character. And then he’s become famous and now I don’t want to do the movie […] I don’t want to be associated with him anymore because I don’t really like the comparison.”
Prodded about how he feels about the growth of social media since the release of the 2010 film, Eisenberg said that, as an actor, he talks about himself “too much.” “It’s not healthy. No human being has ever talked about themselves as much as I talk about myself. So I’m not on any [social media]. All that stuff scares me so much, you know, Facebook and social media, Twitter, whatever, because I already feel humiliated to be in public talking about myself. It’s disgusting. All that stuff terrifies me.”
“Then, being in the movie about it, too, made it even more scary because I see that the person who created this website is not a person who cares about people,” he said. “I’m like: well, if this guy is the creator of this world, I don’t want to live in that world.”
The American spoke at length about his directorial career during the almost two-hour talk. Eisenberg recalled “bad reviews” of his directorial debut, “When You Finish Saving the World,” saying critics disliked Julianne Moore’s character. “Moore played this very tough woman,” he mentioned. “Then the reviews came out and [asked]: Why did I make a movie about such a mean person? To me, she’s not. I’m crying for her. We’re watching the movie; I’m weeping. I guess I was the only one.”
But the director noticed a significant difference in his sophomore effort, the acclaimed “A Real Pain.” “Kieran Culkin plays a character who’s also kind of cruel but, for some reason, maybe sexism, he’s celebrated for it.”
Eisenberg is currently in the early days of promoting his next directorial effort, A24’s “The Debut,” starring Julianne Moore and Paul Giamatti and scheduled to come out in the U.S. on December 3rd. Speaking about the film, the director said Giamatti plays a “really cruel” character, but audiences “celebrated” the character in test screenings. “So maybe it has to do a little bit with sexism that when a woman is mean, we’re really put off, and when a man is mean, we give them a little flexibility.”
On the subject of A24, Eisenberg was asked about collaborating with the American label for his three films, jokingly correcting the moderator to state “A Real Pain” was distributed by Searchlight Pictures because A24 “rejected” it. “We were making [‘The Debut’] independently, but we knew that [A24] was going to distribute it,” he said. “They were hands-off while we were making the movie. They were very helpful, and we could ask them for advice, but they were not working on it.”
The director praised the company, calling it “one of the very few places in media that tries to appeal to the best version of the thing.” “Almost all other media are trying to make money. A24 is trying to make money, too, but it’s just that the way they found to make money was by making things as good as possible. As a director, I am very lucky because I’m in Hollywood movies, and you could see their entire interest is just how this can be done the cheapest and make the most money. And A24 doesn’t think that way. Maybe they will in the future, but right now, they don’t.”
In that sense, A24 is possibly the closest one can find to a studio adopting a European model in the U.S., with Eisenberg noting how films in his home country “have to make money back.”
“In America, we don’t have any state funding for movies,” he said. “Even a tiny movie, like an art film about somebody’s childhood, has to make money back in some way. What that means is you start casting the most famous person you can cast. It means shooting it for the smallest [number] of days you can get because you’re only going to get half a million dollars to shoot this movie. Then you come to Europe, and suddenly the State values the arts. Suddenly you’re getting $5 million from a combination of the Poles, the Slovenes, and the Czechs and you have money to make this small movie.”
Eisenberg recalled how “A Real Pain” had a $3 million budget, but it could have gone up to $10 million if he had been a Polish citizen at the time of shooting (since the film’s stellar awards campaign, the director and his immediate family have been made citizens). “I wouldn’t make more money, I would make the same salary, but we wouldn’t be rushing around to try to get this big movie [shot] in 20 days. We would have 35 days or something like that. This is why a lot of Americans love doing European movies.”
“I would never go to the States,” he told a budding filmmaker in the audience. “If you can have a career as a filmmaker in Europe, you’re far better off. This is my opinion. I don’t know the real ins-and-outs, maybe a Czech director would say [I’m] totally wrong. I’ve been trying to get American movies made for 20 years […] the first question is: How are we going to make our money back? And then I’ve been in these European movies and they’re like: Well, how is this going to be the best possible version? That seems to be the difference.”
The Karlovy Vary Film Festival runs July 3-11.