Zodiac was an audacious movie. Fincher staged every murder according to the varying accounts that witnesses gave to the police. That meant that the killer appeared to be a different size and shape in each scenario. The identity of the Zodiac killer has never been verified—there was no trial, no closure. It was an ideal scenario for Fincher: a mystery without resolution, an existential inquiry into what frightened him most. “At an early screening of Zodiac,” Fincher said, “an executive told me, ‘It’s an intellectual exercise. It’s about the unknowable.’ And I said, ‘Yes—that’s the point.’ But I have no misconceptions; I know what the game is. They wanted me to do Zodiac because Se7en was successful and both are about serial killers. Now they offer me Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. They think, No one does perv quite like this guy.”
For all of his categorizing and put-downs (real or otherwise), Fincher was immediately captivated by Aaron Sorkin’s script for The Social Network. He read it in one gulp, and said yes the same day. “Aaron had written his version of The Great Gatsby through Mark Zuckerberg,” Rudin told me. “David saw the film differently. He related to Zuckerberg’s wish to build something. David was making beta-cam movies in his garage when he was a teenager, and building something like Zuckerberg did was very romantic and personal to him.”
Before Fincher signed on, Sorkin had wanted to direct his own script. “There was a ticking clock,” Fincher recalled. “I read it on a Sunday night, and e-mailed Sorkin: You’ll have to put your directorial debut on hold.” Fincher wanted to begin instantly and started casting. Jesse Eisenberg sent a homemade tape of himself playing Zuckerberg, and got the part without auditioning in person. Andrew Garfield, who is English, also tried out for Zuckerberg, but Fincher felt he was openly emotional, and therefore intrinsically better suited to play Eduardo Saverin, Zuckerberg’s former best friend and business partner. “When you cast actors,” Fincher said, “you try to find the quality you couldn’t beat out of them with a tire iron. That’s where you find the character.”
For the role of Zuckerberg’s erstwhile girlfriend, Erica, who has to be the Helen of Troy of Facebook and hold her own opposite Zuckerberg in the crucial opening scene of the film, Fincher knew he had to cast somebody unique, a woman who was, as he put it, “Katharine Ross from The Graduate—the girl who got away. We read everybody in the world for the part of Erica. It’s only one scene, but it sets the tone for the rest of the movie. When Rooney walked in, I said, ‘There’s the girl!’”
