By most accounts, Aaron Sorkin’s new film The Social Reckoning, a follow-up to his 2010 smash-hit The Social Network, is a flop. The film critic Mark Kermode’s response to seeing it was that Sorkin, who is widely regarded as one of the greatest living screenwriters, is “not a great director”.
It seems that Sorkin agrees. Because Sorkin is very famous, he has had to do the rounds talking about the film in the media, which led to his appearance on the Hollywood Reporter’s Awards Chatter podcast earlier this week, in which he addressed these kind of criticisms head on. “I’m very worried that the parts of directing that I’m not good at are those parts that you can’t learn,” he said. “In addition to having absorbed none of the science of filmmaking, I have – and this is a problem in a visual medium – I have no visual sensibility at all, it turns out.”
It’s not the first time a director has made a confession in this vein. Sam Raimi, for instance, memorably told the Nerdist podcast in 2014 that the reason Spider-Man 3 sucked is that he “messed up plenty” because he “didn’t really believe in all the characters”. But someone like Sorkin, a man with five Primetime Emmy wins and four Academy Award nominations, can afford to fess up to some failings. And it’s a pretty funny thing to say, as he does on this podcast, immediately after the host waxes lyrical about all his glittering career highlights and staggering creative ability.
On the one hand, I think the world would be a better place if more people admitted that they are not that good at their jobs. I’d have loved it if the guy I hired to hang some pictures in my last flat, and who positioned several of them as if they were trying to escape through the ceiling and then merrily gouged a hole in one wall before claiming the wall itself was made of some substance previously unknown to masonry, had just held his hands up and said: “Look. My bad. I am not very good at this.”
But it got me thinking about the whole podcast circuit. Podcasts, and the increasingly widespread “video podcast”, have become a cornerstone of the film publicity world. There are the big hitters such as the A24 Podcast and The Big Picture, but there are also endless podcasts you’ve never even heard of, where figures from the entertainment world have to engage in hours of conversation every time they have a new project out. Unlike the old requirement for a celebrity to commit to a couple of broadsheet interviews or a 10-minute slot for some late-night arts programme, the new demand for hours of sprawling chat just ends up being undignified for all involved.
I’ve interviewed actors and directors, and while most of them are media-trained and polite enough to seem engaged in talking about their work, it cannot be fun for them to meander around the houses again and again on the same subject. Making people talk about the same thing over and over is quite literally the basis of certain forms of torture.
I hate to think of the kinds of things I might claim about my own work if I was subjected to hours of repetitive chatter about it. Do we really need to hear actors and directors do so much extemporaneous talk about what they do? Especially when so few of them – mea culpas of this Sorkin kind excepted – are saying anything other than “yeah it was a great experience, I love movies and this new movie of mine in particular”?
I understand that the publicity circuit is a built-in part of making creative work in our digital age. People have to hear about the film for people to buy tickets to the film. The microphones are not going away. But I think that if we must have them, let’s have more strange admissions of incompetence or, even better, straight-up lies, to enliven the conversation.
The only person who seems to be squeezing some personal enjoyment from the media merry-go-round is Robert Pattinson, who once claimed he watched a clown die in a car explosion in an interview for the Today show while promoting Water for Elephants in 2011.
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So, more power to Sorkin, but next time maybe claim that you, I don’t know, secretly run a Facebook group for fans of the 1996 chimp comedy Dunston Checks In. Have a little fun with it.
