There are two things you should know about Aaron Sorkin.
One is that the man likes to talk. A lot.This will not surprise anyone whos seen the 1992 screen version of his playA Few Good Men, starring Tom Cruise and Jack Nicholson. Or has watched a TV show hes had a hand in developing, like the one about an all-sports cable channel (Sports Night) or the one about an all-news cable channel (The Newsroom) or the Emmy-winning one about an all-drama idealistic White House (The West Wing). Or remembers the sharp, rat-a-tat-tat dialogue in the screenplays hes written or cowritten for The Social Network, Moneyball and Steve Jobs.You know that shot in every film about New York summers, where kids are splashing around a gushing fire hydrant? Sorkin is the verbal equivalent of that hydrant. At one point, his publicist has to shuffle him off to his next interview while hes still finishing an answer, which the gentleman is determined to extrapolate on from every conceivable angle. So the 56-year-old writer keeps chatting as we speed-stroll down a hallway at which point it occurs to everyone concerned that they are taking part in a real-life Aaron Sorkin walk-and-talk scene.
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The second thing the bit that is surprising, given the reason Sorkin is at the Toronto Film Festival, in September of 2017, talking to journalists in hotel passageways is that the man hates poker. My TV is permanently tuned to ESPN, so you
cant help but trip over the World Series of Poker every so often, he says. And it is the Worst. Spectator. Sport. Ever.Ive tried watching a few minutes of it even
while I was writing this movie, which is when it would have been the most useful to me and its the exact opposite of You cant take your
eyes off it. You cant keep your eyes ON IT! Because I dont want any of these guys in their
Members Only jackets and bad sunglasses and backwards baseball caps to go home
with any money. Im not rooting for anybody. Is there a way the waitress can win instead?!
The game, in other words, is not why Sorkin decided to write and for the first time in his decades-long career, direct Mollys Game(which opens wide on January 5th), the story of former Olympian hopeful-turned-underground Poker Queen-turned-enemy of the state Molly Bloom. As played by Jessica Chastain, this woman isnt much of a motormouth, at least at first. Her skill lies in silently listening and playing very, very close attention to the ins and outs of how her bosss invite-only crme de la crme card game works. Soon, shes running her own high-roller, celebrity-filled poker nights, first in Hollywood and then in Manhattan. The Russian Mob takes an interest. So do the Feds. And then, when it behooves Molly to speak in order to save her skin, she shuts up.
So yes, he could give a flying fuck about how an ace-high hand fares in a Texas Hold Em showdown. But refusing to compromise your principles when the chips are down now that was something the man admired. And a strong moral center was what Bloom had in spades. Listen, I love watching superheroes with capes as much as any 12-year-old, Sorkin says. But integrity, character, doing the right thing thats what I love writing about. I basically keep writing characters that are variation of my father. And Molly reminded me a lot of my father.
The man takes a quick breath. And also if Wile E. Coyote was crossed with Jessica Rabbit.
Sorkin had actually been contemplating several projects when a lawyer who I knew socially passed along his clients book to the screenwriter a tome blessed with the Sorkin-level verboseMollys Game: The True Story of the 26-Year-Old Woman Behind the Most Exclusive, High-Stakes Underground Poker Game in the World. Despite the fact that the dreaded wordpoker was listed prominently in the title, he agreed to give it a read and found the book fun but I had zero interest in adapting it. None. Not in the slightest. And then I met Molly, and everything changed.
Specifically, Sorkin says, it was the disconnect between the story that Blooms book told and the real version of her tale. It wasnt just that she had a sly sense of humor and was smarter than I was one does not have to be too smart to pull off that feat, he notes. It was the why behind Molly deciding to leave so much out of the book. She didnt feel she could let people down when shed given them her word, which was something that meant a lot to her. What actually happened was a lot more complicated, nuanced and emotional than what was on the page.
Plus when I met her, Sorkin adds, shed just been sentenced to 200 hours of community service, had been handed a massive fine and was paying several millions worth of taxes on the money the government had seized! Yet Molly just seemed very casual about it. After that first meeting, I felt like I knew her well enough to tell her, Ive never met someone so down on their luck and who seemed so confident.' He left that face-to-face knew that he wanted to tell her story. What the writer didnt know was that hed also just unwittingly signed up to become a director as well.
When Sorkin finished the screenplay for Mollys Game, he did what any in-demand Hollywood scribe would do: He gave it to the best filmmaker he knew. Like anything I write, I had a strong emotional attachment to it and I want the very best director to make to it, he says. So I went right to David Fincher. I gave it to him first I mean, Id give any of my scripts to David first! According to Sorkin, the Social Network auteur was completely on board to take the reins (ironically, the Oscar-nominated movie about the founding of Facebook was almost Sorkins directorial debut per a making-of doc) before running into problems regarding the proposed budget and walking away from the table.
Ok, fine, since it wasnt going to be David, it was going to be somebody else, the writer continues. But I always had a fear that, because of all the shiny objects the money, the decadence, the sexuality, the Hollywoodness of it it was easy to make something where all of those things could overwhelm the story that I wanted to tell. The thought of directing it himself had not occurred to him; it was the movies producers who initially proposed the idea. There was a meeting between myself, Mark Gordon and Amy Pascal in which we all had a list of directors in front of us. We went through the pros and cons of each of them, but apparently, there had been a conversation before I had arrived. After the last name was debated, they said, Why dont you do it? This was right before Christmas they asked me to take the holiday break and think it over.
Theres a line: Mmmmm Im a brat. Were doing the scene for the first time, I say, Mmm I was a brat. And he yells, Cut. Jessica, five Ms not three Ms. Five.
-Jessica Chastain
When the trio met again, Sorkin started to lay out his apprehensions. And Mark just cut me off and said, Look, theres no Im-leaning-toward this or that here youre either in or youre not. And I just said Im in. At which point I was struck by an overwhelming sense of terror that I still have yet to shake. He laughs. Maybe one day.
He began looking in to casting immediately. It was Pascal who suggested Idris Elba for the part of Mollys lawyer Sorkin had loved a five-episode arc the actor had done on The Office, so he enthusiastically cosigned. He wanted Kevin Costner for the role of Mollys father, but figured there was no chance in hell theyd get him; when the Oscar-winner did get onboard, Sorkin gifted him with a showstopper of a monologue, in which the hard-driving dad distills a decades worth of therapy into 10 minutes. (With an actor like Kevin and a scene like that, its sort of like driving a Ferrari, the director says. You dont have to put your foot on the gas very hard.)
As for the part of Molly, that proved to be a little tougher to fill. Write down a list of actresses who you think would be up for it, Sorkin says, and I guarantee you I had a meeting with all of them. All fantastic, too, but the role required someone to play her from age 22 to 35, and I wanted to skew more toward the latter so really, if were being honest, its Jessica Chastain or Emma Stone. When he did finally talk to Chastain over a long afternoon, the connection was immediate. You could see Mollys sense of humor, Mollys smarts, from the moment she opened her mouth. She just sort of hit out of the park from the first second.
Yeah, I thought hed be a total control freak, Chastain says, laughing over the phone several months after the films Toronto premiere. Shes already begun promotional duties as the holidays, and the movies Christmas release in New York and Los Angeles, approaches rapidly. This was before Id met him, mind you! His writing is just so precise, you assume the man would be like, I am the only genius on this set. And then I met him, and he could not have been more collaborative, more open to exploring things, more well, what do you think?'
Which didnt mean, shes quick to add, that Sorkin wasnt occasionally nitpicking actors over what hed written, sometimes down to the letter literally. He loves to tell this story, Chastain says, about ribbing me over one single line. It was simply, Mmmmm I was a brat. And we get on set, Aaron calls action, were doing the scene for the first time, I say, Mmm I was a brat. And he yells, Cut. Jessica, five Msnot three Ms. Five.
But my revenge, she continues, happened a little later, when we were rehearsing a scene, and I say, Yeah. And he walks over and goes, Thats not the line, Jessica. Uh, no, thats the line, Aaron. I have never written Yeah in any of my scripts! Ok, wheres the script supervisor? She comes over. Opens to the page. Guess what word is staring back at him? That was myfavorite day on set. She bursts into raucous laughter. It was like, dont
mess with me, man. You wanted memorized and prepared, you got memorized and prepared. You
may think you write more heightened language than Yeah, but you will be wrong!'
And while Sorkin will freely admit that every sound that comes out of an actors mouth if its not there in the script, I dont want to it to
happen, he mentions that some of his best moment as a director happened because he was willing to let people go completely off-book. Keep in mind that this movie is not Rounders theres no Matt Damon or Ed Norton character, he says. We do not care who wins. This is all about Molly. But we had six or seven days set aside for shooting just poker scenes, and we wanted to get a lot of inserts: chips being pushed forward, ice clinking into glasses, decks being cut and cards being dealt, all that. Wed hired a lot of real players for the background. And during the last few hours of shooting, I reminded them that, when we first got to set, I was going to cut a check for $2500 to whomever had the most chips when we wrapped.
Then I told everyone, Guys, just play cards. Dont worry about your lines or the cameras, he says. I wanted them to have an incentive to really go for it. And it turns out professional card players do not need an extra incentive to win. They just need to win. The reason racehorses run fast is that they
have some kind of instinct that makes them want to run faster than all the
other racehorses. These all want to be the best player at whatever table theyre sitting at, real or fictional. So not only did we get great stuff, a number of folks went home with huge piles of cash. Those extras were the highest-paid people on set. I think [Michael] Cera left without his house.
So has Sorkin now been bitten by the directing bug? For the first time in a half hour of talking, he stops and thinks for a second or two, or five, or 20. You know, he says finally, when I was doing Charlie Wilsons War with Mike Nichols, I remember all of us sitting down for the very first table read. You know, there are a lot of words in that script, a lot of lines; some of the actors look a little worried. And Mike stands up, looks at everyone and says, Heres how you do this script: start talking when its your turn. Dont stop until your turn is over.' Sorkin sits back. If I can keep making movies that way, Ill do it. I mean, if its good enough for Mike Nichols .