Why ‘The Social Reckoning’ Reimagines Facebook’s Offices as a Palace of Fear

“The Social Reckoning” is nowhere near the first project to shoot in Vancouver and double for California, and it certainly won’t be the last. But writer/director Aaron Sorkin and production designer Jon Hutman weren’t looking to build an exact replica of the Facebook offices. Indeed, they go pretty far afield from the reclaimed industrial chic that actually keeps Meta’s small army of employees bivouacked in Menlo Park — and for a very specific reason.

Hutman, who sculpted dramatic prosceniums for Sorkin dialogue out of seemingly ordinary spaces on “The West Wing” and “Being the Ricardos,” scouted colleges in British Columbia for Facebook’s headquarters because their layouts are similarly designed to keep people in one centralized location. “The Facebook headquarters are massive. So, we created a version that is not a literal duplication but is faithful to the identity and vibe of the place,” Hutman said.

In terms of vibes, both big tech and university campuses share a similar tension: a push and pull between the youthful vibrancy of employees like future whistleblower Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison) and the architectural grandeur of the institution they move within. One only has to remember the cramped, scrappy vibe of the Facebook offices in “The Social Network” to see the difference between what Facebook started as and the impossible behemoth it has become.

“Facebook’s offices [have] the largest open floor plan office in the world,” Sorkin told IndieWire on an upcoming episode of the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast. “It is a quarter of a mile from one wall to the opposite wall. So you’d have a hard time building that.”

Instead of attempting the most massive open-plan office in the world — which, take it from someone who works in an open-plan office, honestly sounds like a future Jordan Peele horror movie just waiting to happen — Hutman picked locations at Simon Fraser University and the University of British Columbia that are definitely more brutalist in look and feel.

These locations create a Fortress Zuckerberg vibe, where forever-embattled CEO Mark (Jeremy Strong) throws out measures that might lead to a 1% drop in engagement. The feeling is especially true in Zuckerberg’s office itself, where all the modern glass and light woodworking in the world can’t quite erase the sense of being in a very observable, very enclosed space.

“You find out in the movie, he has a bulletproof couch in his office,” Sorkin said. “[In an office scene], as he says, ‘that’s 30 million people who just stopped scrolling,’ you see the fear. The incredible fear. And Francis’ supervisor, as they’re walking in, says, ‘Stand by the wall. You’re an extra in this scene.’ And she just has to stand there and just watch this going back and forth.”

Behind the scenes of ‘The Social Reckoning‘ ©Columbia Pictures/Courtesy Everett Collection

Hutman wanted the entire Facebook campus to avoid being one brutal (Brutalist) metaphor, however. “One of the biggest design challenges of the movie was, ‘how do you capture the essence of one of the biggest, best-known companies in the world, and create that sense of youth, relevance, and modernity?'” Hutman said. “We also used Simon Fraser for the cafeteria, which is this glass cube where [cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth] could really emphasize sunlight, scale, and the relationship between inside and outside.”

But it’s telling that Hutman embeds that latent sense of fear into the visual design of Zuckerberg’s office. Hutman found the location on Simon Fraser’s campus and used it because “it was designed by two wonderful Canadian architects, Arthur Erickson and Geoffrey Massey,” Hutman said. The space is so polished, open, and streamlined that it creates less a sense of calm or relief than a risk of overexposure.

“The Social Reckoning” is now in theaters.