The Unwavering Optimism of Aaron Sorkin

Aaron Sorkin’s body of work feels relevant right now. Distrust of social media, particularly Facebook, is at an all-time high; American politics is in disarray; and this year has been filled with peaceful protests turned violent by supposed peacekeepers. Coincidentally, this month The Social Network is celebrating its 10th anniversary; Sorkin and executive producer Thomas Schlamme got The West Wing gang back together—with additional shout-outs from Michelle Obama, Bill Clinton, and Lin-Manuel Miranda—for a staged theatrical reading on HBO Max of season 3’s “Hartsfield’s Landing” episode; and The Trial of the Chicago 7, Sorkin’s second effort as a writer-director, following 2017’s Molly’s Game, arrives on Netflix today.

The Trial of the Chicago 7 recalls one of the most contentious trials in American history, in which the federal government put seven anti–Vietnam War protesters on trial for a variety of charges—including conspiracy and incitement to riot—after police and protesters clashed violently during the 1968 Democratic National Convention. The colorful cast of defendants is made even more so by Sorkin’s casting choices, including Sacha Baron Cohen and Succession star Jeremy Strong as Youth International Party cofounders Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, respectively; Eddie Redmayne as social activist turned senator Tom Hayden; and Mark Rylance as radical lawyer William Kunstler, who was a major contributor to the 175 contempt‐of‐court citations the Chicago 7 and their legal team incurred.

GQ spoke with Sorkin about the collision between the past and the present, The Trial of the Chicago 7, and social media dread.

GQ: It’s great to catch up right now—not only because of everything you’ve got going on, but because of everything that’s going on around us. We’re essentially watching the absurdist version of The West Wing play out in real life.

Aaron Sorkin: You mentioned the things that are going on in the world. I haven’t really been paying attention. Can you just quickly fill me in?

Yes, President Hillary Clinton is running for reelection. And things are getting a little wild.

Okay, got it.

I just want to know which person in the White House has COVID-19 now, as they’re getting knocked down like bowling pins. I have all the respect in the world for people who can sit there and say, “I don’t wish ill upon anyone,” and mean it. I’m not that person, unfortunately.

You know what? I’m with you. I don’t wish pain and discomfort on anyone, and I certainly don’t wish death on anyone, but what we’re seeing now is justice.

So the president is infected with a virus that he has downplayed at every turn. His entire staff is catching it one by one, and all of this is happening less than a month away from one of the most contentious elections in American history, while police officers are killing Black citizens. You were recently asked how you would write the ending if this was a season of The West Wing, and some people didn’t like your answer.

I think I said that Donald Trump loses and refuses to accept the results of the election, as we expect will happen, but that three powerful Senate Republicans walk up to the White House and say, “It's time to go.” Other people read that and got really upset with that, and I'm not sure why. Because I wasn't asked what I think is going to happen; I was asked how, in the romantic and idealistic style with which I write, I would write it. And that's how I would write it.

It was only then that I discovered that there are people who blame The West Wing for a false expectation we have that Republicans will do the right thing, which blows my mind that The West Wing would be blamed for anything at all. I had no idea that an off-the-cuff answer that seems simple enough to me would trouble people, but I guess it did.

It sounds like you’re in charge of the GOP now. Congratulations!

I guess I am. So, I'll revise my answer: In my romantic and idealistic world, Donald Trump loses the election, refuses to accept the results, and the world explodes. I'll change it to that.

People have been begging you to bring The West Wing back for years now. And given that it’s apparently to blame for our political problems, the reunion special should fix everything that’s wrong with America—or at least show us what a proper press secretary does. How did the idea to restage “Hartsfield’s Landing” come about?

It started as something much smaller, shortly after March 13, which is when all theaters in America shut down. There's an organization called the Actors Fund, which helps out anybody who works in the theater—not just actors but crews, front-of-house, everybody. I have a play currently on Broadway which is suspended, just like everyone else. So I was asked to do a benefit for the Actors Fund.

I thought: I'll get The West Wing cast together, and we'll just do a Zoom table read of one of our episodes, and we'll raise some money for the Actors Fund. But then the ground, which had been shifting beneath our feet for a while, shifted very dramatically with the protests over the killings of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor—and many of those protesters were being met by police with tear gas and nightsticks. As worthy an organization as the Actors Fund is, I think the moment calls for something bigger. So we partnered with When We All Vote, the nonprofit, nonpartisan Get Out the Vote operation, and I brought in Tommy Schlamme, the principal director of The West Wing.

We took an episode that ends up being an ode to voting and restaged it at a theater in Downtown L.A. We didn't change a word of it; it's just been restaged as a play, and then we filmed that play in the style of modern Playhouse 90. During the act breaks, where you'd ordinarily see commercials, we get to hear from people—everyone from President Clinton and Mrs. Obama to Samuel L. Jackson and Lin-Manuel Miranda, Marlee Matlin, Elisabeth Moss. They hit different points about voting in what I hope is an entertaining, inspiring, and helpful way.

As an American citizen and a voter, do you think there is any chance that the election could end without some sort of major conflict that ends up in the Supreme Court?

We’ve been told over and over that there will not be a peaceful transfer of power. We've been told that. We've been given a three-week heads-up that men with bad intentions and box cutters are boarding passenger planes. We've been given a three-week heads-up that enemy planes are headed toward Pearl Harbor. He's been laying the groundwork for almost a year to say that “it was rigged.” I don't know what happens after that.

I’ll just hope for the Trump version of All the President’s Men to come out in a few months.

Here’s the thing about these last four years: Certainly, writers are going to write a lot about it. Not just journalists like you, but playwrights, screenwriters, and television writers; they’re going to write a lot about it. But my prediction is that you’ll hardly ever see Trump as an on-screen character. He’ll have to be an off-screen character. You’ll have to see him in news footage on the TV because he’s simply implausible as a character. You don't buy him. You can have heroes, and you can have villains. You can have protagonists and antiheroes and antagonists. But there’s no such thing as an interesting character who doesn't have a conscience. You can’t work with that, so you can’t have that character. Because he will look like Alec Baldwin on SNL every time.

You realize, though, that Trump will be offering himself up. He'll be offering bargain rates in order to play himself.

Oh, yeah. I'm sure he'd be happy to make a deal. In fact, I'm pretty sure if we had just given the guy an Emmy for The Celebrity Apprentice, we could've avoided this whole thing. Or a People’s Choice? Something that he could brag about?

Have you seen The Comey Rule with your man, Jeff Daniels?

I did, and I thought he was great. Brendan Gleeson did a good job. But I thought that Brendan Gleeson was unable to fully conceal his own intelligence, his own soul. He couldn't help but bring that with him a little bit. The performance reminded me of Brando in The Godfather. We know [Brando’s Don Corleone] character as being multidimensional and very smart and, in the gang world, compassionate and having the range of human emotions. Interestingly, the most sympathetic portrayal of Donald Trump right now is on Stephen Colbert’s show Our Cartoon President. I don't know if you’ve seen it or not, but I think it’s fantastic.

Do yourself a favor and watch all of them, but what they do is they treat it like it’s a half-hour TV show. The whole Trump gang is part of a sitcom or something, and by the end of each episode, Trump learns something. He changes somehow, the way characters do on a sitcom, and so even though all the awfulness is there, for some reason, that cartoon Donald Trump is the best Donald Trump looks anywhere.

I suppose that someone will try to do a treatment of it where they give Trump a Richard III core. We understand he had a very difficult father, and that he had to prove things to people, and so that’s how he became what he is. With a character like Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network or Steve Jobs in Jobs or Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men, when you’re writing an antihero, you have to write them as if they’re making their case to God for why they should be allowed into heaven. So I think that, 50 years from now, someone will write Trump that way, but they’ll be wrong.

Politics always seems to be at the root of your work—whether it’s the American political system or the politics of a particular industry like television or sports. What makes that such a rich source of material for you?

The best I can do to try to answer your question, honestly, is to guess. I do spend a lot of time thinking about writing and thinking about my own work in terms of: What was wrong with that? Why did that scene not work? Why did that story not work? Why did that episode of The Newsroom not work? Just trying to be a diagnostician and figure out how to get better. But I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about these bigger-picture ideas that you’re talking about, though I can take a guess. Drama is conflict, right? And in my case, the kinds of conflicts that I’m generally drawn to are conflicts of ideas, as opposed to, say, a bank heist. That said, I would love to write a bank-heist movie. I like writing the kinds of movies that made me want to be a writer in the first place.

What were some of those movies?

Well, yes, it was All the President’s Men. But it was also Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. So I would love to write Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. William Goldman got there already, but you know what I’m saying.

The Social Network marks its 10th anniversary this year. At the time, it seemed like a harmless way to catch up with kids you hadn’t spoken to since grammar school. But The Social Network painted Facebook, and social media in general, as something we need to be cautious of. Is there ever a moment where you think: I told you so?

There is that. Have you seen the new Alex Gibney doc yet, The Social Dilemma? I still haven’t been able to get to sleep from that. I don’t have any social media accounts for roughly the same reason I don’t sleep on a bed of broken glass at night. I’ll tip my cap to the very positive things that social media has been able to do, whether it’s the Arab Spring or organizing any of the BLM protests, the Women’s March or the many protests. It’s done a good job at that, but I think that the good that it does is absolutely swamped by the bad that it does.

What would you say to those people who were originally critical of The Social Network and its message? There was a backlash to your critique at the time.

Honestly, what I'd say is: Watch The Social Dilemma. Because I think it's considerably worse than any of us could have imagined even 10 years ago, when we were doing The Social Network… [Facebook] is such an effective purveyor of misinformation. The positive is swamped by the negative effect that it's having on our country and on the world—the negative effect that just began with so quickly making us meaner and dumber, collectively, as a nation, and has really turned into something dark now.

When you’re writing something like The Trial of the Chicago 7 or The West Wing, you have trusted sources and historical documents that can lead you in certain directions. But when you’re done with your initial research, do you then put everything you’ve learned to the side and work on it more like a thesis as you develop your ideas?

I think that you’re giving as good a description as I’ve ever heard of how it works when I’m writing nonfiction, which is to say I fill up on all the research I can get, and sometimes you’re able to get primary research. In the case of Steve Jobs, he wasn’t alive, but everyone around him was. In the case of the Chicago 7, Tom Hayden was alive when I started working on this back in 2006.

He passed away four years ago, but there’s usually a dozen good books on the subject, if you’re lucky. In the case of the Chicago 7, I had the 21,000-page trial transcript. So you fill up on the research, and then you spend a lot of time climbing the walls and pacing around trying to figure out, what is this movie? You don’t just want to dramatize a Wikipedia page.

You now need to turn this data into a compelling story.

Yes, and you need now to depart from journalism. It’s no longer going to be a photograph; it’s going to be a painting now. In other words, it’s going to be subjective. It’s going to be my point of view, which shouldn't be confused with my using characters as delivery systems for something I want to say. I’m the one telling the story, and if you lined up 10 screenwriters and asked them to write a movie about the early days of Facebook or write a movie about the Chicago 7 and their trial, you’d get 10 different movies, all of them worthy.

I know you hate social media, but you seem like someone who actually listens to what people say about your work and takes the time to respond to it. The Newsroom is probably the best example, where there were criticisms about setting that world in the very recent past and using real-world events as the basis for storylines. You ended up sort of apologizing and explaining that you didn't want to create fake news, essentially. Have you ever made changes based on criticism you've heard?

I haven't done that. I haven't made changes to try to please people who aren't happy with what I've done. I just think that that way lies disaster. You really can't start writing to try to change someone's mind about your writing.

What I did: I had two things with The Newsroom, and one had nothing to do with outside opinion at all. It was simply that I just never felt comfortable writing The West Wing. I always felt like I had a pebble in my shoe. I could never get it quite right. I could put a couple of good scenes together. I could put an episode together. God knows the cast was giving their all with their performances and the directors were doing a beautiful job. I'm right-handed, but for some reason I just always felt like I was writing with my left hand a little bit.

But the other issue was simply a misunderstanding, and I should've been able to foresee this misunderstanding. And it's because, as you mentioned, I set The Newsroom in the recent past, as opposed to the parallel universe that The West Wing is in. The West Wing takes place in the present, except I don't make any contemporary pop-culture references. I don't do anything that makes us say, ‘Wait a second, in a world where Britney Spears has the number-one hit, isn't Bill Clinton the president?’ And if you mention Bill Clinton: ‘Didn't George Bush come after Bill Clinton? Where's Bartlet in the whole thing?’ You don't want people to start to do that mental math. It is a parallel universe. In The Newsroom, it's the same universe you and I live in. It's just about a year and a half earlier.

I know that there was a belief that what I was doing was trying to show the pros how it ought to have been done. ‘Here's how you should've covered Gabby Giffords,’ or ‘Here's how you should've covered getting Bin Laden’ or whatever it was, and that's absolutely not what I was doing. I put it in the recent past so that I wouldn't have to make up news events, so that the show could take place in the world that we live in, instead of a world where we've just been invaded by Portugal.… All I'm trying to do every week is write and produce a good show. I'm not thinking about how to respond to a blogger.

Whether it’s the real world or not, all of your work is underscored with a strong sense of hopefulness or optimism. You’ve said that you can't help it.

I can't. I can only write the way I write. I'm bad at impersonating other writers. As an audience member, I'm very happy to watch cynicism on TV—I was a fan of House of Cards and Veep—but when I write, it's The West Wing.

You mentioned the Newsroom episode that deals with bin Laden’s capture. The climax of that episode, in which Don is stuck on an airplane and defuses his own rant to the pilot and flight attendants with the breaking news about bin Laden, is a clip that gets recirculated often on Twitter by critics and fans of the show alike. Are you aware that it’s become a thing?

I'm less aware of things that are circulated than most people because I'm just not in that loop. But I remember the scene that you're talking about, and I just thought it was a nice way to resolve the episode for those particular characters in that part of the story that I was telling, who'd been so focused on getting the scoop, getting the facts, and doing their jobs. Then there is what seems like an overly cautious flight attendant really bothering Tom Sadoski's character, Don, and I think he shouts, ‘Why in the world are you so paranoid?’ or ‘Why are you so afraid?’ He stops himself in the middle and realizes that he's talking to a United Airlines flight attendant, who has a good reason to be afraid, and that she and the cabin crew, they're the ones who deserve to hear the news first that we got bin Laden. I thought that was a nice end to that story.

How did you start working on The Trial of the Chicago 7?

In 2006, on a Saturday morning, I was asked to come to Steven Spielberg’s house—and I want to be clear that that’s not common. I don’t hang out with Steven Spielberg. But I was invited to his house on a Saturday; he called me there because he wanted me to write a movie about the Chicago 7 and that crazy conspiracy trial that fall. I said: Yes, count me in.

The last thing he said to me before I left the house was, “And it would be great if we could have this ready to release before the election.” He did not specify which election. So I think I’m right on time, on budget, and on schedule, but I did leave his house really not knowing what he was talking about. I had to call my father to ask, ‘Dad, who were the Chicago 7? What is this crazy conspiracy trial?’ I was just saying yes to Steven Spielberg the way literally anyone would. So I had a lot of learning to do.

Was it always the plan that you were going to direct it? Did Spielberg want you to direct this?

Of the two films I've directed, Molly's Game and Chicago 7, in neither case did I know I was directing it when I wrote it. Originally, Spielberg was going to direct. Then he decided he was going to produce with someone else directing, and the first someone else was Paul Greengrass, and then it was Ben Stiller, and then a couple of others. It wasn't until the film kind of got reignited by Steven—surely responding to Trump and his rallies—who said the time to make the film is now. He had seen Molly's Game and I guess thought I did a good enough job that I should direct Chicago 7.

Though you show bits of the 1968 Democratic National Convention, it’s largely a courtroom drama about the actual trial. Was that always the plan?

There wasn’t always a plan. I didn't have a plan from day one. It took a long time for me to develop a plan, and that plan was this: That the movie organized itself into three stories that I was going to tell at once. One was the court drama; the other was the evolution of the riot and how what was supposed to be a peaceful protest devolved into such a violent clash with the police and the National Guard; and the third part was the more personal story between Tom Hayden and Abbie Hoffman. These two guys were on the same side, fighting for the same thing, yet clearly can’t stand each other. They each think that the other one is doing harm to the cause. And I never would have been able to get that part of the story without spending time with Hayden. Because you can’t find that in the trial transcript, you can’t find that in any of the books—to say nothing of the fact that Hayden meant to say “our” blood when addressing the crowd.

That’s sort of the key to the whole movie—that’s something that you learned from talking to Tom Hayden?

Yes, from Hayden. I mentioned Butch and Sundance: Bill Goldman took me under his wing when I was in my 20s, and we stayed very close, and he was very much a mentor figure to me until he died just a couple years ago. He told me about Butch Cassidy, and about having a secret. He was at the library doing research on Butch and Sundance, and he had a secret in his pocket, which was that the Sundance Kid couldn't swim. He knew if he could just get those guys to that cliff in the second act with the rapids underneath, boy, was this going to be a great moment. That’s how I felt when I heard Tom Hayden talk about “our,” because I then had this great secret.

It seems like a small difference, but it does change the meaning of the statement. If Hayden had told the crowd “Let us make sure that if our blood flows, it flows all over the city,” instead of “Let us make sure that if blood flows, it flows all over the city,” do you think that things would've turned out differently?

From having spent time with Tom, and what I tried to dramatize in the third act of the film, I think that there's a part of Tom that feels like he inadvertently caused a tremendous amount of violence and all the blood that was spilled that night. Not that Tom, nor anyone else, thinks that the riot was Tom's fault. The police could've easily not started smacking people in the head with baseball bats.

So you’ve been working on this project for 14 years now. Obviously, you’ve done plenty of other things. Have you been writing and thinking about it this whole time?

Oh, no, I’ve written several dozen drafts of the screenplay—with the first draft, by the way, being basically a dramatization of a Wikipedia page.

That’s as good a place to start as any.

You do have to start someplace. And then, by the time you get to the end, you have a better picture of what this story is about. It’s like the old story about Michelangelo and David, where he took the slab of marble, and he just chipped away everything that wasn’t David. You start to do that with the screenplay. You start to chip away everything that isn’t David, and you start to just hang lanterns and bring into relief the things that are. The changes that were being made were just the rewrites that you’d be doing to make a screenplay better. I wasn’t changing anything to reflect the world. The world was changing to reflect the screenplay.

If you close your eyes and just listen to the Chicago 7, what’s striking is how many of those same conversations are still happening today. Even the conflict between Abbie Hoffman and Tom Hayden, who are fighting for the same thing, but approaching it from different ways.

I’m really happy that you said that because the things that you instantly see in terms of relevance today, obviously, are the clashes between the protestors and police. The deep division in the country. A politically motivated attorney general. It’s Donald Trump in the role of [Chicago] Mayor Daley. But I also hope that people see what you just mentioned: That that friction between Tom and Abbie is reflected today in the friction between the left and the further left. There are the people who were trying to work within the system to create incremental change, and the people furthest to the left were tired of incremental change and wanted a revolution.

When you see that happen—not just with Chicago 7, but with the warning you sent up with The Social Network, or some of the ideas you planted regarding political discord in The West Wing—do you feel like you wrote something eerily prescient? Or is it more that nothing has really changed?

It certainly wasn’t eerily prescient of me. I wasn’t seeing into the future. When we learn about these moments in our history—whether it’s the Chicago Seven or Jim Crow or a dozen other things—we tend to look at those and say, ‘Boy, I can’t believe the way we were then, but at least we got through it and that will never happen again. We’re better.’ To find out that we’re not is terrible. But Chicago 7 does end looking up, right? There’s a final act of defiance. There’s Daniel Pemberton’s beautiful score under the reading of the names. It’s a final act of defiance by the defendants. I want kids to feel good when they leave the theater.

Within all of your work, there’s always a sense of hopefulness.

I can’t help it. As an audience member, I like things that are darker and more cynical. But as a writer, I can’t seem to stop myself from writing more idealistically, more romantically, more hopefully.

Originally Appeared on GQ