THE teenage Mark Zuckerberg might have been a jerk, but at least the grown-up one can take a joke.

That's how The Social Network screenplay writer Aaron Sorkin might put it — if he didn't love using so many words.

"Growing up in my family at my dinner, anyone who used one word when they could use ten just wasn't trying," he joked to news.com.au during a recent trip to Sydney to promote his new film.

The Social Network follows the founding of social networking site Facebook and its odd, often unlikeable, creator Mark Zuckerberg.

To say that Zuckerberg comes off as less than an angel in the film would be an understatement.

But Sorkin, the writer behind A Few Good Men and TV show The West Wing, says the real Facebook chief seems to have taken the movie in his stride.

"I want to say right up front I think he's been a remarkably good sport about this whole thing. I don't mean to be glib about it, but he has," he said.

"I don't think any of us would want a movie made about the things we did when we were 19 years old, but here it is."

One of the movie's pivotal scenes involves drinking a generous amount of Appletinis — something the real Zuckerberg appears to have taken to heart.

"I know the day that the movie opened in the US, he shut down the Facebook offices, he bought out a movie theatre, he took the entire staff over to see the movie," Sorkin says.

"And this won't mean anything to anybody until they've seen the movie, but he took them all out for Appletinis.

"I don't know what bar in the world has that much Appletini mix, but he made the Appletini the official drink of Facebook."

Angry geniuses

Sorkin says the film is based on fact, not fiction — thanks in part to blog posts written by the teenage Zuckerberg which he incorporated into the script.

However he also says that Zuckerberg represents a wider group of people he dubs "angry geniuses".

"He's not alone. There's an entire subset of tech geniuses, and even geniuses in other fields, who are not like the cuddly nerds that Hollywood made movies about in the '80s," he says.

"They're very angry because the pretty cheerleader still wants to go out with the quarterback and not them, even though they're the ones who are running the universe.

"They have a kind of superiority-inferiority complex that crashes into each other.

"They've been told that they're inferior because they keep getting stuffed in the locker, at least metaphorically. But they know that their minds are superior."

The trick to putting a character like that on screen without alienating viewers, Sorkin says, is to not judge them.

"You can't judge the character. You can't decide this guy is good, bad, up, down, right, left or anything like that," he says.

"You've got to find the parts about him that are you and you've got to empathise with him.

"(To do that) I'll try to tap into those moments when I've felt kind of an immature anger about something.

"I really don't have to go back that far. I can go back to being 25 and still find moments of great immaturity and find that anger."

The Social Network opens in cinemas this Thursday.