“I wasn’t on Facebook. I had heard of Facebook the way I had heard of a carburetor,” playwright and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin said in an interview in the Daily’s offices last month. “I can’t pop open the hood of my car and point to it and tell you what it does.”

Despite his lack of familiarity with the popular social networking site, Sorkin — whose works include “A Few Good Men” and the Emmy-winning TV series “The West Wing” — never hesitated in signing on to write “The Social Network,” a film about Facebook’s improbable and tumultuous beginnings, out in theaters today in tandem with Ben Mezrich’s book “The Accidental Billionaires.”

“Here’s what happened: I got sent a 14-page book proposal that Ben Mezrich had written for his publisher. And the publisher was trying to shop it around for a film sale and so that’s how it got into my hands. I think I was on page three when I said yes to this. It was the fastest that I’ve ever said yes to anything,” Sorkin explained.

Actor Jesse Eisenberg, who plays Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, was just as new to the online craze as Sorkin.

“Prior to shooting, I had a cynical attitude toward it,” Eisenberg explained. “I think also, as an actor, I value my privacy a little more … maybe I have a greater sensitivity toward putting information about myself online, because sometimes people write stuff about me online and it’s so mean-spirited and I don’t want to be involved in that.”

Once Sorkin had accepted the project, which would become “The Social Network,” and landed David Fincher (“Fight Club”) as director, he and Mezrich began figuring out what exactly the whole Facebook phenomenon is about. And he had a lot to learn, since the site wasn’t his motivation to take on the project.

“What attracted me to it was that the themes in this story are as old as storytelling itself,” Sorkin said. “Of friendship, and loyalty, and betrayal, jealousy, power, class — these are things that Aeschylus was writing about, that Shakespeare was writing about. Paddy Chayefsky would’ve written this story. Luckily for me, none of those guys were available so I got to write it.”

Sorkin was captivated by the lawsuits brought against Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and decided to center “The Social Network” on the company's legal struggles. Zuckerberg was being sued by his co-founder Eduardo Saverin for allegedly cheating him out of company ownership and by Divya Narendra, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss at roughly the same time for allegedly stealing their idea. From these lawsuits, three different stories of Facebook’s founding emerged.

“I decided that I was going to tell the story of how there are three different versions of the truth and get a ‘Rashomon’ effect,” Sorkin said. “In other words, embrace the fact that no two people are telling the same story here.”

However, when stories of loyalty, betrayal, jealousy, power and class are based off true events and real people, they’re typically met with some degree of controversy. Sorkin is aware some might not appreciate the film.

“I don’t think anyone would like a movie made about the things they did when they were 19 years old,” he said.

“I’m sure that Mark and Facebook would prefer that I only tell the story from Mark’s point of view, but I’m telling it from Mark’s point of view and the point of view of the people who were suing Mark,” Sorkin said. “Facebook’s beef isn’t with the movie; it’s with the testimony given from the people who sued him. I hope controversy isn’t the reason why people buy a ticket. I hope it’s because they heard it was good.”

Some would argue that after seeing the movie, they got a glimpse of a more compassionate Zuckerberg.

“My job for the six-month shoot, every day, was to defend Mark Zuckerberg and my character, because you can’t act in a scene if you can’t defend the character’s behavior,” Eisenberg said. “So I don’t feel like he’s acting in a way that’s mean-spirited or malicious.