The screenplay, authored by Aaron Sorkin, is based on a biographical book by Ben Mezrich, who interviewed Zuckerberg and others who had contributed to bringing Facebook into the public arena. Cronenweth notes that Fincher had to decide whether he wanted interpretive or reality-based cinematography to bring audiences into the places and environments where the contemporary story is unfolding.

“I think we came up with a visual quality which is naturalistic, so it won't wrench you out of the very human drama, but also has a few bold, Expressionistic undertones and some subtle stylization, which acknowledges the hyper-reality of youth – especially within the isolation of the old Ivy League colleges. It's important to remember the subjects of the story are still just kids finding their way in the world, and when you're young and the world is still a party, it has a slightly unreal emotional amplification to it.

“Preparation was the same as it would be on any movie,” he explains. “David and I discussed the personalities of Mark Zuckerberg (played by Jesse Eisenberg) and the other main characters, and how he wanted to present them to the audience. We also visited locations where we would be shooting in Cambridge, Massachusetts, California, Maryland, Dorney Lake, Berkshire, Windsor and Oxfordshire, in England.”

Cronenweth and Fincher discussed creating a contemporary period look, while transporting moviegoers to the locations where the story is unfolding. A sense of place became key when the characters moved between the college and San Francisco's party scenes. Cronenweth had to capture the different feel of these locations, as well as the brighter, more clinical lighting of the deposition rooms, where the nostalgia is dropped in favour of the hard realities of the court case.

Sometimes this contrast is easier said than done. Besides not being permitted access to the Harvard campus (they shot the majority of the college scenes around Cambridge), Cronenweth worked hard at having an interesting visual language emerge from the story's ethical questions.

“The moral compass of the story is murky and grey, and the ethics don't play out with any sense of certainty about the right answers,” says Cronenweth, “so we needed to match this with the visual tones and still have something exciting to look at. We decided to mute the colour pallete quite heavily in the college scenes, and keep a limited depth-of-field to make the place feel claustrophobic in contrast to San Francisco.”