Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin has apologised to founder Mark Zuckerberg for his depiction of the tech guru in The Social Network, insisting he was just trying to tell his story.

The Moneyball writer won an Academy Award in 2011 for his screenplay for the film, which starred Jesse Eisenberg.

The movie centred on Zuckerberg as he developed the popular social networking site at college, but the boffin found the depiction "hurtful."

He said, "They just kind of made up a bunch of stuff that I found really hurtful. They made up this whole plot line about how I somehow decided to create Facebook to attract girls. The real story is a lot of hard work. If they were really making a movie (about the creation of Facebook)... it would be of me sitting there coding for two hours straight."

Sorkin explains he did not mean to upset Zuckerberg and was simply trying to tell the story of how the company was founded in as entertaining a fashion as he could.

He tells U.S. breakfast show Today, "I'm sorry that it did (hurt his feelings), I get it completely, I know I wouldn't want a movie made about the things that I did when I was 19 years old, so I get it. I didn't set out to hurt his feelings.

"There was a cool intellectual properties lawsuit, there was a origins story about this phenomenon of Facebook (that I wanted to explore)."