First we had Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in David Fincher's The Social Network. Now comes Apple's late, great co-founder in Danny Boyle's new picture, Steve Jobs.
"I imagine there will come a time when there won't be much else to write about but tech people," says Aaron Sorkin, the screenwriter behind both. But just as The Social Network wasn't about Facebook, Steve Jobs isn't a love-letter to the gadget giants.
“It’s not about computers. It’s not about phones. It’s not about devices,” says Sorkin.
What it’s about, is the ugly side of genius; with Jobs played warts-and-all by Michael Fassbender. The story is set on the eve of three separate product launches. Each like a mini-movie, the first is set in 1984, with advent of the Macintosh; the second deals with Jobs unveiling the NeXT computer in 1988 after he was fired from Apple; and the third sees the 1998 launch of the candy-coloured iMac, the first in a huge line of game-changing devices from the company.
The film was to be directed by Fincher, but when he dropped out, Boyle came on board. He was relieved Sorkin’s script veered away from the traditional biopic. “The cradle-to-the-grave thing skims the surface,” says the 59-year-old director. “It doesn’t really delve. But this was extraordinary.” Capturing the essence of the man through its sizzling dialogue and the hum of Daniel Pemberton’s score, Boyle argues Jobs’ outpourings are meant to replicate his interior life. “That’s what we wanted to try to illustrate – what the sound of his mind is like.”
A role both Christian Bale and Leonardo DiCaprio flirted with, Boyle wasn’t worried that his eventual star Fassbender looked nothing like Jobs. “What you need is a great actor. It doesn’t matter what they look like.” Without using prosthetics, Fassbender only wears coloured contacts to change his appearance, though he does don a wig and polo-neck jumper to adopt Jobs’ most “iconic” look late on. “I daren’t say that I look like him,” he says, “but there was more of a similarity there [in the final act], which hopefully creeps up on the audience.”
On holiday in Australia when first contacted about playing the character, the 38 year-old Irish-German star was immediately taken with Sorkin’s writing. “If you think of a modern-day Shakespeare, he’s it,” he says. “It was never an option. I had to do it, I had to take it on.” It meant months of work, reading the script three times a day until it seeped in and watching YouTube clips of Jobs giving speeches and interviews. “I would go off for a bite to eat at night and have him in my ears on the iPhone, some YouTube clip, and just keep playing on repeat.”
With a number of people orbiting around the fiery Jobs backstage in the script, Fassbender spoke to many of their real-life counterparts including Apple chief executive John Sculley (played by Jeff Daniels), Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak (Seth Rogen), Macintosh designer Andy Hertzfeld (Michael Stuhlbarg) and Apple marketing exec Joanna Hoffman (Kate Winslet). While Jobs died in 2011, aged 56, Fassbender was also able to speak to Walter Isaacson, who wrote the biography Steve Jobs that Sorkin loosely adapted.
Only Sorkin, however, got to chat with Jobs’ daughter Lisa Brennan, who refused to meet Isaacson.
“I don’t think that the movie would have been what it is without her doing that,” Sorkin concedes. It’s her fractured relationship with Jobs – who denied claims by his ex-wife Chrisann (Katherine Waterston) that he was Lisa’s father – that forms the emotional centre-point of the film.
What emerges is a man far less sleek than his designs.
“Steve, as he says in the final scene, is poorly made,” says Sorkin. “There’s not going to be a version of Steve, a Steve 4.0, that he’s finally perfected. All he can do is make products that are perfect. And if anyone tries to make them less perfect, Steve is going to react to that person the exact same way I would react to a director who was making [a script of mine] less perfect.”
Thankfully, Sorkin had Boyle. The Oscar-winning director behind Slumdog Millionaire here decided to film chronologically, rehearsing each segment for two weeks beforehand. Each time period was also given its own look: shooting on 16mm film (for 1984), 35mm (1988) and digital (1998), while Boyle also insisted on filming in San Francisco, “the Bethlehem of the new machine age” as he puts it, despite the expense.
It all results in a film as beautifully crafted as one of Jobs’ products. Ever modest, Boyle credits Sorkin, his remarkable cast and particularly Fassbender. “When somebody is that good, everyone else comes up to that level. Funnily enough it’s Jobs’ argument – “A” players encourage the “A” players and “B” players don’t. He just wants ‘A’ players and that’s the same with a cast like this.”
• Steve Jobs opens in cinemas today
artslife@thenational.ae