In fact, biopic might not even be the right word for it. It’s more like a play.
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It is no accident that Sorkin’s script is set not in tech labs or board meetings, but nearly entirely backstage during pivotal Apple product launches; it locates Jobs as, fundamentally, a writer, producer, director and performer.
Part of it might be Danny Boyle’s demeanor. Here’s what he had to say. First, the movie had to be filmed in San Francisco.
It’s an expensive town.
Although talented as a project manager and marketer, Jobs couldn’t relate to people in any fashion other than with clipped hostility. Twenty, thirty years is nothing for the sort of changes that have been forged. “He might also be remembered for his negative personality”. It creates more like that. On film, it could come across as, well, stagy. It’s like, “Holy –t!” It’s like three, 185 pages of dialogue and it’s basically there’s no instruction manual. And of course he has a connection with the products, or the corporations if you like, they were communication. And was just real daunting there really in that role really. The film’s score was created by Award-winning composer Daniel Pemberton, as well as includes two iconic tracks from Bob Dylan, and songs by The Libertines and the Maccabees. You know what? It IS like that.
I haven’t yet named the actor breathing life into this character.
I doubt Sorkin and his pals really know themselves. It is refreshing to see the aesthetic evolve with the film and a ideal deconstruction of the three act structure. “Do you see how its face resembles a goofy grin?” But I thought, “That’s fantastic”. To be sure, “Steve Jobs” has its own integrity as the story of the young innovator, but it’s a little like making a movie about Thomas Edison and stopping somewhere between the phonograph and the lightbulb. These conflicts and resolutions, spanning his career at Apple, subsequent departure, and victorious return, shaped Jobs as both an innovator and a person. (It seems ungenerous to deny the filmmakers their own “reality-distortion field.”) But by stripping out any and all complications from the story it wishes to tell, the movie denies itself the opportunity for nuance and puts a ceiling on its own ambition. Todd Haynes made high art of this with his 2007 film I’m Not There, in which seven different actors, Cate Blanchett among them, portrayed Dylan in various guises, everything from hillbilly poet to rebel rocker to mystery tramp to born-again shaman. Did we hear someone say Helvetica? For all the good he brought the world with his innovations, there seem to be as many stories about his malevolence, wrongdoing and all-around dickishness. Life is so hard to capture anyway.
Everybody’s going to have an opinion about you because everybody’s got an opinion about you, so he’s under staggering pressure. How do you tell him a scene isn’t working?
It’s interesting to me that you’re trying to make these big… maybe “statements” isn’t the correct word… but convey these big ideas, and you’re doing it dramatically in microcosm. But it felt truthful, and it felt exquisitely good as anything I’ve read. After an interview with WGN-AM’s Roe Conn and Anna Davlantes and yours truly, Sorkin and I continued the conversation one on one.
While that scene didn’t happen, it captured the Jobs that Wozniak knew.
Steve Jobs follows Jobs (2013) and Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine (2015) to the movie marketplace, each emerging progressively stronger than its predecessor, and all three warts-and-all portraits worthwhile. Certainly, it thrashes against its constraints, but it also never feels the need to break too severely from its central gimmick. Literally. And it’s such a great positioning of that because it’s after that enormous scene when Seth pulls him apart in front of his fans, in front of the acolytes. Fassbender is a solid Jobs and physically evolves into the character by the third act.
“Steve Jobs” is arguing that when an artist claims to understand the intersection of human insecurity and desire, even though that sweet spot changes every few minutes, we would all be advised to shut up and listen. The director also filmed the movie in a unique way, using 16mm film for the 1984 sequence, 35mm for the 1988 sequence, and shooting the 1998 sequence digitally. So we went with that illusion and 35 is handsome for that.
Actually, sooner or later everyone gets to do all three. And so it felt like that was an opportunity to work on 16 again.
Whether or not that’s who Steve Jobs actually was is a different matter.
I mean, the Macintosh wasn’t a success at the beginning, and the NeXT was not a success at all, although it had the first digital book in it. Which he wasn’t shy about comparing himself to Gutenberg and the printing press. So he’s got everything he wants. But back then, it’s like, “Oh, wow, this is science fiction!” Fassbender isn’t endearing. He’s not someone you love in spite of yourself.
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We didn’t [laughs]. We tried to. Just as long as you keep your iPhones off. As for the people who buy his computers and crowd the launches – and who, indeed, will sit in movie theaters or at home watching this movie while checking their iPhones – he has only the contempt of a conquering visionary.
