Steve Jobs phoned Aaron Sorkin three times in his life. To thank the writer for name-checking Macs as his word processor of choice; to ask for help with his Stanford commencement address; and to ask if he'd write a Pixar film. Sorkin turned that offer down, saying he didn't think he'd be able to make inanimate objects talk. "But once you make them talk, they won't be inanimate any more," countered Jobs. "He might as well have said, 'Are you stupid?'," Sorkin said years later.
The pair formed a formidable mutual appreciation society, so when Jobs died it made sense for Sony to hire Sorkin to adapt Walter Isaacson's 2012 biography of the Apple iconoclast. It also helped that Sorkin, one of the finest screenwriters of our time, had recently won an Oscar for The Social Network.
Sorkin is master of the workplace drama -- A Few Good Men and The West Wing are but two career highlights. And he didn't want to write a conventional biopic of Jobs.
After spending time with the key players, including Steve Wozniak, Apple's former marketing exec Joanna Hoffman, and, particularly, Jobs' first daughter Lisa, Sorkin decided to construct the film as just three scenes, each taking in the moments before product launches: the Macintosh in 1984, the NeXT Cube, following Jobs' Apple firing in 1988, and his comeback in 1998 with the iMac.
WIRED spoke to Sorkin about the film and the difficulties he faced in telling Steve Jobs' life story on the big screen.
WIRED: The film focuses on Jobs' relationships, as well as his professional achievements. Do both sides of his life inform each other?
**Aaron Sorkin:**I would say that both sides of his life are inseparable from each other. They're not even compartmentalised as two sides, there's one person -- there was a lot of genius there.
He really sought perfection in his product and there is an extent to which he believed that kindness to your employees was actually a form of vanity. That someone who does that, it's more important to them that they be loved by their employees than reaching the ultimate goal, which is a great product.
Do you think it's a case of yin and yang with exceptional people, that you can't have one without the other? That you don't get to be that successful without being that difficult?
That argument is the central argument of the movie. And that argument is dramatised for us in a number of different forms right before our eyes and ears. I find it impossible to believe that it can only be one or the other. I don't have the genius that Steve Jobs did. In other words: How would I know?
In early interviews, years ago, you said the film's third act would be the iPod launch. Obviously you changed your mind, but did it even matter that it was iPod or iMac?
In early interviews I'm sure I didn't know what I was talking about yet. I do care what the product was, simply because it represented finally success after failure.
I had the first Macintosh, I had just graduated from college and my roommates and I all chipped in and we bought that first Macintosh. I was setting out to be a playwright and it was a great tool for me simply because of the delete key, I could keep doing draft after draft of my first play, A Few Good Men, on this Macintosh.
I thought it all took off from there, but the original Macintosh was a commercial failure. The success wasn't until the iMac. So that's why the iMac was important to me, that's why it became the third act.
When Sony was hacked last year, some of your emails about the film were leaked [one piece of correspondence revealed that Sorkin was initially unenthusiastic about Michael Fassbender filling Jobs' shoes]. Did being part of that storm change the way you use email?
You mean did I become fearful of what I was putting in an email? No. My issue with the Sony hack was that I simply don't understand how the press was so willing to buy what they understood was private property stolen by extortionists who were threatening violence and death even, against the people they had stolen it from.
It would be as if someone came into your house with a gun, said, "I'm going to kill you if you exercise your freedom of speech, and to show you how serious I am, I'm gonna take all of your stuff right now and I'm gonna put it out on the curb in front of your house." And then all your neighbours came by and, knowing how your stuff got on the curb, helped themselves. They just took it. That was my problem with the Sony hack.
[Director] Danny Boyle says he sees this film as part two of The Social Network. He studied the characters' behaviour in the latter, and that informed what he wanted to do with this. I'm sure you see them as two completely separate films, but how do you feel about that?
Well absolutely I view them as two completely separate movies. It's a coincidence that at the centre of both of them is a tech pioneer. But I think I understand what he's talking about. Danny speaks a lot about Silicon Valley being the Bethlehem of the new industrial revolution, the tech revolution, and he also says that he hopes this movie is the second of a trilogy. So for him it was important to make that connection, that these are stories about a new world being born.
Mark Zuckerberg objected to your take on him creating Facebook as revenge on an ex-girlfriend and an attempt to gatecrash a social group. He said that Hollywood people -- meaning you I guess -- don't understand that people in Silicon Valley like building things just for the sake of building things.
That's the only disagreement I have with Mr Zuckerberg. Hollywood people absolutely understand building things for the sake of building things, we do it every day. That is exactly what we do.
Nobody got involved with the Steve Jobs movie because they thought it was gonna be a money-printing machine. This movie doesn't have summer blockbuster written all over it. We did it because we wanted to build it. But Mark is entitled to anything he wants to say, I think that if somebody made a movie about the things that I did when I was 19 years old, I wouldn't like it either.
Steve Jobs is out on November 13.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
