In Steve Jobs, Oscar-winning screenwriter Aaron Sorkin takes us backstage to paint a painfully human portrait of the late Apple icon.
If you’d like to have an in-depth discussion about algorithms or FaceTime, you should cross Aaron Sorkin off your list of potential conversation partners. But if you need an Oscar-winning screenwriter to elevate the tech world beyond the usual awkward-genius clichés, Sorkin is your man.
Though he swears that he has no idea how he became Hollywood’s “go-to guy for the binary system,” in the past five years alone Sorkin has won an Oscar for writing David Fincher’s The Social Network, earned a second nomination (alongside Steven Zaillian and Stan Chervin) for Bennett Miller’s Moneyball, and churned out three seasons of the social-media-fueled The Newsroom. Now, with October’s Steve Jobs, the 54-year-old is daring to go where several writers have gone before—it’s the latest in at least a dozen films about the late Apple cofounder (and the third to be released this year).
Staged as three distinct acts—each taking place backstage at a major product launch (the Macintosh in 1984, NeXT in 1988, and the iMac in 1998)—the film is an adaptation of Walter Isaacson’s comprehensive (and Jobs-authorized) biography. But don’t call it a biopic. “Walter’s biography had to be about what happened,” Sorkin says. “It had to be a piece of journalism. When I write something, there is actually a requirement to be subjective; it’s really the difference between a photograph and a painting.” And it’s not always pretty. In a wide-ranging conversation, we spoke with Sorkin about finding the balance between real life and entertainment in taking on a 21st-century icon.
WIRED: How did your involvement in writing Steve Jobs begin?
Sorkin: I had just done The Social Network and Moneyball for Sony, with Scott Rudin producing. Amy Pascal, who at the time was the co-chairperson at Sony, called and said, “We want you to adapt Walter Isaacson’s book.” I sort of immediately began shaking. Scott is very good at talking me into things when I’m nervous about doing them, and I said yes.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/D1R-LwHbld4
What made you so worried?
I’m nervous before I do anything. It’s just standing at the bottom of a mountain and looking up with no clear path of how you’re going to get to the top. But in this case, it was particularly daunting for me as I didn’t know that much about Steve Jobs, and the idea of doing a biopic was daunting.
How did you get past that?
I work very slowly, and the first couple of months are spent just pacing around, climbing the walls, and saying, “I have no idea what I’m going to do. I don’t know how to do this.” It was in that period that I decided not to write a biopic.
Why not?
When you’re doing a biopic, it’s very hard to shake the cradle-to-grave structure that audiences are so familiar with. People are going to come into the theater knowing that first we’re going to see a little boy with his father, and he’s looking into the window of the electronics store, and then we’re going to hit these famous signposts along the way in Steve Jobs’ life. Also, I’m not really a screenwriter; I’m a playwright who pretends to be a screenwriter. I’m most comfortable writing in claustrophobic pieces of geography and periods of time.
In reading about the trouble they were having getting the Mac to say “Hello” at the 1984 launch, I got this idea, and I wrote an email to Scott saying, “If I had no one to answer to, I would write this entire movie in three real-time scenes, and each one would take place backstage before a particular product launch. I would identify five or six conflicts in Steve’s life and have those conflicts play themselves out in these scenes backstage—in places where they didn’t take place.”
You’ve worked with him enough by now, though, that I imagine you’ve got his trust.
Really, I was emailing Scott to get help: Take this thing that I really want to do and tell me what I’m allowed to do, because no studio is going to let me do this. Two or three minutes later, I got an email from Amy Pascal—Scott had forwarded my email to her—and she said, “I think this is a great idea.” I couldn’t believe it. They were going to let me do this thing. And so it turned into not a biopic. I’m not quite sure what to call it.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/lB95KLmpLR4
Did the fact that this and The Social Network could be construed as being similar give you pause at all?
Only the irony gave me pause—the irony being that I’m technologically illiterate. I’m not sure why I’m the go-to guy for the binary system, but I wasn’t worried about repeating myself. I knew that it would be a different animal.
In the first trailers for the film, you really get that “Steve Jobs, rock star” vibe.
Of the big cheering crowd, yes.
I was surprised, though, that there’s actually not a lot of that in the movie itself. It all takes place backstage.
I think there are people anticipating that the movie’s going to be just one big champagne toast to Steve Jobs. You saw it. It’s not.
Walter Isaacson’s biography is extremely comprehensive. How much did you rely on the text and the interviews in the book in crafting your script?
Obviously Walter’s book was invaluable. Also invaluable though was the time I spent with the actual people—with Steve Wozniak and Joanna Hoffman and several dozen others, but in particular with John Sculley and Steve’s daughter Lisa.
“If you were to tell me that Kim Jong-un was going to have a direct effect on my life, I wouldn’t have believed you—but it happened. We watched the Sony hack unfold in real time while we were casting Steve Jobs.”
What surprised you most in reading the book and getting to know more about Jobs—the things that stuck out to you that you wanted to include?
There were two things that I wanted to try to get my arms around. One had to do with Lisa. I’m the father of a daughter too, and it was hard for me at first to get past Steve’s treatment of his daughter—the denial of paternity and so forth. But what started out as this huge obstacle became a great engine for writing the movie, because Steve would find his way to being a father, which was great.
The other thing is what we hear Seth Rogen say in the trailer: “What do you do?” Where is the evidence of genius from Steve Jobs? There’s the success, I get that, but I’m not getting what it is that Steve did. It was in talking to Lee Clow and Woz and Andy Hertzfeld and all these people that I began to get an idea of it. But I also liked that question being asked.
Jobs was a big idea guy, but a lot of what we see in the film seems ego-driven.
The book Steve Jobs is a masterful piece of journalism. A movie can’t be that. Charlie Wilson’s War, with Mike Nichols, was the first nonfiction that I wrote, and there was this thing that Mike would repeat to me: “Art isn’t about what happened.” That sunk in.
For as much as the movie is about one of the great tech icons, technology is really just a supporting character. You describe yourself as technologically illiterate, yet with this movie and The Social Network and Moneyball, you seem to …
This isn’t an origin story or an invention story. It’s not about how the Mac was invented. And The Social Network wasn’t about the technology that went into creating Facebook. Nonetheless, I knew that there was going to be no way I could write this movie without a lot of tutors. There are lines that I wrote in the movie that I don’t understand.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/xZGVgSw4Pho
There have been a number of other movies made about Steve Jobs, from Pirates of Silicon Valley to Alex Gibney’s new documentary. Did you look at those movies at all to see what has already been done?
I haven’t seen Pirates of Silicon Valley. By design, I did not see Jobs, the Ashton Kutcher movie, because I wanted to be able to say I haven’t seen it. But I rely on people who have seen those films to tell me if I just wrote a scene that was in another movie.
I don’t know whether you’ve noticed that many of the headlines talking about Steve Jobs refer to it as “Aaron Sorkin’s Steve Jobs.” Which is odd—and interesting—and must put some pressure on you.
In reality, of course, the movie belongs to a lot of people. Like [director] Danny Boyle. In failure, certainly, I’m going to blame Michael Fassbender.
Though he really is fantastic in the title role. Of course, it’s quite public knowledge now that he wasn’t the first actor cast in the role.
The truth of the matter is that Steve Jobs, comparatively speaking, went off without a hitch. I know it doesn’t seem that way, primarily because of the Sony hack and then news leaking that we were talking to Leonardo DiCaprio and we were talking to Christian Bale.
As far as the Sony hack goes, you guys got off pretty easy—your movie certainly was not the main story there. But what does it feel like to wake up and learn that the whole of your communication about this movie you’ve been working on for years can now be read by anyone?
The Sony hack was very troubling to me on a number of levels—I wrote about this in an op-ed for The New York Times. I couldn’t get over the fact that news outlets were reprinting emails that had been stolen by extortionists who threatened the families of Sony employees. And to make matters worse, it happened to be North Korea.
And to think it was all kicked off by a Seth Rogen comedy.
Listen, if you were to tell me that Kim Jong-un was going to have a direct effect on my life, I wouldn’t have believed you. But it happened. It really happened—while we were in the middle of casting Steve Jobs! We’d be having casting sessions over at Sony, and one day everybody got this really weird thing on their computer screen, this sort of upsetting imagery of skulls and blood, and then the next day it got worse. And then we watched the whole thing unfold in real time.
Did witnessing that change your habits? Are you sending more handwritten letters? Learning Morse code?
I have a perhaps unhealthy stubborn streak in this area—I don’t like altering my life because of bad people. But sometimes I won’t be given the choice. When a movie is being rolled out, the studio publicists and all our individual publicists get together and come up with bullet points and talking points—“Make sure you stay away from this,” and “Don’t say that quite that way, because that quote can be taken out of context,” and that kind of thing. The decision was made that none of those conversations can happen by email. They all have to happen over the phone. So there are things like that.
The script itself was very heavily guarded. Once it was done, you had to go to Amy Pascal’s or Scott Rudin’s office to read it, and I’m talking about the heads of agencies—Ari Emanuel and Richard Lovett. An employee would be sitting in the room while they read it. There was just a lot of security around it.
How curious are you about the audience response? The film doesn’t necessarily paint Steve Jobs in the most flattering light, and not everyone is going to expect—or want—that.
There are going to be people who say we were rough on him, and there are going to be people who say we weren’t rough enough on him. But I think we made a good movie, and I think that if you asked 10 writers to write 10 movies about Steve Jobs, you’d get 10 different movies that wouldn’t resemble one another.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/aEr6K1bwIVs
Grooming by Louise Moon for Bumble and Bumble
