While we don’t yet have any definitive indication who will play the titular character in the forthcoming Steve Jobs biopic penned by Aaron Sorkin — first it was Leonardo DiCaprio, then it was Christian Bale, and now Michael Fassbender is circling the project — the movie is one I’m really excited to see come together. Sorkin recently sat down with Bloomberg News to talk about Steve Jobs and the biopic reportedly due out next year, including that he thinks there could easily be ten more movies about Mr. Jobs.
“I think if you lined up ten writers and said, ‘Write a movie about Steve Jobs,’ you’d get ten different movies, all of them worth going to see,” Sorkin tells Bloomberg’s Emily Chang. Having read Walter Isaacson‘s biography “Steve Jobs”, upon which Sorkin’s script is partly based, even ten films might not do the iconic CEO justice. There is so much to unpack, so many interesting events and personal complexities detailed within Isaacson’s book, though I’m sure some will write Steve Jobs off as “a very smart man with control issues,” seeing as one of my former computer science instructors used those words, verbatim, to describe Jobs during a class discussion.
Sorkin also tells how, while he never met the charismatic co-founder and former CEO of Apple, he did speak with him on the phone a few times over the years: one call from Jobs was intended to convince Sorkin to write a Pixar movie, which he didn’t do, and the other was to enlist the writer’s help in cleaning up his 2005 Stanford commencement address, which he did do. It appears Sorkin isn’t only in the screenwriting business, so perhaps he’ll help write the report I have to hand in on the 17th.
To alleviate some of the pressure that comes with writing a film about such a well-known character, as well as to achieve a firmer grasp on the material, Sorkin met and spent time with the other seven characters who will show up in his film, including Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, to be played by Seth Rogen; former Macintosh team marketing chief Joanna Hoffman; and former PepsiCo president John Sculley, who was recruited by Jobs to become Apple’s CEO and later ousted the Jobs from the company he started. Alongside Rogen and Fassbender, Jessica Chastain is rumored for a role, which could perhaps be Hoffman, though I’m just spit-balling here.
As for Sorkin’s approach, “In this movie, Jobs has conflicts with all of [these characters] that get dramatized and worked out in a very compressed, very claustrophobic environment.” I, for one, can’t wait — even if a cast isn’t yet firmly in place. You can check out the video below for the full Bloomberg segment.
