All about Steve
STEVE JOBS | Oscar-winning screenwriter Aaron Sorkin tells Buzz how he adapted the storied life of an iConoclast.
Aaron Sorkin knows a thing or two about real-life screenplays – he won an Academy Award for The Social Network. Condensing Apple co-founder Steve Jobs’ life into three acts is no mean feat, but here he talks us through the process of putting a life on screen.
DITCH THE BIOPIC FORMULA “The challenge in this film is, Walter [ Isaacson]’ s book is a straight-ahead biography. That’s what he set out to write. Walter, at heart, is a journalist. Art and journalism are two different things with two different sets of criteria. If I wasn’t going to do the cradle-to-grave format that Walter did, I was going to have to do something else. I decided [ to write the script] before I read the book.”
FIND A WAY IN “I met with dozens of people, including the real life counterparts of the characters in the movie. Obviously not Steve – he had passed away by the time I started doing the movie. All I knew was what I didn’t want to do, which was a biopic. It’s very hard to shake the structure of a biopic, and audiences are very familiar with it, that kind of cradle-to-grave structure and in between you do the greatest hits of the character. So I came up with this different structure. I identified about five conflicts in Steve’s life with other people, including and especially his eldest daughter Lisa.”
TIGHTEN YOUR FOCUS “I’m happiest in claustrophobic spaces and compartments of time where there’s a ticking clock. So I came up with the structure to have three scenes that all took place in real time. All of those conflicts would be played out over those three scenes, taking place before one of his big product launches. I liked the first one because it was the introduction of the Mac. The second one was Steve in exile. And then I wanted to do the first one that marked his return to Apple. The products weren’t that interesting to me, it was the events.”
FORGET THE TECH “You’ll read from people who haven’t seen the movie, ‘Aw, I wanted to see the iPhone’ or,
‘I write until they take my pencils away’ Aaron Sorkin
‘I wanted to see the iPad.’ Those people are going to be surprised when they see the movie, that the scenes have very little to do with the products that are being launched. I don’t know much about the technology, so it would have been very difficult for me to write something that somebody else couldn’t understand. I can tell you, there are moments in the movie I don’t understand. The trick is getting the audience to believe that they know what they’re talking about.”
LET THE DIALOGUE FLOW “If you’re labouring over every line, it means you don’t have it. You have to sort of load up the shelves with groceries. You have to know what the intention and obstacle is in each scene. What does this person want? What’s standing in their way of getting it? And then when you’re fully loaded, you want to write with as much speed and energy as you can. I really believe that that energy makes its way onto the page.”
KEEP WORKING “I work on the script until they take my pencils away. We had a fantastic rehearsal period on this. It was rehearsed like a play. So all during rehearsals, I’d make little adjustments at night. Work gets done during rehearsal. Like building someone the perfect suit, you’ve got a cast now – you’re seeing the actors in front of you doing it, you’re seeing what doesn’t quite work, you’re seeing where you may have overwritten something, the actor is taking care of it better than you took care of it, so maybe you cut this line, cut that line.”
ONE MORE THING... “There’s plenty about Steve Jobs that isn’t in the script. We never mention Pixar in this movie. It’s a pretty big deal. He founded a movie studio that’s had enormous success and kind of changed the game. There are many things having to do with Steve and Lisa, many things having to do with Steve and Woz [ Steve Wozniak, Apple co-founder], many things having to do with Steve and Sculley [ John, former Apple CEO] that didn’t make it into the script. Just because, if it can’t move the story forward, it can’t be in the script.” MM
ETA | 13 November Steve Jobs is out next month.