Steve Jobs Interviews with the cast, director Danny Boyle and Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin

Michael Fassbender as Steve Jobs

We get another look into the life of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs in the appropriately titled new film, Steve Jobs.  

While the movie  focuses on the Jobs , there are other people depicted in the film who also played a part in helping shape the company's history.

Focusing on Jobs as he prepares for three different launches in his career, the original Mac, the NeXT Computer, and the iMac, the movie depicts him as ruthless and ambitious. It also examines his tumultuous relationship with his first daughter, Lisa, who the movie shows Jobs not initially accepting as his own.

Jobs is played by Michael Fassbender as conflicted and without a doubt a brilliant visionary but he's also seen as shrewd and heartless in his relationships with colleagues, his daughter Lisa and her mother, Jobs' high school girlfriend, Chris-Ann Brennan (played by Katherine Waterston).

Michael Fassbender and Seth Rogen

Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin who wrote The Social Network, The Newsroom and The West Wing, among other things, used Walter Isaacson's best selling biography on Jobs as a reference. "When you are writing a character like this, it's important not to judge the character," Sorkin recently told me during our recent interview for the film.

Director Danny Boyle  calls Jobs "one of the most important figures in our lives and many, many more people’s lives to come," and said Jobs and other visionaries "have to be written about and have to be examined."

While Jobs is seen as gifted but cold, Seth Rogen's portrayal of Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak shows a gifted guy who received far less attention and credit than Jobs.  Wozniak spent a lot of time with Rogen and gave him as much insight as he could. In the end “Woz” was impressed with Rogen's performance and gave him high praise.

Kate Winslet as Joanna Hoffman

Another important player in Jobs' life was Joanna Hoffman, played by Kate Winslet.  As a member of the Macintosh development team, Hoffman,  was pretty much Jobs' right hand woman and stayed very close to Jobs throughout his career. In the film, Hoffman cares about Jobs but unlike others, she's not afraid to stand up to him.

Jeff Daniels (already an Aaron Sorkin pro - he starred in The Newsroom) plays John Scully, the former Pepsi CEO who later led Apple. While the beginning of the film shows Sculley as sort of a father figure to Jobs, promising to look out for him, it later shows a falling out between the two men, resulting in Jobs leaving Apple after the board of directors sided with the CEO.

Jeff Daniels as John Scully in, Steve Jobs

The movies also features Michael Stuhlbarg as Andy Herzfeld, an early Apple employee who helped shaped the software.

I had the opportunity to speak with director Danny Boyle, screenwriter Aaron Sorkin and most of the cast recently in London about working on this film and their thoughts on the man who literally changed the world, Steve Jobs.

Steve Jobs opens in theatres on October 16th