Danny Boyle Explains Why The Sony Leak About ‘Steve Jobs’ Was ‘Healthy’

Danny Boyle
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Here’s something you don’t hear a filmmaker say every day when promoting a movie about a famous person’s life: “In a kind of Shakespearean way, you jettison the facts that don’t help the drama and try to embrace the drama on the facts that do.” Usually, we are fed some sort of crafty bullshit about how everything we see is “true to the best that the story would allow,” or whatever. But here, Danny Boyle is openly admitting that Steve Jobs ignores some facts and embraces others. Then again, Boyle — who won a directing Oscar for Slumdog Millionaire — has made a film that’s nothing like a traditional biopic.

Steve Jobs condenses the life of the famed Apple founder (played by Michael Fassbender) into three moments, each taking place before a huge presentation of a new product. In these three presentations, each spaced out by several years, Jobs is surrounded by the same people — including his estranged daughter, Lisa, a character who plays a pivotal role in the film – and it’s through how these relationships change over time that we get a sense of who Steve Jobs really is.

Ahead, Boyle explains the challenges of creating what’s essentially a biopic, only with extreme scene limitations and rich, rich dialogue from Aaron Sorkin. Also, Boyle talks about the Sony hack — a leak that revealed pretty much everyone ever considered to play Jobs – and how that affected his job as the person who actually wound up directing the movie.

Were you at all worried that this very specific “three moments in Jobs’ life” time structure would be limiting? What was your biggest worry?

Obviously repetition. Because it’s just an extraordinarily formal, almost abstract idea that you get the same six people, 40 minutes before three launches. And they just bash away at each other. It’s a wonderful idea, but you’re worried about it feeling, too… Because cinema is always a lover of forward momentum, where this is a cyclical idea. It’s a cycle that’s repeated three times. So we tried to make each act very distinctive and different, so it felt fresh. And that was for the actors’ energy, because we rehearsed and shot each act separately — so the actors knew 1984 was done before we moved onto 1988. And we made the three theaters very distinctive and hopefully reflected the idea of the stories within each of the acts and parts.

And you shot each part with a different format: 16mm, 35mm, then digital.

And we shot with three different formats. So, again, it felt like you were moving forward to a digital age, really. Which is what Steve Jobs is. You know, that defined him ultimately — the clean lines, the simplicity, the beauty of everything stripped away. The elegance of the infinite resolution of Pixar, of Toy Story — which is in 1995 — so he arrived at that look for the film. It feels like you’re moving forward to something. On a human level, you’re moving forward to redemption for him, in terms of his behavior.

Steve Jobs tricked me into thinking it’s not a traditional biopic, but all the information is still in there, just presented in a unique way that doesn’t make it feel like a biopic.

It absolutely does. And when Aaron Sorkin is approaching it, you’re dealing with a guy who is asking everybody to think differently. “Don’t think the same.” [Laughs] You’re not going to do a traditional cradle to grave biopic. The guy is telling you, “Don’t do that!” He’s actually saying to you, “Don’t do that! Think different! Do something different!” You don’t know where it will lead you, ultimately; you’ve got to trust it. That’s what he did, of course. And look where he ended up. So, that’s what we tried to do and that’s what Sorkin tried to do.

The way people reported on Steve Jobs, I was always under the impression he had almost no relationship with his estranged daughter, Lisa. Your movie is telling us that’s not true and he did have a relationship with her.

Yeah, there was. And I think Michael Fassbender brought that out. Michael was very insistent on that. Although Steve Jobs was saying things, occasionally, that seemed incredibly cruel about her — or to her, even. Actually, when he was with her, he communicated with her, because he educated her. Because if you watch the film, even when he’s being cruel, he’s trying to teach her stuff really, in a way. It’s just that he doesn’t have time for her because his focus is so myopically and exclusively on this thing that doesn’t exist yet, so he cannot deal with any of the responsibilities… But, actually, he trained her well. Because in pure drama terms, somebody emerges who can really stand up to him. He trained her well. She’s a chip off the block, as they say, and can confront him.

The truth is, he did have a complex relationship with her — which was on and off and on and off. And he did absorb her into his new family, which we don’t deal with at all. In a kind of Shakespearean way, you jettison the facts that don’t help the drama and try to embrace the drama on the facts that do. And you hope it’s an avenue to a greater understanding than a lot of details over a period of time, which actually just keep you on the surface the whole time. You want to kind of engineer something beneath the surface through a microscopic approach, I guess, is what we’re doing through three instances, three moments in time.

Because of the Sony leaks, we know pretty much everyone who was ever up for this movie. And now that I’ve seen it, I can’t imagine Michael Fassbender not playing Steve Jobs. But are you annoyed that stuff is out there?

Well, it’s the world, isn’t it? And it’s partly a world this guy helped create.

That’s true.

Where we are always accessible at all times to all people. You can’t be nostalgic about the way, in the past, film studios were able to control information much more easily. It’s much more difficult for them to do it now. And that’s ultimately a healthy thing. It can be embarrassing at times, but actually it can empower you at times, as well. And I think Michael knows there’s only a handful of guys that can actually play that part — and none of them as well as him. And I think you’re right, what you feel now about watching it and not being able to imagine anybody else in it, that’s what happens to you as a director. Once you cast, your belief in that person is absolute and you carry that through, ultimately. And they make it their own, as well: Because it becomes as much about Michael as it does about Steve Jobs, in a way. As it should be! It’s not a sheet of armor that’s he’s presenting to you, it’s actually a glimpse into him as well especially in that third part, when you begin to see him begin to pull apart.

And in that third part, Michael Fassbender looks just like Steve Jobs. It’s uncanny.

Well, it’s uncanny, isn’t it? It’s trusting the process by which you get to him, not photographically, but you get to him emotionally. That’s the way you’re going to get at him, not by comparing him to photographs and mannerisms, but actually through understanding and belief in the material — and that has an essential truthfulness about what he was like. And I do believe it. And I never met the guy, so what can I say? If I’m judging it against other material, then I’m just judging it against other people’s version of him. In some way, you have to believe Michael’s version. This is Michael’s version. And other people will compare themselves when they do it to Michael’s version of this man. Your bullshit detector has to be active at all times when you’re doing this. Because there are so many facts that are contested anyway, what do you judge it against?

Did you see Ex Machina?

Yes. And that’s a portrait of Google, which it is in a way and it’s crucial these stories are told: Dave Eggers’ book, The Circle; The Social Network, the Alex Gibney documentaries. There’s another guy, Adam Curtis, who made an amazing series documentary called All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace. These stories have to be told because that’s our present and future.

Mike Ryan has written for The Huffington Post, Wired, Vanity Fair and New York magazine. He is senior entertainment writer at Uproxx. You can contact him directly on Twitter.

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