5 questions for Steve Jobs screenwriter Aaron Sorkin

The negative reaction to Steve Jobs by the late tech titan’s company Apple and by his widow suggest that Jobs himself would also have been angry about his snarling portrayal in the movie.

History begs to differ, however, because Jobs had nothing but admiration for Aaron Sorkin, the film’s screenwriter. This was expressed in conversations the pair had in the years before Jobs died in 2011.

“Yes and that’s a big deal for me,” confirms a casually attired Sorkin, 54, somewhat sheepishly, during a Toronto promotional visit this week. (Steve Jobs opens wide Friday, following last week’s platform release.)

“He called me three times, having nothing to do with this movie. The first time was just to compliment something that I had written that he’d seen, an episode of The West Wing that had aired the night before.

“The second time was to invite me to tour Pixar in the hope that I’d write a Pixar movie. And the third time was to ask for my help with his Stanford University commencement speech (in 2005).”

For reasons he doesn’t get into, Sorkin passed on the Pixar project and the speech writing gig — although Jobs triumphed at Stanford regardless, delivering an inspirational address that’s considered one of his best. (It’s viewable on YouTube.)

But Sorkin’s fascination with Jobs continued, as did his interest in digital-era pioneers. He wrote Steve Jobs for director Danny Boyle, loosely adapting Walter Isaacson’s Jobs biography, after having earlier penned a take on Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg for David Fincher’s The Social Network. You can bet Sorkin has thoughts to share, on whether Jobs was a true genius and also the role of a key woman in the man’s life:

Michael Fassbender brilliantly plays the title icon of Steve Jobs, but like many people in the film, we’re left wondering if Jobs was a true genius or just a savvy marketer. What do you think?

Seth Rogen’s character Steve Wozniak asks that question so many times in the film because I had that same question. I don’t get it: Where exactly is Steve’s genius? I can see it in Danny Boyle. I can see it in David Fincher, when I worked with him. I’ve seen it in academics and I’ve seen it in other writers, such as Tony Kushner (Angels in America), who is plainly a genius. But I kept trying to figure out what it was that Steve was doing that qualified him for that. I’m not sure I ever found the answer, so if you’re asking me do I think Steve’s a genius, I don’t know.

How about Jobs as a person? He’s seen in your film and others as being callous and ruthless in his treatment of his workers, family and friends. Why was he so cantankerous?

There was something inside of Steve that made him feel like he was irrevocably damaged somehow, that he was unworthy of being liked or being loved. However, he had the genius to make these devices or marshal the forces that would make these devices, and he was able to endow them with something that made us emotional about them. I think Steve felt that if he can make things that people like, then it doesn’t matter if people like him or not. And that if you’re someone who doesn’t understand the value of rectangles having rounded corners, he’s just going to slice right through you because you’re standing in the way of him being liked.

Steve Jobs began his Stanford speech by saying he wanted to tell the graduating students “just three stories” from his life. Your script for Steve Jobs takes a similar three-story approach. Coincidence?

(Reflecting) I think it’s a coincidence, but maybe it’s not a coincidence. Before I knew what I wanted to do, I knew what I didn’t want to do. What I didn’t want to do was write a biopic. I didn’t want to do a cradle-to-grave story where we land on the character’s greatest hits along the way.

So how did you finally decide on your approach to his story?

While I was doing all of my research, I just tripped over the factoid that during the rehearsal for the 1984 launch of the Macintosh, they couldn’t get the Mac to say “Hello.” And suddenly that got me thinking backstage and I thought, “Well, what if the movie is just three scenes, each of them in real time, each of them backstage in the moments leading up to a product launch?” And I could then dramatize these points of friction in Steve’s life with other people that I think reveal a lot more about him than, “Hey, Woz, let’s use my parents’ garage.”

Unlike other films about Steve Jobs, this one pays a lot of attention to Macintosh marketing chief Joanna Hoffman, played by Kate Winslet, who is fascinating in her own right.

Yes, she’s not mentioned a lot in Walter’s book, but one of the mentions that she got was as this person who won this silly award that they gave every year at Apple to the person who could best stand up to Steve. So I thought, “I should talk to her.” And then once I met her, and began hearing the stories, I realized she was — given what I was doing — she was a very important character in this and that I was going to be using her for more than research. She was going to become a character.