Biographical films are always walking something of a tightrope (even when they don’t actually involve tightropes). On the one hand they have to tell the true story about what happened to their subject, or they’re not very good biographies. On the other hand, they have to tell interesting, or exciting stories, or they won’t make for very good movies. When it comes to the upcoming film Steve Jobs, if you want to get an idea on how accurate the film is, you go to the next best source, Jobs’ partner Steve Wozniak.
Woz was interviewed by Bloomberg and asked how much the film’s first trailer appears to resemble reality. His response, while not a glowing endorsement, is about all the movie could ask for at this stage of the game. He said:
The lines I heard spoken were not things I would say but carried the right message, at least partly... I felt a lot of the real [Steve] Jobs in the trailer, although a bit exaggerated.
So it looks like Danny Boyle's Jobs will be accurate in deed if not in word. Wozniak is perfectly OK with this. He’s not at all upset or angry with the way he, or anybody else, is depicted, which isn’t uncommon with biopics. Woz seems to have a realistic handle on films based on real events. He understands that they are entertainment first, even if they are trying to tell a true story. A film that contains a real, if exaggerated, Jobs is probably exactly what the filmmakers were going for. Folks over at Universal may be breathing a sigh of relief as Woz has much nicer things to say about the trailer than he did that other Steve Jobs movie from a couple years ago.
Steve Wozniak goes on to say that he "doesn’t talk like that." We’ve got news for you, Woz. Aaron Sorkin wrote the script. Nobody talks like that. We just wish we did. Wozniak did consult with Sorkin on the script, though he never asked to see the final version because he didn’t feel it would be appropriate. He understood that the script was a work of creativity amongst the writer, actors and director, and not something he should be directly involved in. In the film, Wozniak is portrayed by Seth Rogen, oppositeMichael Fassbender’s Jobs. See the full trailer below.
The trailer’s depiction of the personal side of the Apple co-founder actually got an emotional reaction from the man who lived through the actual events. That’s about as ringing an endorsement as we can expect. We’re looking forward to seeing more of Steve Jobs before it’s released this October.
