Exclusive Interview: Joshua Michael Stern on jOBS

CraveOnline: Did you make all these decisions before the film began, or are some of these scenes and ideas on the cutting room floor?

Joshua Michael Stern: We were a smaller budget film. We had 30 days to shoot it. There might have been a couple things I would have liked to have put in but a lot of the decisions were made before we shot it. We had to really figure it out. I also had to figure out what was dramatic, you know? And what we know. To venture into his relationship with Laurene would be complete conjecture. He was so fiercely private. The fact that that whole section where he went to NeXT and was sort of unfulfilled on some level. That was a great operating system. And he was on the board at Pixar. Stuff happened, but [it was] not necessarily hugely dramatic and we just, you know… What do you tell? So for us a lot of it was about what was interesting.

What ended up on the cutting room floor? There were some idiosyncratic about Steve. For example, he used to love to put his feet into a toilet and flush the water to calm himself down. We had a couple of moments that we didn’t include. There was a bit of a moment where we were going to maybe do something about him going to Xerox, but the thing about when you make a biopic [is] when you ask the question and you don’t fully answer it, sometimes… “What was that?” You know? Ultimately a lot of the issues were just really undramatic and it was just really difficult to film it and [give] it some kind of life. Except for the people who would have loved to have seen the scene where he was listening and looking at GUI. That would have been fun, but aside from that you just had to choose what was important and not.

 

It strikes me as interesting that when you make a biographical picture, you have two options: you can tell a story from the day he was born to the day he died, or you can find a story within that. Was the story you chose obvious to you, or did you have to figure out where jOBs was going to end?

One scene that was cut was a scene when he was doing the blue box when he was a teenager. It was just difficult because you have to decide what you’re telling. To me, the story was about a guy who gets out of college and searches for what he wants, and he has an epiphany. I kind of put it akin to a religious epiphany. If you’ve ever known somebody who’s found any kind of religion, let’s say on a Sunday, they’re a very different person the next Monday, and they usually tend to be ultra focused on what that is and the people who were part of their lives before the epiphany, they tend to kind of drift away from them as they move forward. For Jobs, I think he found that.

As far as the trajectory of the movie, it was really interesting to me. This was a movie about a guy, a kind of classic Shakespearean… or some of those big, big ultra, über, dramatic themes that happen fiction, which is… You know, that “left on the doorstep of peasants” sort of thing. [Jobs] was born into parents who were not his. He grows up thinking he’s bigger than his environment, but he loves his adopted parents, and he meets this scraggly group of ne’er do wells who are smelly ruffians, and he finally gets into the palace with the business of vision. How do you do something creative that’s never been done, and have a board who is risk averse be patient with you? Finally the palace gets impatient with him and they stab him.

So when they kicked him out of his own company, what was interesting to me was that for him to create the first iMac… which is really how everyone identifies him, meaning that most people 25 and under [didn’t know] he was anything before that first bondi blue iMac with the translucent egglike shape. For him to have gotten there, I think he needed to come back after maturing, after those ten years when was exiled, and deciding on some level that he needed to control everything for him to really realize a vision of something that was cool, that you could have in your house that was functional and beautiful and artistic.

So for that reason I thought it was important to… I think it was a sort of resurrection, the last fifteen minutes of this film which takes him back to meet Jonny Ive, and just a little bit of that… Boom. To me, the end of the movie where Apple starts, for most people.

 

I was watching this with my girlfriend, and she made a point that you ended it with “the” commercial. It struck me how very centered around advertising the movie is, and how everyone remembers that commercial, and it kind of feels important.

Yes, yes. And you know, the story goes that he did it and he felt that it was self-conscious for him to be using his voice, and they eventually hired Richard Dreyfuss for that commercial. You know, to me the reason why I loved it so much is because in the end, the philosophy of that commercial, the philosophy of it was relevant to right now.

It’s interesting that you mention that, because that was kind of an add-on. That was the one scene that we shot that was not originally scripted. It came from the thought that we’re living in a culture right now where businesses are doing, or realizing with this recession that they can do more with less people. It’s the post-industrial new norm, which is a kind corporate world that people used to go with and doesn’t exist as much any more, and that people have to create things from within… entrepreneurialism, and people deciding that “I have an idea and it’s worth something, and I may feel like I am an outsider in my own world, but I have value.”

It just felt like that’s kind of… Why do you make a movie? Is it just to make a movie about a guy, or are you making a movie to say something, and it also is why I included this moment where Steve Jobs says the moment you wake up and realize the world was created by people no smarter than you is the moment your life will change. That’s just true about all these people who are searching for what the next thing for them to do is, and realizing, “Maybe that next thing is outside of me. Maybe I have something to contribute.” I think that’s kind of where that ending came from, so it’s interesting that you picked up on that.

 


William Bibbiani is the editor of CraveOnline’s Film Channel and co-host of The B-Movies Podcast. Follow him on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.

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