I think that we see Steve Jobs as the genius speaker in the mock black turtleneck with the round glasses, sort of beautifully delivering his new product, and I think that for people to understand that he started in a garage.
Doing a movie about Steve Jobs is just generally a provocative thing to do, whoever does it, and it begs a lot of questioning and skepticism only in that, what is this going to be? What am I going to be looking at? And curiosity as well. I think thats all positive in any film, because you want people to be curious about it.
Doing a movie about computers between 1978 and 1982? You cant get much less sexy, less active than that.
So the fact that the first movie about Steve Jobs was made by a guy who was completely entrepreneurial and outside the film industry, I think is very appropriate.
Steve Jobs just made a product. He started off where a lot of people were skeptical of what he was doing, and he basically just focused on the product and making it the best he could, and really focused on what it was that these products would take into your lives.
Right before when the iMac came out is when most people associate Apple started. That's when people remember Apple - that first iMac or that first laptop that was a clam shell. To me everything before that was what was interesting.
People are out there looking for jobs and realizing that they have to look within to do and create what the new and next thing will be. They can't rely anymore on what was usually given to them.
As a director, you just have to kind of like just get through the first project before starting on the next one.
It struck me that Steve Jobs, known to be such a brilliant speaker, had a very difficult time explaining things when he was younger. He was describing technology that didn't exist. He had MIT engineers, and he was trying to tell them what he wanted; but there were no terms for what he wanted yet. I think a lot of his early frustration was trying to quickly get his vision to the finish line.
You can mythologize Steve Jobs, but really in the end, he was a kid from the Valley, with his funny little friends, and they made something. That's all he was.
Steve Jobes called anybody. He was fearless. When he was very young, he had no filter. He would call the president of Hewlett-Packard and the head of Atari and say, 'I'm Steve Jobs.' He just didn't take no for an answer.
