JOBS
So what does it take to create one of the most discussed biopics of the year? A dream team, for starters. Meet actor Josh Gad, composer John Debney, and director Joshua Michael Stern, whose combined efforts have made Jobs a must-see for Apple friends and foes alike.
THE DIRECTOR: JOSHUA MICHAEL STERN
Some filmmakers would pause before taking on the story of Steve Jobs less than two years after his death, but Joshua Michael Stern approached the project with relish. “I couldn’t resist,” admits the director. “It was daunting and extremely ambitious, but in retrospect, it was a good idea. On some level, doing something relatively soon makes it fresher and more impactful in the consciousness of the viewer, as opposed to doing it five or 10 years later, when I think it would be sort of a footnote.”
Stern was given the script by a financier who was a fan of Stern’s film, Swing Vote. Originally coming in at 180 pages, Stern and his collaborators trimmed it to a “very manageable length.” But the film is still remarkably inclusive, covering an action-packed period from Jobs’s early twenties, when he first launched the company in his Palo Alto garage, to his late thirties, when the prodigal son was coaxed back to Apple. “To me, it was a story of a prince who starts the kingdom, gets overtaken and exiled for 10 years, and finally comes back, having learned his lesson,” muses Stern. “The denouement is the sense that he has returned, and can do what he always set out to do.”
One of Stern’s boldest choices was casting Kutcher in the title role. “There was a push to get an unknown, but when Ashton walked into the meeting, it was like he was already the character,” he says. “Beside the fact that he looked like a young Steve Jobs, he was, as a human being, so invested in technology and Jobs himself. Ashton had already studied his loping walk and his mannerisms. For this movie to pop, this particular actor needed to feel exciting. There’s something extremely interesting and provocative about Kutcher as Jobs. It only adds to the mystique.”
Hiring Josh Gad was “kind of a no-brainer,” he says, even though he admits Wozniak was “specific,” and therefore tougher to cast. “Josh had such pathos and empathy,” says Stern. “In the scenes he’s in, he’s able to represent him so wholly and completely that the audience senses they know that guy.”
To tell the story, Stern admits that he was “a bit handcuffed” by some of the facts. “The poetic and dramatic license that was taken was much more about how we approached all those things that we know of, rather than re-creating, embellishing, or fictionalizing a moment to make it more dramatic,” he says.
But because Jobs was so enigmatic, it offered Stern a unique opportunity to shape the public’s perception of an icon. “I approached him very much the way you approach any dramatic figure, regardless of who he is and what he represents,” he explains. “He’s a character with a rise, a fall, and a direction. I don’t think I had a real awareness of Jobs until he entered that phase of giving the keynote and product-release speeches, donning the black mock-turtleneck shirt and round glasses. I was curious about who he was and how he presented himself to the world.”
Stern has a long history with his subject matter—he did, after all, write his first screenplay on an Apple II. “I actually had a carrier for it—it was three feet tall, almost like luggage,” he reminisces. “It was one of those things you could barely afford, but when you got it, you owned something extremely exclusive. That was always the intention, on some level, with Apple products. It wasn’t just a piece of technology, but something that set you apart—something cool.”
Although Jobs is a far cry from hagiography—“I don’t think Jobs’s family or Apple are going to want to touch this at all,” he concedes—it did prove popular with the company’s old guard. “We showed the movie to all the original people who started Mac, and they loved it,” he says. “One of the things they said was that things might not have happened exactly like that, but they happened that way a hundred times over. That’s all you can do—give a sense of what was going on, and be truthful to that.”
THE COMPOSER: JOHN DEBNEY
Every icon needs a theme, and when it came time to conceptualize one for Steve Jobs, director Joshua Michael Stern looked to Hollywood’s go-to composer John Debney, whom he had previously worked with on Swing Vote. “It was fraught with a bit of danger,” admits Debney, who has developed scores for both television (he’s won three Emmys) and films ranging from Sin City to The Passion of the Christ, for which he was nominated for an Academy Award. “You usually have the good guys and the bad guys, but Steve was a more elusive character. Some might say he wasn’t the most warm or magnanimous, but he had a noble purpose to benefit mankind and create devices that would be revolutionary and lasting.”
Debney’s task was to sufficiently demystify the man in order to interpret him with instrumentation. “I wasn’t able to directly talk to family members, so I had to depend on a number of things that were written about him,” he continues. Debney’s primary resource was known on-set as “The Bible,” a heavily researched dossier on Jobs that the filmmakers had assembled before starting work on the film.
He also went out in the field. “Honestly, the one thing that helped me the most—and this sounds rather mundane and silly—was that I hung out in Apple stores numerous times,” he says. “I wanted to observe what this great visionary had created, and how it affects our daily lives. That was really an eye-opener. I would observe the comings and goings of people, and just how incredibly ingrained in our daily lives these devices are.”
During the writing process, Debney was struck: “I saw a lot of myself in Steve,” he says. “When I was starting out as a young musician and composer, I had a dream, and I was also driven. I had this music in my soul that had to come out, no matter what, and I think Steve was a very similar type of guy. He was very demanding—he had these ideas that he innately knew would benefit mankind—and he was not going to let anything get in his way. Sometimes, the cost would be personal relationships, but he did it nonetheless, and we’re all beneficiaries of that.”
When Debney took to the synthesizer, he “wanted to create a score that exemplified the place and time and paid homage to the pop music of the ’70s, when Steve and the guys were starting out,” he explains. “But ultimately, I went with something I thought Steve might like.” Jobs’s taste in music was notoriously eclectic, ranging from jazz to The Beatles, and Debney drummed up a score that referenced icons like The Byrds, Bob Dylan, and even Crosby, Stills, & Nash. “We created a bigger, more orchestral sound for the bigger more triumphant moments in the film,” he explains, but for Jobs’s theme, Debney relied heavily on the piano. “In some pieces of music, it’s the motor,” he explains. “In other settings, the piano is playing bits of Steve’s theme in a very lonely way—he was sort of a man on an island, really. The piano ended up sounding rather mournful and solitary.”
Working on the film affected Debney profoundly. “I went from observing him as an iconic guy, not unlike a Walt Disney, to realizing that he was a man who was terribly troubled by his own ambition. He knew he had something to do, and yet emotionally, it would affect him that his unending drive could hurt people. Ultimately, he did feel that, but he would sublimate it for the greater good. And that’s where I found the nobility in Steve.”
When the film was first screened at Sundance, Debney met one of Jobs’s early collaborators, Chris Espinosa, who joined the company at age 14 in 1976, when it was operating out of Jobs’s garage. “He mentioned that he loved the music I had created, and he said that Steve probably would have loved it too,” he recalls. “That really won my heart. I hope that’s the case.”