Interview (Written): Aaron Sorkin (“Steve Jobs”)

A Vulture interview with Aaron Sorkin, screenwriter, Steve Jobs:

Were you always interested in Steve Jobs?

No. No. I knew what the general public knew, but not as much as a lot of people, I found out. The fandom is incredible, including the sort of virtual fistfights that break out between people who love Apple and people who hate Apple. The hatred of Apple will also include, generally, a hatred of Steve and a hatred of millennials, hipsters, things that people associate with those products. I’m neither a millennial nor a hipster. I have all of the Apple products. Everything I’ve ever written, I’ve written on a Mac. My first computer, my roommates and I chipped in, and we got that first Macintosh — 128K. It had as much memory as a greeting card that plays music.

And I appreciate the products a lot. But I don’t have the relationship with them that other people do.

And what did you think of him personally, as a character?

The fact that I am a father of a daughter is something that made it very hard for me at the beginning. Before I met with Lisa, I couldn’t get past Steve’s treatment of his daughter. None of his accomplishments meant anything to me because of this.

Even just saying that out loud, I’m really uncomfortable judging the way somebody else was a parent. But the fact is, he denied paternity when he knew, of course, that he was the father, and even after that, he found odd ways to hurt her. I just couldn’t relate to it at all. But if you’re writing a character like this, an antihero who, in the last couple of minutes, takes a couple of steps towards becoming an actual hero, you can’t judge them. I like to write them as if they’re making their case to God as to why they should be allowed into Heaven. And to do that, I have to be able to identify with them; I have to be able to find things about them that are like me, and that I would want to be able to defend.

How?

Here’s how I was able to relate it to myself. I’ve often thought that I would be better off — and this changed when I became a father, so my fatherhood notwithstanding — I’ve often thought that I’d be better off alone in a room, writing pages, slipping those pages under the door, and someone would slip a tray of food back the other way. That if people only knew what I wrote and didn’t know me, then I wouldn’t get called a crack addict, there wouldn’t be this sort of ridiculous fictional version of me that lives on the internet, where I punched people and yelled at people — I’m not able to recognize myself when I read these things. But I would just be seen as an affable guy. If you write Jed Bartlet and the other characters I write, that seems like he’d be a nice guy who’s doing that.

The interview provides an interesting insight into how Sorkin chose to structure the story the way he did, perhaps the single most important creative choice he made.

For the rest of the interview, go here.