One of the biggest criticisms of the upcoming Steve Jobs movie is that actor Michael Fassbender looks nothing like Jobs. In a new interview, Fassbender acknowledges the lack of resemblance, but says that making himself into a Steve lookalike was never part of the goal.
“We decided that I didn’t look anything like [Jobs], and that we weren’t going to try to make me look anything like him,” Fassbender says. “We just wanted to try to encapsulate the spirit and make our own thing of it.”
Given that we’ve already had a recent subpar Jobs performance from an actor who physically resembled him very closely (Ashton Kutcher), I’ve got no issue with Fassbender not looking like Steve, so long as his performance captures something of Apple’s late CEO.
Anthony Hopkins looked nothing like President Nixon in Oliver Stone’s 1995 biopic Nixon, but was still able to be more than believable in the role due to his acting presence.
Fassbender also says he had trouble getting his head around Jobs’ technical wizardry, noting that, “I’m terrible with technology. It behaves strangely around me. Things crash all the time. I rejected the mobile phone for so long, until people were like, ‘We can’t get in touch with you. This can’t go on.’”
Interestingly, the TIME magazine article — which appears in the September 7 issue — reveals the accuracy the Steve Jobs crew fought to maintain elsewhere in the production.
For instance, director Danny Boyle shot the movie in its original on-site locations in San Francisco, despite the film being set indoors on sets which could be reproduced elsewhere.
“The financiers are going, ‘Well, you could film this in Prague, save $5 million!’” Boyle says in the interview. “[My thought was,] this place is the birthplace of the modern world. Unless something else happens, the world for the next 50 years is going to be living through the consequences of this work.”
Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin also makes an interesting comment about his decision to make the movie a series of short plays, each one focused on a different Steve Jobs product launch.
“It’s not an origin story, it’s not an invention story, it’s not how the Mac was invented,” Sorkin told interview Lev Grossman. “I thought the audience would be coming in expecting to see a little boy and his father, and he’s staring in the window of an electronics shop. Then we would view the greatest hits of Steve Jobs’ life. And I didn’t think I’d be good at that.”
This week, we got our first glimpse of the official movie poster for the upcoming film. Cult of Mac will have more information about Steve Jobs as we get closer to the October release date.
Source: Time
