Earlier this month, Funny or Die released a trailer for its upcoming comedy about Steve Jobs, iSteve. Starring Justin Long from Apple’s own Mac vs. PC ads, the movie is set to debut online Monday, April 15th. Unlike Ashton Kutcher’s JOBS biopic, iSteve is an intentional parody of Apple lore.
The movie is written and directed by Ryan Perez, a former Saturday Night Live writer who has taken quite a bit of “dramatic license.”
Co.Create went behind the scenes with Perez to learn more about the iSteve project. The movie was put together very quickly with a small budget:
The goal was to be the first Jobs movie to debut, which means that the timeline was short and the budget tight. Perez wrote the movie over five days, using only Steve Jobs’ Wikipedia pages and various interviews as source material–he joked that “we couldn’t buy a paperback version of [Walter Isaacson’s] book; it’s not in our budget.” Filming was done over another five days, and the editing schedule was also compressed. Overall, the process of going from idea to 80-minute final cut will have taken about eight weeks.
Jorge Garcia, who played Hugo on the hit TV show Lost, plays Steve Wozniak. James Urbaniak and Michaela Watkins play Bill and Melinda Gates.
“If we made a coherent story out of this, it’ll be a miracle,” Perez told Co.Create. “A coherent story maybe wasn’t the highest priority.”
On the opposite side of the spectrum you have Oscar-winning screenwriter Aaron Sorkin writing a Jobs biopic for Sony. Out of the three Steve Jobs movies in the limelight right now, Funny or Die’s might end up being the most entertaining.
Source: Co.Create
