Not everyone in the Jobs family was against the latest Steve Jobs movie. Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin sat down on October 6 with Trevor Noah of the Daily Show to discuss how speaking with Jobs’ daughter shaped the plot of the movie.
Sorkin said he spent a lot time with Steve Job’s eldest daughter Lisa Brennan-Jobs, whose paternity Jobs originally denied. “Did you rely on her to fill the beats?” Noah asked while discussing the writing of the script.
“Yeah, I couldn’t get past it at first, because I’m the father of a daughter too. I couldn’t get past Jobs’ treatment of his daughter, and I didn’t know how we were going to celebrate the iPhone and iPod and everything. It was Lisa who helped me get past it. She’s a remarkable woman...She would tell me a story. It wouldn’t necessarily be the most flattering story about her father, but she would turn it like a prism and say, ‘but you could see how he really loved me because of this.’ ”
While Aaron Sorkin’s interview reveals the movie was influenced by people who were close to Jobs, not all of his friends and family are happy about the way the movie portrays the late Apple CEO. Jony Ive, who admits he hasn’t seen the movie, expressed in an interview at Vanity Fair’s New Establishment Summit that how “you are defined and portrayed can be hijacked by people with agendas that are really quite different than yours and those of your close family or friends.” And Jobs’ widow, Laurene Powell Jobs even tried to stop the movie from being made.
Sorkin addressed the backlash he’s received after Trevor Noah observed, “Some of the people in and around Apple were saying...the way you’ve portrayed him is incorrect. He was a nice man; he was a friendly man. You made him look mean,” to which Sorkin replied, “Right, the people saying that haven’t seen the movie.”
“He’s definitely a human being, brilliant human being, a flawed human being. We’re all flawed human beings. The movie asks a lot of questions that it doesn’t bother to answer and hopefully most of that discussion will happen in the parking lot.”
The new movie hits theaters everywhere October 23.
Watch Aaron Sorkin’s full interview with Trevor Noah below.
