Michael Fassbender: I studied Ashton Kutcher for Steve Jobs role

The New York Film Festival’s centerpiece “Steve Jobs” is whipping up intense reactions barely 24 hours before it opens at the Lincoln Centre in New York City. The reference to that other, less-acclaimed film about Jobs, which featured the Two and a Half Men star in the lead role, was met with loud laughter from the audience.

To be fair, it seemed pretty clear from the moment Michael Fassbender was cast (looking nothing like Steve Jobs), that this movie was not aiming for documentary realism.

“Walter’s biography had to be about what happened”, Sorkin, who won an Oscar for “The Social Network“, told Wired in an interview. But if the begraddled present tense of the three acts makes for a superficially exhilarating movie-going experience, Sorkin’s text betrays the hoariness of its motivating Big Concept early and often. “We were always very insistent with everyone from the beginning that it wasn’t about being a lookalike and it wasn’t about physical mannerisms. Then we moved to the Alexa for the final part, which is the brutal high definition”, Boyle said. “It’s Shakespearean, really.” Rogen invoked Andy Warhol’s interpretation of Marilyn Monroe to make his point that, “in the end, accuracy isn’t necessarily, creatively, the thing that portrays someone the best”. I was a character in the first “Jobs” movie, from 2013, so that was comparable, but there’s really no comparison since that was written by a rookie screenwriter who didn’t know what he was doing. Even by its surprisingly upbeat denouement, it’s way too late to ask if Steve Jobs is a full-bore promotion of Apple’s corporate philosophy: In 2015, no utterance of Jobs’s name in public can be mistaken for anything else.

“I have to be honest – it was terrifying, but it was fantastic”, Winselt said of the production.

“I loved spending time with her because she shared stories with me about her time with Steve and her relationship with Steve that a lot of people just don’t know anything about”, Winslet said. “He was like, I’m not interested in that”.

While I think the facts of Jobs’ life are intriguing enough on their own, I also don’t have a problem with Aaron Sorkin aiming for a more impressionistic portrayal of events – so long as what comes out of it feels like a genuine portrayal of all involved.

Andy Hertzfeld, a member of the original Macintosh team who helped consult on the movie, echoed Sorkin’s sentiment in an interview with Recode. “HR is the least impressive group of people I’ve ever come across”.