We know that in Hollywood, even the most promising movie with a winning cast doesn’t guarantee that a movie will get made quickly, and the Steve Jobs film has been just that. So far, it’s had two studio homes, two directors, two A-list actors set to play the lead, but it wasn’t until it moved to Universal that the wheels went into motion.
Danny Boyle‘s “Steve Jobs” biopic has been developing about as long as a product does at Apple, but Universal Pictures has announced that they have begun shooting in San Francisco with Michael Fassbender playing the tech genius. Entertainment Weekly broke this story first.
Oscar winning writer (“The Social Network”) Aaron Sorkin has seen his passion project, based on the biography by Walter Isaacson, get delayed several times over the past few years when it was with rival studio Sony Pictures. David Fincher was originally tapped to direct and everyone from Leonardo DiCaprio to Christian Bale came and went until it moved over to Universal where it gained much more traction.
The Sony hacking scandal which resulted in several embarrassing leaked e-mails released in December show that Fincher pulled out of the project after getting pressured from Angelina Jolie who wanted him to direct her “Cleopatra” movie. This had a domino effect with DiCaprio bailing out. He was replaced by Bale who, like his name, jumped out right before Sony decided to call it quits on the project which was getting to be as temperamental as Jobs himself.
Apple fans will be delighted to know that Boyle is filming in the very same garage that Jobs and friends built the first Apple computer. The film will center around three major events in the Apple creator’s life: for the original Mac, for the NEXT cube computer, and for the Apple iMac that happened after Jobs was brought back to literally save the company he founded. Sorkin will be shooting in an unorthodox three-act structure of just three scenes. We saw what going against the script rules did for Richard Linklater’s “Boyhood” so this should be interesting to see how it turns out. It can only be better than the previous attempt which starred Ashton Kutcher.
Universal also confirmed the entire main cast:
- Michael Fassbender as Steve Jobs
- Kate Winslet as Joanna Hoffman, former Macintosh marketing chief
- Seth Rogen as Steve Wozniak, Apple co-founder
- Jeff Daniels as John Sculley, former Apple CEO
- Katherine Waterston as Chrisann Brenna, Jobs’ ex-girlfriend and mother of his child
- Michael Stuhlbarg as Andy Hertzfeld, an original Apple Macintosh development team member
- Perla Haney-Jardine, Ripley Sobo, and Mackenzie Moss as Jobs’ daughter Lisa Brennan at various stages of her life
- Sarah Snook as Andrea Cunningham, project leader of Apple Macintosh
- Adam Shapiro as Avie Tevanian, Apple Computer Senior VP of Software Engineering
Universal hasn’t set a release date yet for the “Steve Jobs” film.