 All right. Hey, everybody. Thank you so much for coming and seeing the film with us. Thank you to Aaron and Danny for being with us. This is obviously Aaron Sorkin and Danny Boyle. I'm Neil Ippital. I'm the editor-in-chief of The Verge. You can clap for them if you want to. So I think it's, we all just saw the movie. It's obvious it's a very powerful movie. It's a very emotional movie. I have some questions here. I'm really interested in the idea of Steve Jobs as a myth. So I don't know how much you guys know about our site, but I was just saying The Verge is all about culture. It's not really about technology. Technology is the engine of the culture. And what we really want to do is talk about the people who helped shape the culture through the devices. So here's my first question. And it's really for both of you, but I suspect one of you will have a more distinct answer. You just made a movie about Steve Jobs that never once the words Pixar, iPhone, or cancer are said out loud. And I just want to, that's an incredibly bold choice. Those are three major plot points in his life. And I think the iPhone in our entire world. So talk about that choice. Sure. All those things that you said, the things that, the big things that weren't mentioned, all would come under the umbrella of this. That before I knew what I wanted to do, I knew what I didn't want to do. And that was write a biopic. A cradle to grave story where we land on the characters greatest hits along the way. And you just mentioned some of them. Surely if you were doing that movie, absolutely. There would have been Pixar and he would have been diagnosed and there would have been the iPhone, the iPod and the antitrust suit. A fight with Bill Gates, a lot of things. But I didn't want to do that. That biopic structure is familiar to audiences and that's not a good thing. I didn't think I'd be able to shake it. I just didn't think I'd do it well. I was trying to see it and it wasn't feeling good to me. I'm most comfortable as a playwright. I kind of fake my way through movies and television shows. I've been lucky. I feel lucky I haven't been caught. But as a playwright, I like claustrophobic spaces. I like compressed periods of time, preferably with a ticking clock. And I also love being behind the scenes. In this case, we're literally behind the scenes in some spectacular theaters in San Francisco, Cupertino. So I landed on the structure that you saw. A movie that was made entirely of three scenes, all of them in real time. Real time, as you know, is when 40 minutes for you in the audience is the same as 40 minutes for a character on the screen. All of them taking place backstage in the moments leading up to a product launch. And I felt after a year, year and a half roughly, of spending time talking to the people closest to Steve, including all of the people who you saw represented by characters in the movie with the exception of course of Steve who had passed away already, and a few dozen others, that I had identified a handful of very interesting conflicts in Steve's life. Human conflicts with people that I felt were dramatic, that I could tell a story and would illustrate some interesting things about Steve and kind of demonstrate some hypotheses that I had. And that meant that he wasn't going to die at the end. We weren't, as far as Pixar goes, I sort of always had it in the back of my mind. It should at least be mentioned. But every time, I always had it on an index card on a board somewhere, but it never happened naturally. It always felt like it was name dropping, frankly, like the guy had to get in Pixar. You did some of that. At the end he promises the iPod, he waves his hand at Scully. Yes. In both cases, there was a reason for it. The iPod with Lisa was, I'm going to put music in your pocket, was, I love you, Lisa. This is how I say it. With Scully, it was, you know, Scully had, at the beginning of the scene, accuses him of killing the Newton for spite. And it was Steve at the end of, or almost at the end of an act in which he'd been getting his brains beaten in every scene, saying to this guy, you know, not everything I do is because I'm a jerk. And here's the difference between me and you, not saying it in a mean way. But touch pad technology is next, not the stylist. Okay? That's why I killed the Newton. Not because I'm a jerk. So there was a reason for those things. Believe me, if I had discovered an interesting conflict, say with John Lasseter, there would have been a reason to have Pixar in the movie. But the answer to your question is, it's not a biopic. It's something else. It's no more a biopic than All the President's Men is a biopic about Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. It just happens to tell that story in their life. And there's nothing in All the President's Men that then suggests that these guys were going to go on to do what they did. I think it's kind of funny that Apple just put out an iPad with a stylus. Like literally on the heel of the moment of this movie. Some fortunate timing for us, but, or for them, depending on how you look at it. So Danny, how do you deal with that, with the notion that, you know, there's an element of this movie where it presupposes some knowledge of jobs, right? It presupposes the fact that, you know, product launches are a big moment now in our culture, and he was the one who led that. It presupposes that, you know, he's dead. How did you deal with the weight of kind of the reality and what people know versus the story you were trying to tell? I think what I loved about the structure, the idea of going behind the three product launches, was exactly that it kind of like sidestepped the myth. It's a way of very deftly going, all that stuff you know. You know, and there was stuff out there that people, you can't resist, but no, I'm not very, very techy. But I knew the stuff about him that you know, and I knew, I'd seen the launches, you know, because they made the national news, even in Britain. You know, they'd be there and you'd see them. So people are carrying that kind of luggage, and it's a great way, a little sidestep of it, because it goes, it's one of the six industries he revolutionized, product launches, and we don't see them because actually it's the 40 minutes. He walks out on stage and you stop. And I think that's a lovely way of encouraging that it's an abstract, the way we did, you know, the scheme of it to deal with him is not like a biopic. It's actually, it's more like an abstract. And actually that was one of the reasons that we didn't want him, we didn't want him slavishly to look like him to begin with, because we wanted to send the signal very early on to you as you set your brain for it to watch it, that it's clearly not, you know, a photographic impersonation full of mannerisms that he had. And that it is slightly fictive in that sense, although it's based on lots of facts. And then Aaron's cleared out other facts that don't concern us at the moment. So how did you, particularly with Michael Fassbender, who looks nothing like Steve Jobs, I mean like the first act, he's like sexy Steve Jobs. He's like ripped, like Steve Jobs was never ripped. How did you kind of manage the tension between, you don't look anything like him, but we want you to talk like him, but we also want you to talk like Aaron Sorkin would write Steve Jobs. How did you kind of navigate that line? It's kind of, you know, an actor gets a part and they start to explore it because what they find interesting about it internally. That's one of the wonderful things about actors. You can set them to actually explore it from the public side of it, i.e. set about trying to look like him, have prosthetic surgery, knock out your front teeth. You know the weird stuff you hear about. You can ask them to do that or you say, don't do that. Find it internally. And that's what he set off to do. And you can see him in that. For me, it's really interesting, the first act. Obviously, Jobs is fighting the IBM edifice. He's the rebel. He wants to smash it down. But in a way, Michael was also grappling with this monster part that Aaron's written. And he's kind of, you can feel his anger. It's like punkish, kind of as he's trying to just thrash away at everything that's trying to hold him back. And then by the time you get to the third part, you can feel him as an actor. He kind of got it. And he begins to look like him in a weird way. I mean, I know it's a bit easier because he is the age then. You know, he's about the right age that Michael is. But he kind of, it was more the rhythm of it. He was suddenly in it and on it. And Jeff Daniels, who would always, who knows Aaron's work, there's a lot of experience about Aaron's work, said that's what it's like. You've got to wrestle it. He talked of it like an animal. You've got to get it down, control it, get on top of it, and then off you go. And you can go anywhere with it then. And it looks very intimidating at first. There's so much dialogue. But actually, it's a liberation when you find yourself on, when you got it, you can sort of do, you hope you can go anywhere with it. So that's interesting to me because you're talking about writing. You're talking about a character that's created. And that's the point. I think another way to answer your question is you play the character in the script. Don't worry about the real Steve Jobs, the real Joanna Hoffman, the real Wozniak. Play the character in the script. So but this is, for example, you and Tim Cook have been speaking around each other for a few days now. Yeah. You've got, I mean, who'd you talk to? You talked to Lisa, you talked to Woz. You talked to Johnny Ive, for example. Yeah. As I said, I talked to everybody you see in the movie. Lisa was very important to talk to. She did not want to talk to Walter Isaacson when Walter was writing the book because her father was still alive. And that's understandable. But she was ready to talk to me. So I spent a lot of time with her. One you see in the movie, John Scully also was in news parlance again. After John Scully left Apple, he really barely spoke to anyone. He went down to Florida and lived a very quiet life. That episode was and still is just very painful for him. It's a dramatic moment that he hadn't quite recovered from until a few years ago. He's in his 70s now. He remarried a wonderful woman named Diane. And Diane has kind of made it her mission to correct the record and get John out there in the world. Don't get up off the mat and correct the record. Because as he says in the second act, the story of how and why you left Apple, which is quickly becoming mythologized, is not true. So speaking to John Scully was important. But beyond that, yes, Johnny Ive, Lee Clow, just many of the engineers, coders, designers at Apple, as well as some people further down the ladder. I had a great conversation with a woman whose job it was at one of the launches. If I could go back and get my notes, I could tell you which one. But I can't remember now. One of the launches happened to coincide with the five-year anniversary of another product. So Steve wanted a slide of a birthday cake with candles on it for this launch to remind the audience that it's the five-year anniversary of this other product. And this woman's job was to find the right cake. And just went to the greatest pastry chefs in all the land, who each would make her a cake and she would bring it in for Steve. And no, no, no, no, no. Finally, the cake he settled on, she went to a grocery store and went to the cake aisle, like the Entenmann's aisle. And that's the one he liked. And so that's where I got the shark thing from in the second act. So I spoke to a lot of people. And that was, obviously, Walter's book was sort of the rock on which the church was built. But I had read everything else. But it was the first person research. It was talking to these people that really made the engine turn over. So this is, but this kind of goes back to this tension that I'm talking about between the myth and reality. Like Walter's book, for example, has been criticized a lot for some inaccuracies. And you're talking about setting the record straight with John Sculley because nobody knows his story. So that story is now here. But then there are other parts, like the fact that Next was a 14-year project that did actually have an OS that wasn't designed to be sold to Apple. How do you kind of reconcile that? I reconcile it this way. I don't want to have an argument with you about the truth of Next. But Steve, here's what we can agree on, I'm sure. Steve's return to Apple was a result of Apple buying Next, buying Next because they had to, because Next had an OS that they needed. There were several steps in between. And Steve, as he was able to do often in his life, was able to look down the road and see what was going to happen because Apple wasn't innovating at the time. There was, after Sculley and before Steve, the CEO was Gil Amelio. And Gil Amelio, Steve knew that Gil Amelio was going to have to answer to Wall Street. And Wall Street was going to want hard proof that there's going to be a change and that Gil Amelio was going to have to say, look at our new OS that we've got. It's like two great chess players who never really play until checkmate. They play until 14 moves before checkmate when one of them is able to look at the board and say, you're going to win. Steve was the winner in that game. But your question was, how do I reconcile that with facts? I reconcile it this way. And I know that the language I'm going to use sounds like I'm skating around a problem, but I really believe this. There is a difference between journalism and what I do and what Danny does. And that doesn't give you a license to lie. But the difference between journalism and what we do is the same as the difference between a photograph and a painting. And what we're doing is a painting. Those facts that you're talking about are not as important in this story as the fact that Steve was able to climb his way back to Apple, that car, that next was the car that drove him there, that you can't really call it a failure. It got him back to Apple. That was the more important truth. And the most important truth in the movie are the conflicts, the points of friction that he had with these people in his life and what they do to illustrate, to bring into relief the man. As far as the man versus the myth, that was kind of the beginning for me. I was offered the job of adapting Walter's book just a couple of weeks after Steve died. And when I had witnessed, and even though I own all these products, everything I've ever written, I've written on a Mac, I've got an iPhone in my pocket, I still like my iPod, I haven't put my music on my phone because I like the way the wheel clicks. That's great. Best product ever. And yeah, I agree. I was still astonished at the way that Steve Jobs was eulogized when he died. I had no idea that the world had this kind of emotional connection to him when he died. What they really had was an emotional connection to his products. The way we didn't really have an emotional connection to John Lennon, we had an emotional connection to his songs. And I thought, boy, I missed something that everyone else got and I wanna catch up and I wanna write about this. That's amazing. So I gotta ask, Danny, there's another movie that Aaron's written that is in this lineage, right? It's The Social Network. And I look at The Social Network, and obviously David Fincher directed it, and it's dark. I actually heard you say on Monday, everyone in that movie is always sitting down. And this movie is bright, it's moving, it's energetic. How did you go about acting in this lineage and making this painting versus what Fincher had done with The Social Network? No, I think I was very... Yeah, well, the guy, the king maker, if you like, is Scott Rudin, the producer who produced The Social Network. He rang up and said, Fincher's dropped out, and do you wanna read it? And I said, yeah, I'll read it. And I love Social Network and I think Fincher's a wonderful director and also directs with enormous... It's a compressed energy he has. It's a kind of like... Mine's more a kind of open energy, but he compresses it in it. And I loved... I read this and I was blown away and it feels like it was the same... I think it's the same film. I never have a problem admitting that, because it's basically these people who have made such an imprint on our world, have literally made the dent in the universe. What were they? What did they amount to as people, as us? They're one of us, because you can all... They're in the stratosphere in terms of success. They're out of sight. And that was another reason why it's good, I think, that he avoids the later products. It's because he's just still within reach, really. But once that IMAX launch, because it needs to achieve so much of the vision, and then... And suddenly the products are super sexy and cool, and you will take them to bed with you. I mean, you can't with the IMAX, because it's a bit bulky, but it's soon that you, as you will all will tonight, as we all will tonight, we take them to bed with us. And some of us leave them on, monitoring what we're doing in bed in the night. I mean, you know, it's like... So I jumped at it, because it had a kind of... The other thing about it that's different from social network is that it had... He'd somehow caught this restlessness of the guy's mind. And that's the movement you get in it. Whereas social network is all sitting down, as they kind of strategize. And then occasionally they get up, and there's a crisis, when they actually get out of their seats. Whereas this one, nobody was in a seat. And if they were in a seat, there was a very particular reason. And it's the restlessness of his mind. It's literally a wonderful clue for a director. So I gotta ask, we're out of time, so here's my last question here. Who's getting the next one? Is it Uber? Is it Snapchat? How do you carry on this language? Well, you know, I'll tell you. Danny keeps... First of all, I wanna say one thing. Danny, every time he talks about what he just talked about, in his typically self-effacing way, a more humble man you're not gonna meet, always makes it sound like he was our second choice after Fincher. Danny Boyle is no... Danny Boyle is nobody's second choice. Okay. We went to Fincher because we'd just done a movie together. Of course we did. Danny's gonna do a sequel to Trainspotting. He's not gonna ask me to write it. I'm gonna be okay with that. And I think it would be a very unusual movie if I did. But Danny keeps saying that he believes that this movie is the second in a trilogy, a tech trilogy, while I keep saying that it's simply a coincidence that those that I wrote about to tech type... Could you write a sequel to this movie? If I were able to find more conflict out there, and I felt like the audience was able to sit through another three acts of talking, and especially if I had a chance to work with Danny on this cast again, you bet I would. Absolutely. All right. Well, thank you so much for being here. We're gonna do 30 minutes in the newsroom outside. I asked everybody what I should ask you, and they're like, let's talk about the newsroom. It was funny. But thank you guys so much for being here. Thank you guys for coming. And there's drinks. Thanks a lot. I really appreciate it. Thanks a lot. I really appreciate it. Thank you.