Steve Jobs, Danny Boyle’s bio of the late Apple co-founder, has been named as the centerpiece showcase for the 53rd New York Film Festival, it was announced Monday. Oscar nominated actor Michael Fassbender (12 Years Slave) stars as Jobs in a new feature written by Oscar winner Aaron Sorkin (The Social Network) based on Walter Isaacson’s best-selling biography. The New York Film Festival, presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center, runs September 25th-October 11th. Steve Jobs is set to screen on October 3rd.
Anticipated for reasons that extend pedigree and subject matter, Steve Jobs marks one of the more fascinating case studies in modern filmmaking. Originally set up at Sony, the film later moved over to Universal in a development that unraveled publicly due to the Sony hack– along with that came heated messages over who should be put in the director’s chair and who should star as Jobs himself. In the end, Boyle (Oscar winning director of the 2008 smash Slumdog Millionaire) and Fassbender (last seen in the film Slow West) won out and soon enough, we will be able to judge the film on its own terms.
An examining portrait of one of the most innovative and enigmatic pioneers of the 20th century, Steve Jobs attempts to study the life of the Apple co-founder through three pivotal points of his career- as he prepares to launch the first Macintosh, the NeXT workstation, and the iMac. Oscar winner Kate Winslet (The Reader), Seth Rogen (The Guilt Trip), Katharine Waterson (Inherent Vice), Sarah Snook (Predestination), Michael Stulhbarg (Hugo) and Emmy winner Jeff Daniels (The Newsroom) co-star.
Whether fairly or not, Steve Jobs will surely be compared to David Fincher’s film The Social Network. Both featured screenplays from Aaron Sorkin and focused on innovators of the digital revolution- The Social Network centered around the formation of Facebook and its founder, Mark Zuckerberg. The Social Network ended its run as a critical darling, a domestic box office tally just shy of $100 million and eventually won three Academy Awards (including for Sorkin himself) – incidentally that had its world premiere as the opening night feature for the 2010 New York Film Festival. That’s quite a lot to take in.
Curiously, there’s no mention of whether or not Steve Jobs will make its world premiere at NYFF, leading the impression that the film might screen at either the Telluride or Toronto film festival first. Boyle, particularly, has a relationship with both Telluride and Toronto– both festivals screened Best Picture winner Slumdog Millionaire (Telluride hosted the world premiere, while the film won the People’s Choice Award at Toronto) as well as his Oscar-nominated 2010 follow-up 127 Hours. Previous centerpiece screenings at the New York Film Festival have included Paul Thomas Anderson’s trippy noir Inherent Vice and Ben Stiller’s The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.
Kent Jones, Director of the New York Film Festival said of the film, “You hear that a bio of Steve Jobs is being produced, and of course you see multiple possible movies in your head . . . but not this one. Steve Jobs is dramatically concentrated, yet beautifully expansive; it’s extremely sharp; it’s wildly entertaining, and the actors just soar—you can feel their joy as they bite into their material.” Steve Jobs joins previously announced 2015 New York Film Festival entries The Walk (making its world premiere as the opener) and Miles Ahead (making its world premiere as the festival’s closing night film).
Steve Jobs opens in theaters on October 9, 2015.
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