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For award-winning documentary maker Alex Gibney, it is also
time for re-assessing the hard-driving perfectionist who
revolutionized the way people communicate but whose treatment of
friends, family and co-workers was sometimes rife with
contradiction.
"Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine" breaks no new ground
factually. But it contrasts the man who once aspired to be a
Buddhist monk with the businessman who initially denied
paternity of his first child and presided over a company that
paid Chinese iPhone makers a pittance and pared back its
philanthropic programs while reaping billions in profits.
"He had the focus of a monk, but none of the empathy," Gibney
comments in the film, whose tagline is "Bold. Brilliant.
Brutal."
The documentary, arriving in U.S. movie theaters on Sept. 4,
uses archival footage of Jobs as well as interviews with
journalists, some former friends and ex-Apple employees. Both
Apple and Jobs' widow Laurene declined to co-operate.
Gibney says he didn't set out to vilify Jobs, whose death of
pancreatic cancer in 2011 was mourned worldwide with an
intensity usually afforded a rock star.
"The imperative for me to make this film was why so many people
who didn't know Steve Jobs were weeping when he left," he said.
Apple, he added, has a cult aspect that fascinates him.
"There is a passion for the person and the products that is so
deep that any criticism can't be tolerated. Why should that be?
Is it not possible that we can discuss how pitifully paid are
the workers in China... even as we may admire some of the
technological aspects of the Apple product?
"There seems to be a need to deify that stuff in a way that
brooks all criticism, and that does verge sometimes on the
religious," Gibney said.
Gibney says there is one question he would have liked to ask
Jobs, given the chance.
"He kept talking about values, the values of Apple. I would have
asked Steve Jobs, 'what are your values?' Please express your
values. That is what I would have liked to hear from him in an
honest and straightforward way."
Another film about Jobs, the feature movie "Steve Jobs" starring
Michael Fassbender as the late Apple CEO, is due for release in
October.
(Reporting By Jill Serjeant; Editing by Lisa Lambert)
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