3 Things 'Steve Jobs' Teaches Us About Filmmaking
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- Опубліковано 9 жов 2015
- Danny Boyle’s new film on the life and career of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs seems to be on the lips of many film lovers lately and it isn’t surprising considering the exciting collaboration between director Danny Boyle, writer Aaron Sorkin, and actors Michael Fassbender and Kate Winslet. I was fortunate enough to see it at the New York Film Festival recently. So let’s take a look at what this film teaches us about filmmaking…
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This video essay was written, edited, and narrated by Tyler Knudsen.
Sources:
www.theguardian.com/film/2015/...
Quote: “Like Jobs himself it’s a film of movement. We thought of the film as the sound of his mind.” The aesthetic of the three acts was, says Boyle, carefully delineated so as not to feel repetitious. Therefore the “punky” first third shows Jobs trying to forge a “creationist myth”, the second is all about elegance, while the third has even cleaner lines. “And simplicity is now seen as the ultimate sophistication,” said Boyle. “Products and world vision are both heading that way.”
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Steve Jobs introduces the Original Macintosh - Apple Shareholder Event (1984)
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Steve Jobs introduces the Original iMac - Apple Special Event (1998)
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Great analysis. It might be because I was watching a low quality version of this, but I totally missed the 16mm -> 35mm -> digital transfer between the three acts. Keep it up!
you are a wizard for making these videos. great content
+tim Thanks! Glad you liked it!
Another great video of movie analysis. 🎥🙌🏼🔥💨
Love these, keep it up. Will you ever do a video on Fincher?
+MovieGuyConnor Thanks! Fight Club is one of my all-time favorite movies and I'm sure I'll do a video on it at some point. It always seems harder to do videos on my favorite movies because there is always so much to talk about (as you can see in my 2001: A Space Odyssey videos). I did make a short video for IndieWire on the opening of Se7en a while back if you're interested.
blogs.indiewire.com/pressplay/watch-why-the-beginning-of-david-finchers-se7en-is-the-perfect-opening-sequence-20150402
keep up the good work dude, lovin it
+BillBuchananFtw Thanks!
Sorkin made a good point at the end of that video about how you should portray contradictory characters.
Awesome analisys!!!! Tha
I had to subscribe after one video. amazing work
+iCrackediTTv Thanks!
i love this movie, it's really a masterclass in cinema, i watch it every six months or so
I was jus thinking there no good breakdown of this awesome movie
And yes this is good breakdown
But I. Wish there is a even longer breakdown by analysing protagonist. S character arc
Jus subscribed
great channel man!!!!!!!!!
+Sam Shields Thank you!
This is a great video :D
Thank you!
three formats are quite a strain for post, i've never even had two major formats in a single project.
Finding the song in the script (J. Daniels)... As a musician I find this image very attractive :-)
+drob281159 It was such a clever way to put it and I can totally see where he is coming from. Sorkin's movies rely on rhythm and pacing and there is definitely a musicality to the dialogue.
When are you going to make part 4 of the making of 2001 a space oddysey?
+Charlie Weasel I'm in the middle of a big video on The French Connection right now, but I've been planning Part 4 in the background while I work on other videos, so it shouldn't take as long as the last one. Part 4 is going to be a big one and I want to make sure I get it right. :)
Cool! Hey man keep up the good work. These videos are pretty awesome.
+Charlie Weasel Thanks!
Love this series
+DrunkenM33rkat Thanks! Stay tuned; a big episode on The French Connection is on the way!
This has to be the most amazing summary of inferences from Steve Jobs. great job✨
i like these vids what do you don in films are you a writer or director or what do you do it all
+nextgreat screenwriter Thanks! Right now I'm just doing editing gigs, but I'm saving some money to make a short film.
Good job...in all honesty, your breakdowns of movies are often better than the movie. This was one of those. Well done.
i like it!
+TERRAMOUNT Thank you!
I see actors getting a lot of praise when they back down and work subtle, directors being praised for backing down and working on a subtle level, and my question is: will *Sorkin ever back down a bit* and write a script that doesn't require David Fincher or Danny Boyle to become the precious dialogue's little b*tch?
What do you think?
+Daniel Rosa I totally agree. I'm not a huge fan of Sorkin, but I thought his writing worked better in Steve Jobs than in The Social Network. Fincher's style was very prominent in The Social Network, which left the dialogue feeling very unnatural and too much like TV-style writing (to me at least). I thought the format of Steve Jobs worked well with the filmed-theater style of writing that Sorkin brings and it seems as though they didn't try terribly hard to make it cinematic. I doubt Sorkin is capable of working any other way than the way he does. I imagine that Steve Jobs would have done better as an HBO or Netflix movie than a theatrical release.
I see... Indeed.
Y'know, I ain't gonna lie, I adore The Social Network - and its script. Sorkin's structure, placing of beats, character layers (refusal of linear biography) is great, just like you said.
But do you feel sometimes as if every character was a screenwriter?
I remember when one of the Winklevoss angrily responds _"Because we would look like the skelleton-suit gang chasing the Karate Kid"._
Characters move on completely unaffected by stuff like that, picking up immediately where they left, as if some commom dialogue-entity casually knew how great that sounds.
You could just say _"Because we would look like dicks"_ ,man...
+Daniel Rosa Yeah, that was pretty much my main issue with it. It seems to be a style that is prevalent on television-- where it almost feels like the dialogue is in the head of someone who just had an argument and they're coming up with what they should have said. The funny thing is that, while researching this video, I came across a clip of Sorkin saying that he gets his creative juices flowing (more or less) by driving around in his car and having arguments with himself.
Maybe I need to revisit The Social Network. It was only the characters/dialogue that I found myself having issues with. I thought the directing was fantastic, but I wouldn't expect anything less of Fincher.
+CinemaTyler
My initial reaction was 'Well, if you're watching an Aaron Sorkin dramatisation, you know what you're getting yourself into'
However, I checked out the box office performance and found it was underwhelming,
so maybe the format change you suggest is a good point.
The question is: would the cinematographical effort to keep up with the screenplay achieve a satisfying result with a lowered production value?
It's hard to say why it did poorly. It's possible that the previous Steve Jobs film put a bad taste in everyone's mouth. The script seemed extremely limiting in terms of cinematic possibilities and the only way Danny Boyle could play around was to do format changes and stuff like that.
Never hire two guys named Andy
I love your videos. But do we need the jazz loop in the background?
Subscribing!
+Elizabeth Karr Thank you!
Amazing movie and Christian Bale does not look more like Steve Jobs at all. He was perfect casting here
Te amo
We found this movie burdened by these major conflicts. Yes, they are important, but all the yelling and turmoil is a downer. Jobs was a complicated figure with a lot of angles, and we feel that a proper episodic series will one day cover the wider arc that was his life.
my english teacher can't watch kate winslet movies because he's afraid of her.
Hehe
Loving these video essays, I've nearly watched every one. As for the movie Steve Jobs I loved it but my opinion is biased because I loved The Social Network and I love depictions of "tech" and "tech innovators" in film. Pirates of Silicon Valley was the first movie (TV movie) to draw me to this type of subject material.
Thanks! I think I was a little biased as well-- I'm from the Bay Area and my dad works in Silicon Valley. I thought it was an interesting approach to the story and I hadn't seen a lot of Sorkin's stuff.
All you need is a good actor and lots of turtle necks and bang you got Jobs! cool Vid!
+David Gray Haha, sounds about right
do a Quentin film
+Ali Miskeean I really enjoy listening to Tarantino talk about movies. I'll definitely do one some day. Maybe Hateful Eight... ;)
+CinemaTyler don't do tarantino, he makes entertaining 'cartoonish' films, hes a pastiche artist
It is a pretty interesting cinematic concept to shamelessly appropriate your favorite aspects of a variety of 'deep cut' films and mash them together into a sort of 'super film.' I think it works for the kinds of movies he makes because many of these obscure grindhouse/exploitation/extreme type films tend to have only one or two interesting things about them and stealing these ideas is, in a way, keeping the interesting ideas/concepts from fading away.
+CinemaTyler they're entertaining and all but there's no meaning behind them. art at its basis is about exploring the depths of the human condition and life itself etc, tarantino makes cartoons that are nice to watch in a juvenile sort of way.
+Malibu Thompson magnolia would be a better choice
I've been called complicated. Guess I'm an a-hole.
I felt this film was a bore. In what way? That the action did not engage me as an audience member, that somehow the characters existed in some distant glass cage in which the main feature was a distinct lack of dramatic engagement with the audience. There wasn't a moment that wasn't filled with dialog, there wasn't a moment of subtlety, or symbolism, or visual or cinematic wonder (a low for a Danny Boyle film!). I really think Sorkin should stick to stage plays - and I don't mean that as an insult - it's just a different medium.
cool. you should make a popular film, like oscar winning best film
I made a video on both The Bridge on the River Kwai and The French Connection, which both won Best Picture, but I think I know what you mean. I have been wanting to do something on some more of the bigger cult films, but so much has been said already. If I can manage to find a new take, I'll definitely go for it.
CinemaTyler cool. you should make a popular film, like oscar winning best film
But the script didn’t follow events idk it just feels silly when you are someone who is really into the history of computers. Woz has said numerous times they were never doing ANYTHING in a garage. And I noticed he was wearing the wrong outfit at the iMac event right away, since I’ve watched all these actually launches and Mac worlds.
modern cinema in a nutshell: selfindulged actors and screenwriters etc. try to sell me a biopic about an other salesguy tryin to sale stuff thats more about the selfindulged experience, than the actual content.
watching the ad for the ad for the ad.
watching your fine videos in a chronological order, this one sticks out like a sore thumb so far.
Aaron "ah, ah" Sorkin
All of Sorkin’s characters are the same, hideously obsessive people who sacrifice everything for success. Some are charming, hideously obsessive people, like Bartlet in The West Wing, some are beautiful and ballsy, hideously obsessive people,like Molly Bloom in Molly’s Game, and others are more vanilla hideously obsessive types like Jobs and Zuckerberg. No matter what, Sorkin is writing the same tragedy over and over and over again. That’s not Shakespeare’s humanism, its obsessive, robotic, self-justification - Sorkin’s tortured soul, in hell, justifying himself to God, as he put it. Sorkin’s cultural hero status, is really a reflection of how sick society is, the tragedy of modern life, that goes down the same road again and again, without recognising the overly-familiar features. Perhaps Sorkin really believes he’s writing some new each time, in reality he’s a modern day Barbara Cartland.
Shit film, gave it 4/10 on iMDb, but thanks for the great the analysis and the effort that you put into this.
P.S. When are you going to upload the 2001 part 6?
I'm working on Part 6 as we speak! I have 24 pages of notes so far and I've found some great resources that I think you'll really enjoy. I have a couple of smaller videos that are nearly finished being written so it is likely that they will be published first. Stay tuned!
My, friend. You seem to be a legitimate cinephile, and I thoroughly enjoy your films, but at what point did filmed stage plays become cinematic and began to be celebrated as such? It seems that, over the recent years, so called prestige films such as these have lost all sense of vitality, exuberance, and theatrical scope once celebrated in American Cinema. Pretentious films like Steve Jobs have reduced the cinema to nothing more than little closet dramas... Where is the theatricality that makes the trip to the theatre an altogether different experience from a quiet afternoon read of some moguls biography. I don't know if American cinema has taken on a drab kind of Brittishness, but these new "prestige", Oscar-bait films that are, for whatever reason, celebrated by people like yourself, who should know better, are sapping everything magical about American Cinema right from it. I watched your vid-essays on Dog Day Afternoon and the films of Stanley Kubrick, so you know what energetic American Cinema looks like. All one has to do it look at AFI's 100 greatest films of all time to see how far from those films these new "acclaimed" films have gone off the rails in terms of the scope, vitality and exuberance that made the American film tradition so great. And we have no one but ourselves to blame for celebrating these little closet dramas!
+methylphosphatePOET Thanks for taking the time to comment! This video was a little weird and I feel that I should explain-I enjoy Michael Fassbender and Danny Boyle, but I’m not very familiar with Aaron Sorkin. My channel really started when I made a video about Inherent Vice after attending the premiere at the New York Film Festival and I had an idea to sort of make a yearly tradition out of doing a video for a big NYFF film. I chose Steve Jobs because I found the structure to be really interesting and I’m a little biased being from the Bay Area and knowing so many people who work in Silicon Valley (including my dad who worked in Silicon Valley during the times depicted in the film). To me, Sorkin’s work feels a tad too much like what someone fantasizes they should have said in an argument, but you hardly ever see a film that feels more like the writer’s film instead of the director’s (especially when the director is so well-known). Nevertheless, I really enjoyed Glengarry Glen Ross, which is completely dialogue-driven. There is definitely a place for dialogue-driven films, but I don’t think that scope necessarily gives value to a film. Part of what I did like about Steve Jobs was that they dialed it back so much. I was expecting the film to follow his illness and try and reinforce some kind of legacy, but it felt more like those middle-class films that we’ve lost nowadays. I try not to criticize any films on my channel because I’m not a critic and because I’m actually really harsh and cynical and I don’t want to alienate someone for simply having different taste, but this film, while interesting, is in no way favorite of mine.
I had been thinking about abandoning this tradition and your comment has reinforced this thought. Making videos on new films is quite difficult because there aren’t very many resources available on the film’s construction, but also because I’m so used to making videos on films I can watch over and over while I work.
Thank you for taking my comments... I just subscribed to your channel. And please don't get the wrong impression, I don't dislike contemporary American films. In fact I see just about everything released by major studios and art houses alike. I just think cineastes like yourself do American cinema a disservice when you praise middling films like "Jobs" just because of their pedigree. And it's not the fact that it's a talk fest. "Whiplash" was a talk fest but I'm sure you'll agree that it possesses a cinematic energy that "Jobs" lacks. Another talk fest ironically written by Sorkin himself (The Social Network) had more cinematic juice than "Jobs". "Birdman": lots of energy, exuberantly directed, and a talk fest. If we're going to bring American cinema back to what it was during the old studio system, as well as the particularly strong decades of the 70s and 90s, then people like yourself have to expose listless movies like "Jobs" and celebrate the films that exemplify what the movies are all about, movies that share the same DNA as "The Godfather", "Singin' in the Rain", "Pulp Fiction", even the playful self-consciousness of the French New Wave, as I see you've celebrated. I don't think you recognize the power you video essayists have in shaping the future of American Cinema. Take it as a responsibility and expose these overhyped movies.
+methylphosphatePOET I appreciate your comments. As hard as I try, I can't imagine American cinema going back to the greatness it once had. So much in the industry is working against that happening. To be honest, I actually liked Steve Jobs more than The Social Network. I guess you could say that I'm in the small majority that believes that Fincher's last decent movie was Zodiac. After Zodiac, it felt like Fincher had perfected his 'formula' and all we've gotten since have been reduced to units being cranked out of a Fincher machine. I guess that's a bit harsh. He is one of my favorite directors, but lately I always feel like I get exactly what I expect going in.
What I find interesting about Steve Jobs is that it has almost taken a television approach. The general consensus today is that, as much as movies have gotten bad, television has gotten better. I actually don't follow television much at all, but Steve Jobs felt like what would happen if a current high-end television drama got a much bigger budget and a much more enticing collaboration. I do think that Steve Jobs works better as a TV movie, but it wouldn't have gotten the resources it needed to do what it did. I'm not saying it's good or bad, it's just... interesting. I value experimentation in cinema because good usually follows from it whether it was a success or a failure. My Dinner With Andre lacked everything that one would consider to be classically 'cinematic,' but it was an interesting experiment nonetheless.
The great eras of American cinema came out of that experimentation and that's why I believe we can never really return there. Instead, we must find what the next great cinematic concept is-- whether that be interactive stories, moving toward 3d as a tool rather than a gimmick, or having the line between cinema and television blur so much, that theaters become irrelevant and we start seeing 6 hour films in our home theaters.
+CinemaTyler Hey, my friend... what you say about television is true... The very best of it has a narrative rigor that at least the majority of hollywood movies seem to lack. But if you watch those shows (Mr. Robot, Better Call Saul, Fargo, the late Boardwalk Empire, Breaking Bad, Mad Men, etc.) you'll see that -- regardless of how serious the subject matter, they each posses a subtle self-consciousness, a gleeful awareness of their place in the tradition of American movies and cultural history, of its influences. What you get while watching them is a feeling of a deep abiding love for all of movie history, of stories in general, a ghostly feeling that we usually term "movie magic". Whether movies will ever reach their former greatness ( I happen to believe that it can, even without resorting to wholesale changes in film form you speak of {I think you might underestimate the potential for novelty in basic film grammar} ), they can at least -- even in this decidedly low period in the history of American cinema -- posses that sense of movie magic that we see in great television today. What makes those shows so cinematic is they simply don't sacrifice cinema for realism. They realize that the two aren't mutually exclusive-- the reason being: they are not steeped in the overweening pretensions of ultrarealism that American Art House fair currently finds itself. This art house tripe smacks of bourgeois, 19th century British novels in their dryness and pretensions, when the American film tradition probably has more of an affinity for Walt Whitman, Moby Dick, Cheap Penny Dreadfuls, 1930s pulp fiction, dime novels, vaudeville, and even the unapologetically genre-centric William Shakespeare. If television can carry on this spirit, movies certainly can. And "Steve Jobs", quite frankly, possesses none of it.
+methylphosphatePOET I seem to have fallen into the same quandary that happened with my Inherent Vice video. It is generally assumed that this channel is about criticism as much as it is about filmmaking and film history. I feel as though I have now been put into the position of defending a film that I will likely never care to see again. The choice to make this video was purely out of interest in how it was structured, how the character was handled, and my own introduction to Sorkin’s rhythm. This video doesn’t necessarily praise the film’s content outside of my own interest as someone from Silicon Valley.
I really don’t follow television-of those you listed, I’ve only seen Breaking Bad. However, long form serials could themselves be described as a novelty. And let’s not forget that the two most popular films last year (Birdman and Boyhood) were wholly centered around gimmicks. That said, I must say that I am a little confused-are you saying that your main issue with contemporary cinema, specifically Steve Jobs, is that it strives too much for realism? Steve Jobs has been criticized for taking too much dramatic license and boiling all of these events and relationships into these three settings. The film even alludes to this when Lisa draws her “abstract” artwork on the Macintosh. Now, if you are talking about the idea sacrificing visual storytelling in favor of a talk-fest, I agree, but I don’t think that necessarily dictates the quality of a film.
You just cut a bunch of interviews together
+PicaroPariah This one does use a fair amount of interview clips, but I feel that the ones I used explained my points better than I could. This series is mainly research-based and revolves around finding the major concepts during the filmmaking process that a particular film does well. I try to identify these concepts and build a case using as much supporting material I can find and then I attempt to make connections and discuss what it means to me. With this one in particular, I found that Aaron Sorkin spoke very eloquently about his process and approach to writing this script and there was a lot of good advice about writing to take away from it. I admit that some of the clips of people talking about Sorkin’s writing came across as a little gushy (after all, they are promoting the film), but they still made some good points.
Then was your commentary really necessary then? If it was only really a summary of the points in the interview. It just feels lacking in synthesis.
+PicaroPariah My commentary wasn't meant to be a summary of the interview clips-- the aim was to introduce points and make connections, examples, and implications. I am very interested in making these videos better. Could you give me an example of somewhere in the video where my commentary is solely a summary of an interview clip?
Sure, I'll watch it over again later and substantiate my issues.
I didn't notice any issues. Sure he used previously existing information; but I wouldn't have researched all of that myself and it was nice to have all the info on that specific aspect of the film wrapped up in a comparatively quick video; but also there was quite a bit of narration and CinemaTyler made some points of his own.
This is one of the worst movies I've ever seen. Just trash.