How Steve Jobs' Daughter Supported The Film

If you are expecting a run-of-the-mill cradle to grave biopic when watching the movie Steve Jobs, you may want to put those expectations at bay. Instead of trying to compact the icon's whole lifetime into 122 minutes, screenwriter Aaron Sorkin and director Danny Boyle instead present a dense character study about the Apple co-founder. Much like Steven Spielberg focused on Abraham Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation in Lincoln, Sorkin penned a script for Jobs that follows the CEO throughout three major periods of his life. More specifically, the movie takes us backstage before the launches of three Apple products: the Macintosh in 1984; the NeXT Cube in 1988; and then the iMac in 1998. But the tech component isn't necessarily the main attraction in the film. Woven into this story is Jobs' friendships and interactions with his Apple colleagues, as well as his complicated relationship with his daughter. But what does Lisa Brennan-Jobs think of Steve Jobs , since she's such a prominent part of the film?

Screenwriter Sorkin had the opportunity to speak with Brennan-Jobs when writing the script in order to provide information that'd help bring her relationship with her father to the screen. "At first I didn't know what I was looking for," Sorkin said in an interview with Business Insider. "Lisa didn't speak to Walter Isaacson when Walter was writing the book [Steve Jobs] because her father was alive at the time. But she was willing to speak to me. She was able to tell stories about her father that weren’t necessarily flattering stories, but she would tell the story and then show me how you could see he really did love her."

Yet Brennan-Jobs hasn't commented herself on the film as of yet. She has possibly seen it, though; according to Page Six, while at the New York Film Festival premiere of Steve Jobs earlier this month, Brennan-Jobs reportedly skipped the screening of the film in favor of seeing it in a more intimate setting. So you might have to wait a bit longer to get a full review of the film from the first daughter of Silicon Valley.

That is, if it ever comes. It's no secret that the relationship between Jobs and Brennan-Jobs's mother, Chrisaan, wasn't exactly great. Jobs denied that he was Brennan-Jobs's father despite a positive paternity test (there's a heartbreaking scene in the beginning of the movie that depicts this). The complicated relationship between Jobs and his daughter is the the emotional center of the movie, and it attempts to make Jobs a human rather than this untouchable entity. It's unknown if exactly what's shown on screen actually happened between Jobs and his daughter, and we may never know for sure. But the movie succeeds in making their relationship an affecting and important part of the film; turns out, Steve Jobs is less about a man and his machine and more about a man and his daughter.

Images: François Duhamel/Universal Pictures (2)