by James Mottram
He nearly detonated WW3 with his North Korea-baiting comedy, The Interview, and now Seth Rogen takes on the role of Steve Wozniak – the inventor, electronics engineer, and computer programmer who single-handedly developed the 1976 Apple I, the computer that launched Apple – in the new biopic, Steve Jobs, which details the rise and rise of his much more famous business partner, played by Michael Fassbender.
Are you a big tech guy?
No, I ask my friends to update my computer [Laughs]. And every time that I update my computer, I erase all my shit [Laughs].
Do you think that people at Apple will like the movie?
I don’t know. That’s a good question. Steve Wozniak liked it a lot, and he’s very personally connected to the story. He seemed to feel like it was a good representation of what it was like to be in a room with Steve Jobs. I don’t know how that translates to whether or not Apple employees will like it or not.
It’s good publicity for Apple…
Is it? Good…if I get a free phone out of it, then I’m psyched.
When you got the script for Steve Jobs, were you surprised that there were no jokes in there for you?
I wasn’t that surprised…I would have been shocked if there were, honestly. Wozniak never smoked weed…I asked him that [Laughs]. I obviously asked him [Laughs].
Steve Wozniak is let down by his old friend, Steve Jobs, in the film…has that ever happened to you? Jonah Hill??
Jonah Hill? We’re still very good friends. I just talked to him two days ago, unfortunately for you! There have been people here and there, but I’ve reconnected with a lot of them over the years. There’s never been anything that has completely ended a friendship with someone. Some things have made me not talk to someone for six years, but nothing has completely destroyed our perceptions of one another, luckily. You just grow apart from people, which is natural. There are plenty of people that I used to be good friends with and just naturally we’ve gone our separate ways. I’ve had a few incidents with people, but they tend to seem unimportant in the long run. If you like each other and you like working with each other, then you just ignore them.
Woz did all the work but Jobs got all the credit…does this ever happen with an actor?
The opposite happens more as an actor [Laughs]. You might give an okay performance, and then the director, editor, composer and cinematographer turn it into something that’s truly incredible. I’ve seen that happen once or twice…with me, specifically [Laughs]. I don’t think that actors get less credit than they deserve, in general [Laughs].
You’ve worked as a screenwriter – have you learned anything from acclaimed Steve Jobs scribe, Aaron Sorkin?
Yeah, I must have. He’s just an incredibly brilliant guy, and to be around him, I must have absorbed something. When I read the script, I just got so angry and jealous because of how it was structured, and how unconventional and original it was. That was a lesson. ‘Oh, you can completely reimagine how these things are done, still. Even in 2015, you can come up with a structure that no one has done before.’ That was incredibly frustrating and inspirational at the same time.
Did you know early on that you wanted to create as well as act?
No, what I knew was that there probably wasn’t a room full of Hollywood executives thinking, ‘We need a chubby Canadian dude to star in our movies.’ I knew that if I wanted that to happen, I needed to spearhead that operation. That was more what I was thinking. I knew that there wasn’t a lot of precedent for guys who were like me to star in movies, at least at that time. There were John Candy, Harold Ramis and Dan Aykroyd types, but at the time that I was growing up in the nineties, there weren’t a lot of guys like that. I remember thinking that Vincent D’Onofrio or Jon Favreau were the closest that I aspired to. And so, I more just knew that if I wanted to do it, I probably would have to be the one to lead the charge on it. And I started writing. I started doing stand-up comedy. That’s all writing. That was the first thing that I tried to write.
Was everything that happened around The Interview the weirdest time of your career?
Yeah, definitively, hands down, that was the weirdest time in the career of anyone that I know. It’s one of the weirdest things to ever happen in Hollywood. So, yeah, it was fucking weird [Laughs].
Steve Jobs is released in cinemas on February 4. We are giving away tickets to a preview of Steve Jobs in every capital city. Simply purchase the digital edition of the latest issue from here http://www.filmink.com.au/get-filmink/ and enter the competition detailed inside.
