5 things we learned about 'Steve Jobs' at NYFF

NEW YORK — Painting a warts-and-all portrait of the late Apple co-founder, screenwriter Aaron Sorkin's Shakespearean take on Steve Jobs weighs the cost of genius.

The question is, "Had he been a bit nicer, could he have put a dent in the universe the way that he did?" Jobs biographer Walter Isaacson told reporters at the New York Film Festival Saturday. "I hope people see this movie and have those arguments in the parking lot after," Sorkin added.

Ahead of Steve Jobs' release (in New York and Los Angeles Friday; nationwide Oct. 23), here are five other things we learned from its NYFF premiere:

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1. Sorkin (The Social Network) read Isaacson's nearly 700-page Steve Jobs biography multiple times before deciding that he didn't want to write a traditional biopic. "That would be the conventional 'cradle to grave' structure where you land on all the greatest hits of a character," Sorkin said. Instead, "I wondered if I could take all the work that Walter had done and if there was a way to dramatize the points of friction in Steve's life," which gave birth to the movie's three-act structure.

2. The two-hour film is made up of three "real-time" scenes, set backstage at the launches of three key products: the Apple Macintosh in 1984, the NeXT Computer in 1988 and the iMac in 1998. "It's quite different to anything I've ever witnessed," director Danny Boyle told USA TODAY. "It's rightly unusual for (Jobs). If you're going to make a film about him, it's got to be a different kind of film and that's what we were trying to do."

3. Shot in theaters in San Francisco and Cupertino, Steve Jobs' drawn-out scenes in tight spaces give it the feel of a play, which is why Boyle and the cast approached it as such: pausing filming after each "act" to rehearse and perform run-throughs. It gave them the chance "to make all the mistakes that we needed to make before we walked onto the set," Kate Winslet said. "Because when we walked onto the set, we had to be that well-oiled machine, we had to be ready to go, we had to have 'Sorkinese' in our back pockets. It was necessary to have that process, for creating the energy that was required to keep up with what Aaron had written."

4. Michael Fassbender went into playing Jobs with very little knowledge of Apple's history or the demanding taskmaster behind the company's success. "I didn't really know much about him," Fassbender said. "Obviously, I knew who he was, but I'm not very interested in technology. I use it pretty poorly, so everything was new to me, to be honest." What did make an impression on the actor was meeting the real-life people that worked with Jobs, including Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak (played by Seth Rogen), marketing chief Joanna Hoffman (Winslet) and former CEO John Sculley (Jeff Daniels). Since Jobs died of cancer in 2011, "you could see he was still very much present in their lives," Fassbender added. "Even if the relationships were difficult, there was sadness and a love there for him that I felt was pretty clear."

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5. Onscreen for nearly every frame of the film, Fassbender's towering take on Jobs has made the German-Irish actor a current Oscar front-runner for best actor, according to awards website GoldDerby.com. Unsurprisingly, the late tech genius got under his skin during the nearly five-month production process. "I thought so many things about the man: what he achieved, what he would've done when he got ill, how he would've dealt with that, and how part of his reality distortion field maybe got in the way in the end when he was diagnosed," Fassbender said. Reading the script and watching interviews and speeches on YouTube, "he just didn't leave me. ... He was kind of in and around me the whole time, so I was actually quite happy to put him aside when we finished."