LOS ANGELES, Sept. 26 (UPI) — Renowned scribe Aaron Sorkin has fired back at Tim Cook after the Apple chief executive officer criticized as opportunistic filmmakers who bring Steve Jobs‘ story to the screen.
Sorkin and director Danny Boyle are behind the biopic Steve Jobs, which is set for theatrical release next month and already generating Oscar buzz, particularly for Irish-German actor Michael Fassbender, who plays the late Apple co-founder.
“I haven’t seen [the films about Jobs,] but the Steve I knew was an amazing human being. He’s someone that you wanted to do your best work [for],” Cook said this week on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.
“He invented things that I think other people could not,” Cook added. “He solved problems other people could not. He had this uncanny ability to see around the corner and to describe a future, not an evolutionary future, but a revolutionary future, and he was a joy to work with. I love him dearly and I miss him every day. I think that a lot of people are trying to be opportunistic, and I hate this; it’s not a great part of our world.”
“Nobody did this movie to get rich,” Sorkin told The Hollywood Reporter.
“Secondly, Tim Cook should really see the movie before he decides what it is,” he added. “Third, if you’ve got a factory full of children in China assembling phones for 17 cents an hour, you’ve got a lot of nerve calling someone else opportunistic.”
Co-starring Kate Winslet, Jeff Daniels and Seth Rogen, Steve Jobs is to open in the United States on Oct. 9.
Jobs died of complications from pancreatic cancer in 2011 at the age of 56. The computing-industry pioneer has previously been portrayed on the screen by Noah Wyle and Ashton Kutcher in Pirates of Silicon Valley and Jobs respectively. Jobs’ life was also chronicled in the 2015 documentary Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine.
Sorkin’s credits include The West Wing, The Newsroom and The Social Network.
