Steve Jobs, the upcoming film about the Apple maverick – which stars Michael Fassbender in the titular role and was directed by Danny Boyle – will screen as the centerpiece film for the 53rd New York film festival.
The Film Society of Lincoln Center, which hosts the event, doesn’t list it as a world premiere. Sources say it will bypass the Toronto and Venice film festivals that occur a month beforehand, so a Telluride film festival world premiere seems likely.
Boyle said in a statement: “I am honored that our film has been selected as the centrepiece of this year’s festival. And thrilled and terrified too, unlike the subject of our film, who would have taken the whole thing very much in his stride.”
The Trainspotting director added that Jobs was a thoroughly “contradictory” and “complex” character who has “forged our digital age”.
“He’s the kind of brilliant, flawed character that Shakespeare would have relished writing about, and storytellers of all kinds will be fashioning and re-fashioning the mythology of the digital revolution for generations to come,” he said.
Unlike the critically bashed Jobs biopic that starred Ashton Kutcher, Boyle’s film has a compressed timeframe, focusing on three iconic product launches and ending in 1998 with the unveiling of the iMac.
Joining Fassbender in the film are Kate Winslet as Joanna Hoffman, Seth Rogen as Steve Wozniak, Jeff Daniels as John Sculley, Michael Stuhlbarg as Andy Hertzfeld, and Katherine Waterston as Chrisann Brennan. Coincidentally, Waterston also starred in last year’s centerpiece film, Inherent Vice.
As previously announced, Nyff will open with the world premiere of Robert Zemeckis’s 3D drama The Walk, starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Philippe Petit, the man who crossed the Twin Towers on a high-wire in 1974; and close with the world premiere of Don Cheadle’s directorial debut, Miles Ahead, the biopic of jazz musician Miles Davis.
