Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview

With Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview, director Paul Sen and writer/interviewer Robert X. Cringely prove they know what makes up the best documentaries: memorable characters. When Cringely discovered a VHS tape in a garage containing a long-lost 1995 interview with Apple visionary Steve Jobs, he undoubtedly realized that he had found a rare look at one of America's most fascinating and influential characters. Because instead of crafting a separate documentary around the footage, Sen and Cringely simply released the interview in its entirety, and the result is an engrossing glimpse into the mind of a creative revolutionary at a very unique point in his career. In 1995, Jobs was running his secondary passion project, NeXT, after a "very painful" fallout with Apple 10 years earlier. There is an undeniable "wow" factor to his anecdotes of writing programs for Hewlett-Packard long before hitting puberty, but the real inspiration--and the reason for any creative person to shell out $10 for this admittedly brief hour-long film--comes from Jobs explaining his philosophies of creating tasteful and forward-thinking products that inspire consumers, rather than cater to preconceived notions of how things have been done in the past. And, yes, he might mention Microsoft once or twice.