Interview: Danny Boyle Talks ‘Steve Jobs,’ Tackling Aaron Sorkin's Dense Script, ‘Trainspotting 2,’ And More

Director Danny Boyle got his start in theater and then moved into filmmaking. But for all his experience with actors and the stage, he’s made his name as a propulsive and relentless visual stylist with a knack for kinetic viscera. Having directed “Trainspotting,” “28 Days Later,” “Sunshine” and the Oscar-winning “Slumdog Millionaire,” Boyle’s omnivorous taste has seen him jump from genre to genre, challenging himself with each picture with restless verve.

But for his latest drama, the unconventional biopic of Apple founder “Steve Jobs,” Boyle was faced with an entirely different challenge: how to reconcile his dynamic visual style with 185 verbally dense pages of  Aaron Sorkin screenplay. With so much electricity coming off the script, Boyle made a counter-intuitive but wise move: the film's energy emanates from through the dynamism of performances, rather than his signature visual verve. In the symphonically-charged “Steve Jobs,” Michael Fassbender plays Jobs, Kate...