“He did everything he wanted, and all on his own terms,” said a teary eyed Bob Belleville, a former colleague of Steve Jobs and head of engineering at Apple when the Macintosh 128k was created.

Belleville pays much respect to his former boss while being interviewed in the Alex Gibney (Going Clear, Taxi to the Darkside) documentary Steve Jobs: Man in the Machine (now available on DVD and Blu-ray), yet at the same time regrets that working with Apple, and under such a fastidious boss, cost him his wife and family.

“He’s either seducing you, vilifying you, or he’s ignoring you; you were always in one of these three states,” said Belleville, unable to thwart a somewhat awkward emotional outburst. For our beloved iPhone to exist, the documentary will attempt to show us tears were non negotiable.

Belleville talks of a great man in Steve Jobs, a visionary, but also an uncompromising man that expected Herculean efforts from his workforce. In Man in the Machine Jobs the hero is perhaps more flawed than he has been depicted before, with the documentary focusing as much on Jobs’ illustrious history as it does examining some shadier aspects of his working life. Gibney conducted over 50 interviews in the making of the documentary for CNN Films over a span of three years.

Jobs the Monk

We learn at the very beginning of the film from former colleagues that Jobs could be hard to work with, that he was an iconoclastic entrepreneur, a brilliant mind with a monkish devotion to simplicity and perfection, and that he could also be a mean, at times cold-hearted jerk who allegedly short-changed his good friends (Steve Wozniac), or wouldn’t accept his biological input into the making of a human product – his daughter.

“The motivation to make the film was why so many people who didn’t know Steve Jobs were weeping when he left,” Gibney once said. And so the film starts with footage of vigils being held following Jobs’ death. There’s a scene with an upset young boy lamenting the passing of his modern hero. “He made the iPhone, he made the iPod … he made the iPod Touch … he’s made everything,” says the child. Jobs is compared to Einstein, Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., and this gives Gibney the foundation to see if such praise was deserved.

We are taken to Zen gardens in Japan where we are told that Steve Jobs first began to understand the beauty in simplicity, where he honed his idea about making a computer that “felt like an extension of yourself.” We see footage of Jobs explaining how the people working with him would have been “artists, painters, poets,” were it not for the fact modernity had propelled them to working in the medium of computing. Apple is the counter-culture company, we are told, a corporate revolutionary entity doing battle with the Orwellian totalitarianism of Jobs’ nemesis IBM. Jobs talks about putting “spirit” into products, and for this you can’t help but admire his verve, his tenacity, his vision of creating ideally human-compatible computers.

Jobs the Machine

But Jobs’ idealism is soon underpinned by his own egoism and impenetrable drive to win at all costs, at least in the documentary. “He was even human”, says Jobs’ first daughter, Lisa Brennan-Jobs, when explaining how her usually regimented and sometimes cold father had somewhat softened on a trip to Japan. It’s not exactly a glowing sentiment, but it’s the best thing she says about her dad.

Former iPhone senior manager Andy Grignon is then introduced. Upon leaving Apple Grignon explains that he had a – what comes across as quite hilarious in the documentary – Don Corleone moment with Jobs who explained in no uncertain terms: “You’re part of my family … and Apple’s my family … and you don’t want to leave my family … If you choose to leave my family, should you decide to take so much as one member of my family away from me, I will personally take you down.”

We also see evidence that Jobs had colluded with other tech firms such as Google not to hire each other’s employees.

A similar kind of big boss mentality strikes a Gizmodo journalist after he leaked a story about an iPhone 4 – found in a bar apparently – which not only angered Jobs but ended with a house raid and seizure of equipment of Gizmodo editor Jason Chen.

Packing in the negativity during the middle part of the film we also learn about low wages in Chinese Foxconn factories for those assembling the iPhone 4s and a high rate of suicide in those factories, to which Jobs says in some footage, “It’s very, very troubling.”

This is hardly the fault of Steve Jobs, whose products were only a part of many electronic products being assembled in those factories. But Gibney doesn’t stop there. He introduces us to alleged Apple tax avoidance known as the ‘Double Irish’, Jobs’ attempt to dictate media coverage, as well as doing away with Apple’s philanthropic programs as it was a “waste of time,” according to Jobs.

Jobs the Myth

As Apple gets bigger he gets smaller, one commentator notes near the end of the documentary. He is portrayed, as “an artist who could never be at peace,” perhaps a man that found tranquility, and the roots of his minimalist aesthetic in his Zen gardens, but whose drive for perfection could often create a world of chaos around him. We see an impossibly determined man who refused traditional surgery possibly due to what one commentator calls a, “Pathological need to control his own fate.” He was so determined, the film alludes, perhaps partly because of being adopted as a child.

The documentary has been called mean-spirited by Apple’s software chief Eddy Cue, although in the interview with the BBC Steve Wozniak defends the film saying that Cue wouldn’t have known Jobs in the early days.

Early days or late, it seems Jobs’ private life will remain private. As with the recent fictional movie about Steve Jobs we are given a series of remarkable moments, with no light really shone on all the other millions of minutes that went by in a longish life. Man in the Machine does show us, however, that Jobs was as brilliant a tech visionary as he was at creating the Apple, and perhaps his own mythology. The slew of books and films about Steve Jobs is undeniable proof of that.

Photo credit: Tom Coates via Flickr