"People not long ago were talking with this man and watching him present things and do things. It's not like I've ever seen Abraham Lincoln walk into a room, but I've seen Steve Jobs walk into a room. So everyone has a right to be a legitimate critic because he was very public. It's terrifying to play him, especially since he's someone who is so admired. But the more research you do the more you discover he was a flawed human being just like everyone else."
Directed by Joshua Michael Stern from a script by Matt Whiteley, Jobs paints a broadly favourable portrait of the man who gave the world such groundbreaking gadgets such as the iPod and iPad.
Early, mostly lukewarm, reviews of Jobs have noted that the depiction of the Apple founder's human side is a little thin. The film does tick off many of his issues - his meanness with money, particularly in terms of child support of his first child ,and then cutting out his old friends who helped him in the beginning.
"We didn't try to answer every question about him and, hopefully, the accumulation of the movie, of the life, will give you a feeling about the man," notes Stern.
"My hope is that audiences are left with an emotional connection to who he was. Ours is just what we felt was this portion of his life from age 22 till his mid- to late-30s."
Much of Jobs was shot in a Los Angeles suburb that closely resembles the Silicon Valley city of Cupertino, near San Francisco that is still Apple's home base.
Though the early scenes in Los Altos, California, where Jobs, together with Steve Wozniak (Josh Gad), developed their first Apple computers in 1976, were shot in the actual garage of Jobs' adoptive parents where it all took place.
Wozniak has taken issue with the film, saying it overplayed Jobs' early technical ability and that it was he, not Jobs, who predicted that access to computers would affect society.
'Steve is lecturing me about where computers could go, when it was the other way around," Wozniak told the Los Angeles Times.
"Steve never created a great computer. In that period, he had failure after failure after failure. He had an incredible vision, but he didn't have the ability to execute on it."
"I would be surprised if the movie portrays the truth."
Kutcher, has defended Jobs from Wozniak's criticisms.
"A couple things you have to understand, he told The Hollywood Reporter, "one, Steve Wozniak is being paid by another movie studio to help support their Steve Jobs film, so he's gonna have an opinion that is connected to that, somewhat. Two, the biggest criticism that I've ultimately heard is that he wanted it to be represented - his contribution to Apple - fairly. And, in all fairness, the movie's called Jobs. "
Wozniak is a consultant on a bigger-budget Jobs biopic for Sony Pictures to be written by Aaron Sorkin - returning to territory he last traversed in The Social Network - drawing on Walter Isaacson's authorised biography which was published soon after Jobs' death in 2011 from pancreatic cancer at age 56.
Kutcher's own work with technology companies dovetailed with this preparation for the role.
"For me it was like being able to continue to work with these companies and do things. There is a guy, Dave Morin, he has a company called Path and he used to work for Steve and so we would be working on product and I would be asking him questions about Steve. I would sort of stay in character but I didn't feel I was compromising the work I was doing. I think my comments to some of the companies I work with became a little bit more direct and confident, but it was actually cool."
Jobs wasn't always the "incredible presenter" he became, Kutcher notes. "But he always had it in him. It was tough breaking it all apart so I could build it up over the portrayal in the movie."
There's no doubting Kutcher captures the mogul's trademark slouch and walk, as well as the steely side to his personality. "I think he was a charming guy when he wanted or needed to be, but he was also brutally honest."
In many ways the film focuses on Jobs' ability to stick with the plan, on his single-mindedness and his ability to bounce back after he was shut out of Apple in 1985, only to return in 1996 to the company he founded.
"He's a guy who failed and got back on the horse," Kutcher says. "I think we can all relate to that in some place in our lives where we are moving forward with something and we fall down. You have to have the guts to get back up and go again. I think I share that as well."
Though one part of his preparations for Jobs left Kutcher worse for wear. He adopted Jobs' fruitarian diet, which he had based on Arnold Ehret's 1922 book The Mucusless Diet Healing System.
"I wanted to know who he was," the star offers as his reason. "I wanted to highlight his eccentricity and his sense of discipline. Steve controlled a lot of his environment and was also very controlling over what he ate and what he put in his body. I think in the same way as his clothes, he didn't have to make a choice, so it freed up his mental capacity to make a choice about other things that he cared about. I felt like in preparing to portray this person, I needed to have the same discipline."
Kutcher says the whole experience was awful.
"I did a week where I just ate grapes and I did a week where I just ate carrots and then I backed into a slightly more vegetarian diet. I ended up doubled over in pain and I went to the hospital two days before we started shooting the movie. My pancreas levels were completely out of whack. It was really terrifying, considering everything," Kutcher adds solemnly.
Who: Ashton Kutcher
What: The biopic Jobs
When: Opens at cinemas August 29
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- TimeOut / Additional reporting agencies
