GAME OF PHONE

In the early 2000s, one smartphone dominated the market as high-flying executives craved instant communication. But as new movie BlackBerry shows, the creators flew too close to the sun. Total Film meets director Matt Johnson and his cast to talk gadgets, gangsters and Gordon Gekko.

Believe it or not, I’d never touched one before we started making this movie,’ says writer-directoractor Matt Johnson, leaning back in his chair in Berlin’s Hyatt hotel. ‘I never touched a BlackBerry.’ Maybe that says it all. For the iPhone and Android generation, the BlackBerry might feel as antiquated as a gramophone. But for those who lived through the early 2000s, the handheld device – with a physical keyboard, it allowed you to make calls and, crucially, receive and send emails – was a game-changer.

Created by Research in Motion (RIM), a Canadian tech start-up run by friends Mike Lazaridis and Douglas Fregin, the BlackBerry story is the ultimate Icarus tale. Or, as authors Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff called their 2015 account, Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry. Once controlling over 50% of the global smartphone market, by 2016 RIM’s market share, staggeringly, was 0%.

For Johnson and his co-writer Matthew Miller (who previously co-produced Johnson’s 2013 Slamdance-winning found-footage debut The Dirties), McNish and Silcoff’s book was the perfect source for an indie take on one of the biggest tech stories of the 21st century. Joining the likes of David Fincher’s Facebook drama The Social Network and Danny Boyle’s tale of Apple’s founder, Steve Jobs, the resulting script – simply titled BlackBerry – startled those that read it.

‘I had no idea about the story,’ admits actor Cary Elwes. ‘I had no idea it was a Canadian company. I had no idea the name of the company was based on a stain on somebody’s shirt. So I was fascinated by all of that. And that it was this morality tale mixed with greed and power.’ Elwes, recently seen in Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, pitches up as Carl Yankowski, the CEO of Palm, Inc., the company behind the Palm Pilot (remember them?) that attempted a hostile takeover of RIM.

Joining him is Jay Baruchel (She’s Out of My League) as the silver-haired Lazaridis, Johnson as the goofy, headband-wearing Fregin and Glenn Howerton (It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia) as Jim Balsillie, the ruthless businessman who joined RIM to turn it into a company that, at its peak, was coining in $20bn in sales annually. As Balsillie first pitches Lazaridis and Fregin’s crude demo model to powerhouse comms company Bell Atlantic, he comes on with the charisma of Michael Douglas’ corporate raider Gordon Gekko from Oliver Stone’s Wall Street.

‘The real Jim Balsillie was a huge Wall Street fan,’ says Johnson. ‘And it’s one of the early pieces of information that I latched onto as a writer, because I’m always looking for film references in anything I do, because I love them. It’s the way I view the world. And I thought, “Oh my God, this guy unironically loving Gordon Gekko is such a perfect place for Glenn to be thinking about this guy.” Because what’s so great about Gordon Gekko, even though he is a little bit of a caricature… he also has a sexiness about him.’

Gekko was not the only movie influence on Howerton’s shark-like take on Balsillie, with the 1992 adaptation of David Mamet’s play about real-estate sellers, Glengarry Glen Ross, also key. ‘That movie and the performances in it, and Alec Baldwin’s in particular [as the salesman who motivates with the ABC mantra – ‘Always be closing’] was actually a pretty massive influence on how I wanted to portray the character,’ says Howerton. ‘Jim was not sadistic. I don’t think he got off on joy humiliating people. But he also had no patience. He couldn’t suffer fools at all.’

As BlackBerry shows, Balsillie was utterly unsentimental when it came to hiring and firing, not least because he put his own residential house on the line when it came to backing RIM. ‘If there were things in the way, he just would figure out a way to remove those obstacles whenever possible and by whatever means,’ says Howerton. ‘And I can respect that. I wouldn’t do that, personally. But I can respect it and I can certainly understand it… I can respect somebody who comes along and says, “You fucked up. You’re out of here.”’

Among his biggest enemies at RIM is Doug Fregin, the ‘court jester’ says Johnson, who is at his happiest playing strategy game Command & Conquer online and screening Raiders of the Lost Ark with his fellow RIM geeks. Immediately, he clashes with Balsillie. ‘Doug might really hate him. But Doug’s not realising that this guy is literally providing the structure by which they’re allowed to create the company,’ says Johnson. ‘In my opinion, there’s a true dignity to Jim, a true dignity. I don’t disagree with anything he did personally or any of the things that he had to do, to maintain the success that he tried to get.’

It’s an interesting standpoint, given that Balsillie’s tactics included illegally backdating stock options to lure in the brightest minds from rival tech firms like Google. Moreover, in a sequence that resembles that moment in GoodFellas where a coked-up, paranoid Henry Hill is finally busted, an unhinged Balsillie flies cross-country to strike a deal to buy into ice hockey’s NHL – the National Hockey League (in reality he tried, and failed, three times). At a point when Apple’s iPhone was looming, it was a case of taking your eye off the ball.

‘I think he was coasting as far as BlackBerry was concerned,’ says Howerton. ‘That’s how we portrayed it in the movie. He’s like, “Mike will figure it out because I’m not the tech guy. Right? So if there’s a piece of technology that’s threatening, that’s not a problem, because that’s Mike’s whole thing. Right? That’s his department, that’s not my department. So if he’s fucking up and not ahead of things as far as the technology is concerned, that’s his fault. My job is to sell the fucking thing. Which I do very well. So it’s your fault.” The catchphrase we used for my character through the whole film was like, “Great. What’s next? What’s next?” He was never satisfied.’

" I HAD ON IDEA THE NAME OF THE COMPANY WAS BASED ON A SRTAIN ON SOMEBODY'S SHIRT"

CARY ELWES

In the midst of the war between Balsillie and Fregin stands Lazaridis, the whip-smart tech genius who ultimately let his success go to his head while failing to recognise the threat of Apple’s revolutionary device. Baruchel admits he was inspired by Tony Montana, Al Pacino’s Cuban gangster from 1983’s Scarface. ‘That was the arc I imagined. A guy who’s an underdog that you are kinda rooting for to a degree… By the time the credits roll, you’re forced to go through this whole fucking process and live with this guy, as he turns into kind of a rotten person.’

For the 41-year-old Canadian, who hails from Ontario where the story takes place, it was a rare chance to break out of the comedy realm and play a character who ages physically and emotionally through the narrative. ‘It was fun to finally get the chance to do that kind of big arc,’ he says, ‘one where it wasn’t just, “Oh my God, I learned a lesson before the credits came up!” A big decades-long thing. I loved how operatic a sort of arc it got to be. It’s not something I get to do very often.’

Of course, there was a downside. ‘Sadly, any opinion I have about that process is a purely technical one about how much the fucking wig inconvenienced my day-to-day life. I hated those bloody things. So one of them, the grey one, the first one, was this bobby-pin clip-on [hairpiece] and the other one required a bald cap and two hours of process to fucking get the thing glued on. And it was hot as balls. It was like fucking 40 degrees every day. And so the thing hurt and it itched. So it made me crabby.’

With a note-perfect cast that also includes cult actors such as Martin Donovan (Tenet) and Michael Ironside (Total Recall), everyone dug into their characters excitedly. Take Elwes and his tycoon Carl Yankowski, who is one of the vultures circling when RIM starts wobbling. ‘The more I read about him, the more I realised this was a guy who had a very inflated ego,’ says the actor, who ‘locked into’ one nugget: when Yankowski became a billionaire after Palm went public, he was interviewed on CNBC wearing a suit with gold thread woven into it. ‘I saw this man who felt like he had to put on a layer of something important to show the world – which most people wouldn’t have noticed.’

Indeed, it’s details like this that make BlackBerry such a compelling watch. Even details that scarcely feel credible, like the fact that Balsillie plays Joy Division’s Love Will Tear Us Apart in his car, somehow work. ‘I was like “This is what Jim is about,”’ claims Johnson. Originally he chose The Smiths, but changed Balsillie’s musical choices to fellow Manchester outfit Joy Division, as well as The Strokes – ahot new band in the early 2000s. ‘I thought “Oh, no, he thinks that he’s cooler than everybody in this office.” And I thought that was important. He needed to have a cultural power.’

In the end, though, the story comes back to Mike Lazaridis, a man who clung onto BlackBerry until it sunk (unlike Fregin, who wisely sold his stock at the peak of the company’s popularity). He was a man who dreamed big, changed the world but was crushed by his own hubris. ‘I think he gets his soul saved to a degree by the end, because you see he still gives a shit and he’s still trying to fix everything,’ argues Baruchel. But could the BlackBerry ever make a return? Who doesn’t love that feel of a proper keyboard under their fingertips? Johnson simply chuckles. ‘I don’t think they’re coming back!’

BLACKBERRY OPENS IN CINEMAS ON 6 OCTOBER.