There’s a moment at the end of director Alex Gibney’s new documentary Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine that presents the audience with a blank iPhone screen. The glossy, black surface reflects an image of Jobs that slowly morphs into an image of Gibney–a stylistic nod to Gibney’s thesis for the doc: We’ve all become the men and women in the machine.

It’s a daunting feat to write or shoot anything about Jobs. Walter Isaacson’s extensive 2011 biography Steve Jobs was followed up four years later by Rick Tetzeli and Brent Schlender’s book, Becoming Steve Jobs–not to mention films like Jobs starring Ashton Kutcher, director Danny Boyle’s upcoming Steve Jobs, and a list of other documentaries detailing the life of one of Silicon Valley’s greatest, most complicated heroes.

His job was to make great products–fuck everything else.

Gibney, who has made several highly praised docs, has managed to carve a sizable space for himself in the canon of Jobs chronicles, painting the background of his narrative with the “bold, brilliant, brutal” man we’ve come to know while fleshing out the portrait with his own creative process and surprising detours. The result is a nuanced chronicling of Jobs and, effectively, of Apple customers like you and me.

“When I started the film, the first person I reached out to was Laurene Jobs and it seemed like she was going to talk or at least we were going to engage her in conversation, and then it shut down. And I heard later she actually reached out to a lot of people and asked them not to talk to me, which created a certain number of problems. But at the end of the day, one of the interesting things about being shut down both by Laurene and also by Apple was that it propelled me into odder angles that I might not have pursued otherwise.”

“Sometimes when there are roadblocks put in your way, you find a more interesting path and so it became part of the journey to find out who would talk to us, which led us to people we otherwise might not have talked to and Bob Belleville [director of engineering, MacIntosh, from 1982-1985] is a classic example. We reached out to him in part because he was a character we discovered who spent a lot of time with Steve in Japan. But we didn’t know until we hung out with him how deeply he had been affected by that whole experience. I think sometimes when you get turned down, it takes you to interesting places.”

“You can do things in print that you really can’t in film–that is to say you can get into the forensic detail of stuff. In film, you have to go at it in a very different way. If you go back to that deposition of Jobs, it’s true you could have read that entire deposition in Forbes magazine but you wouldn’t have seen the kind of vicious, sarcastic contempt that Steve had for the SEC examiners. One of my favorite moments is when the SEC person is asking him, ‘So what did you do next?’ And he says, ‘Well, next I was on a search committee to find a new CEO.’ And the SEC guy says, ‘How did that go?’ And he looks at him, eyes dim with contempt and sarcasm and says, ‘I failed.’ That’s the stuff that on film tells you more than you could ever write down in a book.”

“A lot of Zen Buddhists in Japan essentially made peace with Jobs and his fascism. If you dig deeply into Buddhism, it doesn’t take you into cruelty, necessarily, but it can if you take certain aspects and ignore the rest. He really did think that by making products that were really beautiful, really good, and really attractive to people that he was changing the world. Maybe that’s an aspect of Zen he embraced, that if you focus on one thing, do that well, that’s all–everything else is bullshit. He said it straightforward: Giving my money away is a waste of time. He felt his focus was to make great products but it was the focus of a monk without the empathy. His job was to make great products–fuck everything else.”