BLACKBERRY
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
