Sorkin says Jobs movie won't be straight biography

Customers walk past a display of the biography of Steve Jobs, sold at a bookstore in Quezon City, Metro Manila October 24, 2011.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin hasn't yet figured out how to put the life of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs on the silver screen, but he is certain it's not going to be a straightforward biography.

Sorkin, who won an Oscar for his screenplay of Facebook film "The Social Network" and created TV drama "The West Wing", said on Thursday he would be looking for an element of tension or an obstacle in Job's life on which to hang the movie.

Movie studio Sony Pictures announced on Tuesday that Sorkin would adapt Walter Isaacson's best-selling biography of the enigmatic genius behind the iPod and the iPhone. Jobs, 56, died in October after a long struggle with pancreatic cancer.

"I know so little about what I am going to write. I know what I am not going to write. It can't be a straight ahead biography because it's very difficult to shake the cradle-to-grave structure of a biography, " Sorkin told reporters at a news conference for his upcoming HBO drama "The Newsroom."

Sorkin noted that "The Social Network" saw the Facebook story through the lens of an acrimonious lawsuit that pitted CEO Mark Zuckerberg against his Harvard friends over the creation of the social media network.

"Drama is tension versus obstacle. Someone wants something, something is standing in their way of getting it. They want the money, they want the girl, they want to get to Philadelphia - doesn't matter ... And I need to find that event and I will. I just don't know what it is," Sorkin said.

Sorkin said he would turn his full attention to the Jobs film in late June, once he has launched "The Newsroom", which is set behind the scenes at a television network.

He said that Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak has been hired by the film studio as a "tutor" on all the technical aspects of computers and on Jobs himself.

Wozniak and Jobs founded Apple from a garage in 1976. Wozniak stopped working for the company in 1987 but kept in touch with Jobs until his death.

(Reporting by Christine Kearney, Writing by Jill Serjeant; Editing by Bob Tourtellotte)