Jobs' incredible skill was as a storyteller, a salesman. He could captivate our imaginations and reel us in. He was more P.T. Barnum than Thomas Edison.

As a filmmaker, I always took my inspiration from a filmmaker named Marcel Ophüls, who said, "I always have a point of view, but the trick is showing how hard it is to come to that point of view."

The stuff about film being a collaborative medium is no joke.

Many people, including myself, thought of Jobs as an inventor, an Edison-like figure, but he wasn't. I did a documentary on James Brown recently; and, oddly, I found a lot in common between Jobs and Brown. Jobs was also a fantastic performer, put on an extraordinary live show at his product launches, but he could also be ruthless, cruel and totally self-aggrandizing. And just as Brown surrounded himself with the very best musicians, Jobs understood the importance of hiring the absolutely most talented people and knew how crucial they were to the success of what he was trying to do.

Jobs would have ever have asserted that Bill Gates was not serious about technology. He was a huge pioneer in that world, albeit doing something quite different in approach from what Steve did. He was dismissive of Gates' foundation work as something he did to make himself feel better.

In many ways, I'm a big admirer still of Julian Assange. He had balls to do what he did and his motivations in terms of holding the powerful to account are tremendously inspiring to me.

What a terrible world it would be if we only did films that were poster boards for political causes.