“Jim concentrated on the business side, and over time had to deal with the complexity that came with dealing with hundreds of wireless carriers globally, with fierce competitors in each country. When asked what it was like to work for Mike, I explain ‘Well, here’s a man who felt an explanation of the universe that started with electrons, protons and neutrons wasn’t good enough, so he donated over $100 million of his own money to found the Perimeter Institute, to dig deeper. “Mike had a deep understanding of technology and was driven to learn more, and would dig in great detail and challenge conventional wisdom. RIM’s success was the most important thing in their life.” “Both were clearly very intelligent, articulate and driven to win. “I actually saw many similar traits between Mike and Jim,” says David Yach, the company’s former Chief Technology Officer for Software. While this creates onscreen friction, and frisson, it’s not the way employees who worked at BlackBerry describe them in real life. They are, in their cinematic incarnation, seriocomic caricatures - Lazaridis (Jay Baruchel) a socially inept tech guru who rarely makes eye contact, Balsillie (Glenn Howerton) a combustible hothead who spews four letter words with metronomic precision. I don’t think they see themselves the way the film represents them.” “We would have been way too sympathetic to them. “It would have been too difficult to tell this story the way we wanted had they been involved,” notes the 37-year-old maverick, who describes both CEOs as “small town guys, not socially adventurous, with low openness as a psychological trait.”
Elevation Picturesīalsillie and Lazaridis, who resigned as CEOs in 2012, and are today involved in their own tech and philanthropic ventures, weren’t consultants on the film and had no role in its creation (although Balsillie saw a preview screening and is on record of saying he liked it).
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Matt Johnson, director of the movie Blackberry, which opens in theatres May 12. The Waterloo landscape, of course, has changed from the film’s temporal reality, which extends from 1996, when an early version of the BlackBerry was pitched to skeptical investors, to 2008, when cracks in RIM’s corporate structure threatened to topple its dominance. Last June he returned with cast and crew and spent five days driving around, shooting exteriors, visiting local restaurants (he’s a big fan of The Yeti Cafe and Morty’s chicken wings), having “the time of our lives.” We went inside all the original buildings. “While I was doing the original writing, we toured all the old spots - the original RIM offices, the old bagel shop that was underneath, the original buildings at U of W and other places that were interesting to me, like Jim Balsillie’s first workplace, Sutherland-Schultz, which amazingly still stands. “We spent almost a month living out of the Waterloo Hotel,” says director Matt Johnson, whose gleefully anarchic docudrama has garnered positive reviews and comparisons to the 2010 Oscar-winner “The Social Network.”
And fronted by two small town upstarts - a tech whiz (University of Waterloo grad Mike Lazaridis) and a business shark (Jim Balsillie) - there was no reason to think it would produce a device that would become a worldwide phenomenon, be championed by Oprah and earn the fawning nickname “Crackberry.”Īnd with a film that recreates the ferocious seat-of-the-pants creativity that gave birth to this magical computer in your pocket and - a few years later - its dramatic fall from grace, the company that spawned a revolution is finally getting its due, and then some. Research In Motion (RIM) was that company. With the release of “BlackBerry,” the raucous, undignified, wildly entertaining Canadian comedy-drama that depicts the rise and fall of the world’s first successful smartphone, the upstart tech company that put Waterloo Region on the map is back in the spotlight more than a decade after losing the battle for world domination to big gun competitors like Apple.
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