'The Apprentice' Director Talks Film's Portrayal of Donald TrumpExBulletin

Jeremy Strong (left) as Roy Cohn and Sebastian Stan (right) as Donald Trump appear in Ali Abbasi's film The Apprentice. Pief Weyman/Briacliff Entertainment .

rock the legend Pief Weyman/Briacliff Entertainment

At first glance, Ali Abbasi might seem the least likely candidate to direct a film about the history of former President Donald Trump.

The 43-year-old director was born in Tehran, lives in Denmark and has made films that deal with the supernatural (Border, 2018), horror (Shelley, 2016) and serial murder (Holy Spider, 2022). But this context also gives him a particularly detached view on a deeply polarizing subject on the eve of the November presidential election in which Trump is seeking another term.

“You’re so good with monsters and trolls… Do you want to make a movie about Donald Trump?” Abbasi remembers screenwriter Gabriel Sherman telling him in 2018. The Apprentice, released in theaters October 11, takes what Abbasi calls a “radically humanist angle.” The story focuses on Trump's (Sebastian Stan) formative years as a New York real estate businessman under the tutelage of Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong), his lawyer and unlikely mentor.

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Trump seems at first glance like a brave and somewhat naive young man trying to please his father

Likewise, Trump's mistreatment of the dying Cohn near the end of the film elicits empathy for the former mob fixer and prosecutor in “Red Scare.” Abbasi also exploited Trump's relationships with his older brother Fred (Charlie Carrick) and with his first wife Ivana (Maria Bakalova).

Another character in the story is New York itself, depicted in its gritty, grime glory of the 70s and 80s with grainy, saturated documentary-style images.

Maria Bakalova plays Ivana Trump in Ali Abbasi's The Apprentice, alongside Sebastian Stan as Donald Trump. Pief Weyman/Briacliff Entertainment .

rock the legend Pief Weyman/Briacliff Entertainment

Cohn, who also appears as a maligned figure in Tony Kushner's play Angels in America, “is not as well known as he should be,” Abbasi told NPR's A Martnez. “He was a closeted gay intellectual, homophobic, anti-intellectual, some say a self-hating Jew, all these contradictory things… But he was also a very colorful, very interesting and charming person and had a room full of frogs. dolls.”

Cohn died of complications from AIDS in 1986, but he insisted to the end that his illness was liver cancer. In the months before his death, the man who rubbed shoulders with celebrities and political heavyweights was disbarred and sued by the IRS for $7 million in back taxes.

Director Ali Abbasi on the set of The Apprentice. Pief Weyman/Briacliff Entertainment .

rock the legend Pief Weyman/Briacliff Entertainment

Abbasi sees Cohn as an integral part of the genealogy of the American populist right, and particularly adept at creating his own truth via media. In one scene, Cohn tells Trump: “There is no right and wrong. There is no morality. There is no truth with a capital T. It's a construct. It's fiction. It's man-made. None of it matters except winning.”

The director recalls a conversation he had with Sherman, the screenwriter, about how Trump's rise in American politics has been portrayed in the past.

“I told him there's what I feel in America, our liberal friends think he's a monster and he showed up and destroyed health care, destroyed infrastructure. That also implies that we “We are innocent, that we, good liberal people, tried to stop him and failed,” Abbasi said. “But it's not… We're sort of saying, 'Oh, you think it's the other one. Let's observe him. Let's observe ourselves, from his point of view. Is he really there? 'other? Is it really that different?

Humanist or not, the portrait of Trump is unflattering and the film is mired in controversy from the start

The film depicts a scene in which Trump allegedly raped Ivana. In her divorce filing, the Czech-born entrepreneur and model said Trump raped her in 1989 after she underwent a painful scalp reduction to eliminate a bald spot. She later returned to this assertion in a statement published in Harry Hurt III's biography Lost Tycoon: The Many Lives of Donald J. Trump (1993). In that statement, Ivana Trump said: “I called this 'rape,' but I do not want my words to be interpreted in a literal or criminal sense. She died in 2022.

The Apprentice depicts Ivana (Maria Bakalova) and Donald Trump (Sebastian Stan) falling in and out of love. Pief Weyman/Briacliff Entertainment .

rock the legend Pief Weyman/Briacliff Entertainment

Trump's team made legal threats to prevent The Apprentice from being screened in the United States. [at the] At the Cannes Film Festival, they made a very conscious attempt to scare off all the distributors, by sending us a cease and desist letter… They really succeeded in burying us, until very, very recently.” Abbasi said.

At the same time, he added, financing for the film “collapsed” several times because liberal figures in the Hollywood scene thought the film was “too sympathetic” toward Trump.

“What's crazy is the idea that this is a controversial movie because there's nothing really controversial about it… you could write the script with information from Wikipedia,” Abbasi added. “For me, what's most controversial is that Hollywood companies think we're dangerous and we're out there.”

Abbasi calls his film “an experience” that takes the viewer through Trump's story from a fledgling businessman to the politician he is today. Rather than examining the hyper-polarized nature of American politics, Abbasi is interested in the underlying structure that fosters this type of polarization.

“If there's a bigger message in the film, to me, it's that … the fundamental levers of power are not as partisan,” he said.

“This sort of flexibility of ideology, I think it's interesting, because it means that someone like Mr. Trump, when the time comes, becomes a Republican after being a Democrat for 30 years. I think that's the way to look at this system and, in a way, try to tear apart this two-party thing… and look at the sort of naked power structure.

The broadcast version of this story was produced by Julie Depenbrock. The digital version was edited by Obed Manuel.

Sources 1/ https://Google.com/ 2/ https://www.npr.org/2024/10/10/nx-s1-5100620/the-apprentice-donald-trump-director-film The mention sources can contact us to remove/changing this article

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