'The Apprentice' director talks about Donald Trump's portrayal in the film: NPR

Maria Bakalova (left) plays Ivana Trump in “Ali Abbasi.” The apprenticeopposite Sebastian Stan as Donald Trump.

Pief Weyman/Briarcliff Entertainment

Hide caption

Toggle label

Pief Weyman/Briarcliff Entertainment

At first glance, Ali Abbasi appears to be the least likely candidate to make a film about former President Donald Trump's origin story.

The 43-year-old director was born in Tehran, lives in Denmark and has made films that deal with the supernatural (Border2018), Horror (Shelley2016) and serial murder (Holy spider2022). But that background also gives him a uniquely distanced view of a deeply polarizing issue on the eve of November's 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's manager telling him in 2018. The apprentice“The film,” which hits theaters Oct. 11, takes what Abbasi calls a “radical humanist angle.” The story focuses on Trump's (Sebastian Stan) formative years as a New York real estate entrepreneur under the tutelage of Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong), his lawyer and unlikely mentor.

Trump initially seems like a courageous, somewhat naive young man trying to please his father

Similarly, Trump's mistreatment of a dying Cohn near the end of the film inspires sympathy for the former Mafia dealer and “Red Scare” prosecutor. Abbasi also examined Trump's relationships with his older brother Fred (Charlie Carrick) and his first wife Ivana (Maria Bakalova).

Another character in the story is New York itself, depicted in the grit and gritty splendor of the '70s and '80s with grainy, saturated, documentary-style imagery.

Cohn, who also appears as a reviled character in Tony Kushner's play Angels in America“isn't as well known as he should be,” Abbasi told NPR's A Martínez. “He was famously a closeted gay, homophobic, anti-intellectual 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 frog dolls.”

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

Director Ali Abbasi photographed at NPR headquarters on October 2, 2024.

Courtney Theophin/NPR

Hide caption

Toggle label

Courtney Theophin/NPR

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

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

“I told him that in America I feel like our liberal friends think he's a monster and have shown up and destroyed healthcare and infrastructure. That also means that we are innocent, that we are good liberal people.” “We tried to stop him and failed,” said Abbasi. “But that's not the case… We're sort of saying, 'Oh, you think he's the other one. Let's watch him. Let's observe from his perspective. Is he really the other one? Is it that different? Really?' '”

Humanistic or not, Trump's portrait is unflattering and the film was mired in controversy from the start

The film shows a scene in which Trump allegedly rapes Ivana. In her divorce claim, the Czech-born entrepreneur and model said Trump raped her in 1989 after she underwent a painful scalp reduction procedure to remove a bald spot. She later retracted this claim in a statement published in the biography of Harry Hurt III Lost Tycoon: The Many Lives of Donald J. Trump (1993). In that statement, Ivana Trump said: “I have 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 shows Ivana (Maria Bakalova) and Donald Trump (Sebastian Stan) falling in love and breaking up again.

Pief Weyman/Briarcliff Entertainment

Hide caption

Toggle label

Pief Weyman/Briarcliff Entertainment

Trump's team made legal threats to prevent this The apprentice banned from screening in the US: “When we premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, they made a very deliberate attempt to scare off all the distributors by sending us a cease and desist letter…They really managed to bury us.” until very, very recently,” Abbasi said.

At the same time, he added, the film's financing “failed” several times because liberal Hollywood figures believed the film was “too sympathetic” to Trump.

“What's crazy is the whole idea that this is a controversial film, because there's nothing really controversial about it… you could write the script using information from Wikipedia,” Abbasi added. “For me, the most controversial part is that Hollywood thinks we’re dangerous and out there.”

Abbasi speaks of his film as “an experience” that takes the viewer through the arc of Trump's journey from the young businessman to the politician he is today. Rather than examining the hyperpolarized nature of American politics, Abbasi is interested in the underlying structure that fosters this kind of polarization.

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

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

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