‘I’m OK with people bashing us’: in the controversial Trump biopic | Biopics

IIn 1973, Donald Trump was a hungry, bumbling real estate heir from Queens looking for respect in New York. Not particularly smart, not particularly charming and with no solid plan to fight a federal lawsuit over the family business’s discrimination against black tenants, the young Trump stumbled toward his dream of opening a lavish hotel near Grand Central . That is, until he met Roy Cohn, Senator Joseph McCarthy’s boxing accuser became Richard Nixon’s confidante and political fixer in a posh New York club.

That’s the opening scene of The Apprentice, a new film coming out this month after a beleaguered trip to theaters. Written by Vanity Fair’s longtime Trump chronicler Gabriel Sherman and directed by Iranian-Danish filmmaker Ali Abbasi, the film chronicles the young Trump’s rise to fame in New York society in the 1970s and 1980s through Cohn’s shameless tactics when the the lawyer’s health weakened due to HIV. /AIDS. The question that haunts the film, starring a revealed Sebastian Stan as Trump and Succession’s Jeremy Strong as Cohn, was: Does anyone want to watch a Trump movie? And after the film entered a long period of distribution uncertainty following some positive reviews at the Cannes Film Festival in May – would can anyone check it out?

“I’m okay with people bashing us, praising us, whatever,” said Abbasi, who previously made the serial killer thriller Holy Spider. “What I don’t agree with, what really hurts, is the boycott or censorship that we have actually gone through.”

Even with two major stars, independent film has had a rocky road to theaters. After the film’s festival premiere, the Trump camp issued a cease-and-desist letter — unsurprising, given the former president’s litigious stance and the film’s material. The Apprentice shows, among other things, how Trump rapes his first wife, Ivana (Maria Bakalova) – a fictional account of an alleged attack from 1989 – and receives liposuction. Dan Snyder, a pro-Trump billionaire involved with Kinematics, the company that put stock in the film against its domestic rights, reportedly tried to block its release. Possibly shocked by the legal threats, several studios and streamers came calling. At the eleventh hour, Briarcliff Entertainment stepped in with a domestic distribution plan and awards push, though the filmmakers still asked for $100,000 in a Kickstarter campaign (called “Release the Apprentice”).

According to Abbasi, who lives in Copenhagen, the distribution issue was less a juicy tale of a right-wing billionaire and more an unrepentant liar getting his way than simple business logic: “What makes money makes money, what doesn’t make money is that not. interesting.” The calculation is that even though people will watch the movie, this could turn off more Maga subscribers or customers. “Despite the whole liberal surface of Hollywood – and I’m not saying they’re lying or anything – but I don’t think they are willing to engage in politics in an important, meaningful way,” Abbasi said.

The film has been a hard sell from the start. “Trumpland thinks we did a good job on Trump, but when we made the movie, all our liberal friends in Hollywood thought we were giving him too much oxygen,” Abbasi said. “We had people hang up on us while we were at work because we didn’t ‘hate’ Trump enough.”

To be clear, the film, which Sherman first conceived and wrote in 2017 — well before Cohn’s lines of “attack, attack, attack,” “admit nothing, deny everything” and “never admit defeat,” manifested itself in attempts to steal a US presidential election title. elections – not easy for Trump. It’s a dramatization based on historical facts, and that’s just as damning as you see it. (For people outside the Maga-verse, it’s pretty damning.) But it tries to do what may now be impossible in America: talk about Trump without any political baggage, setting aside feelings about the man in the name of facts. based art. “It wasn’t written to influence people’s minds,” Sherman said. “It is written as art and what people get out of it is their own choice.

“It’s such a universal story about the student surpassing the master,” he added. “I hope people can experience it on its own terms and not bring all their political baggage into it.”

Nothing in The Apprentice is unfamiliar to anyone who has paid attention to Trump outside of his recent political career. The film depicts his icy, disappointing relationship with his father (Martin Donovan); his more affectionate relationship with his alcoholic older brother Fred (Charlie Carrick), who died in 1981; his bumbling courtship with Ivana; and his blind eye to Cohn’s homosexuality and clumsy attempts at respectability. And perhaps most damning of all: his deceptions, solutions and outright lies – to the housing authority, to the press – that worked because they aligned with the self-interests of others, and the ways in which New York elites lent legitimacy to a free agent. (A New York Times profile comparing Trump to Robert Redford, read by his mother Mary, is taken directly from a real article that helps build Trump’s reputation as a legitimate New York businessman.)

“There is a system, there is a social Darwinism that is built into American society, that did not start with Trump and will not end with Trump,” says Abbasi, who insists that The Apprentice “is not a Trump movie. It’s about the development of the character of Donald Trump as we know him today, in this very specific time and specific relationship.”

Over the course of the film, Trump, as played by Stan in as unexaggerated a manner as anyone can manage, becomes more and more like the recognizable figure of today: bigger and more blustering, operating with less and less sense of consequence. The most disturbing scene to watch – and the one that made headlines at Cannes – is the one where he rapes Ivana in the late 1980s.

“I felt like the movie needed to address that aspect of his character — it would be a whitewash of a movie if we didn’t acknowledge it in some way,” Sherman said, noting that Trump has been credibly accused of sexual assault by at least a dozen women, and was found liable by a New York jury for the assault of former Elle columnist E. Jean Carroll. The episode in question is taken from Ivana’s own divorce decree, behind closed doors and under oath, in 1990. (Ivana, who died in 2022, later made conflicting statements, although Sherman noted that these were under pressure from Trump’s lawyers and ultimately the campaign team .) “I wanted to feel like, okay, this guy is our president, he has a history of sexual assault — let’s look at it, let’s really show people what that’s like,” he said.

It is one of the hardest scenes to stomach, no matter how much Trump’s well-documented misconduct has been intellectualized and, of course, angered Republicans. Former Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee publicly called for a boycott of the “anti-Trump” film. (“They exercise the First Amendment only when it suits them, their freedom of speech only when it comes to fascism,” Abbasi said of Huckabee and his ilk.)

Trump minions aside, The Apprentice still faces an uphill battle for viewers. ABC and CBS declined to air spots for the film during the campaign debates, a decision Briarcliff attributed to “timidity and cowardice.” And then there’s the hurdle of enticing audiences to watch a two-hour film about a man about whom most Americans have a fixed opinion, and a good half of whom would prefer to see less of it. “People bring a lot of preconceptions to this movie,” Sherman admitted, “but if they just let themselves sit in the theater and be surprised, I think they’ll have a really exciting time.”

Both Abbasi and Sherman pitched The Apprentice in so many different ways: a New York film about a bygone, messy, formative era. A story about a corrupt system. A classic student becomes the teacher saga. An origin story. But it is first and foremost a dramatized portrait of the person Donald Trump. Trump is “not an alien, he is not from another planet. He is human,” Sherman said. “We need to look at these people, even if you don’t agree with them, so that maybe the next time another Trump comes along, we’ll recognize them as such.”

Ultimately, the film, like any film, is up to interpretation. “I think the public is very smart,” Abbasi said. “They can make their own decision if they come in and give this a chance.”