Golden Trash: Donald and Ivana Trump were married from 1977 to 1990. They are played by Sebastian Stan and Maria Bakalova in The Apprentice.Image source: DCM
interview
Actor Sebastian Stan and director Ali Abbasi spoke in Zurich about the years when Donald Trump became overly obsessed with the American dream.
Sebastian Stan’s attitude towards Donald Trump is fearless and unequivocal: “His need for power and control is so intense that it drowns out all other needs within him. No one can compare to him More power. If someone says they're the 'leader of the free world,' then we definitely have to question that.” Sebastian Stan plays Donald in “The Apprentice: The Trump Story.” Trump, perhaps the most important movie in the world right now, is trying to ban it from theaters before the election. It has been playing in US cinemas for a few days, but due to limited advertising options, no TV broadcasts have been allowed.
Stein said the film showed how “a man with ambition and a sense of family” could become dangerous even before he entered politics. Of course, “The Apprentice,” named after Trump's own talent show, is, like all Trump-related shows, a lot of fun.
“The Apprentice” trailer
The reason for Trump's bad pedigree is that Roy Cohn, a gay Jewish lawyer as rooted in American politics and pop culture as Trump himself, helped Senator Joseph McCarthy persecute communists in the 1950s. He later informally advised both Nixon and Reagan. He died of complications from AIDS in 1986. In Tony Kushner's hours-long AIDS drama Angels in America (1991), he played the central role of a gay man in denial about himself and his disease; He was played by Al in the 2003 HBO miniseries of the same name. Pacino. He was called “the devil”.
Jeremy Strong's flat-voiced, glassy-eyed Roy Cohn in “The Apprentice” is actually the same as Ken, another New Yorker and billionaire's son named Roy in “Succession.” Del Roy is exactly the same. He was great again, a hedonist, a cynic, an opportunist and a manipulator of a special class. Cohen was the mentor to whom Donald sold his soul and was shaped by him in the early 1970s. The coach taught him the mantra of hubris and self-centeredness that is the basis of Trump’s lying rhetoric.
Job done: Donald Trump (Sebastian Stan), as we know him.Image: DCM
“Attack, attack, attack,” “Admit nothing, deny everything,” “No matter what happens, claim victory and never admit defeat” were Cohen's rules. You could also say: Always attacking and lying. His trainees learn quickly and thoroughly; the tower he builds in New York (photographed in Toronto) is a symbol of his new confidence; the final complexity can be overcome with hair transplants and liposuction.
Is it hard for Stan to get to know Trump well? He said his last act of courage was to “stop being critical of Trump in his heart” before everyone told him he had no chance of being like Trump. After several failed attempts at facial prosthetics, he hired a team to transform him into Tommy Lee in the Hulu series Pam and Tommy, and they finally succeeded, creating Sebastian Stan A minor miracle, playing a character both brash and reserved, never a clown. , never a caricature, but still very Trumpian.
Stan and Lily James star as “Pam and Tommy.”Image: imago/Annapurna Pictures
The actor is from Romania and his mother was a pianist who named him after Johann Sebastian Bach. In 1990, after the Romanian revolution, she moved with Sebastian to Vienna and four years later to the United States. He got hooked on Hollywood with “Jurassic Park” and “Mrs.” Suspicious. “As he was delivering an hour-long speech to the audience at the Frame Cinema on Saturday morning, a young woman stood up and said: “I'm from the Balkans too and it's great that one of us made it. ”
By and large, his audience is young; they know Stan as the Winter Soldier from Marvel, Gossip Girl and I, Tonya. It loved him and he loved it in return, a humble man who talked about his roles as if they were always trivial and unworthy of mention; he preferred to talk about his love for Tom Cruise, Meryl S. Admiration for Tripp and Nicole Kidman.
Ali Abbasi, the director of “The Apprentice”, is Iranian and has lived in Denmark for many years. Their non-American origins insulate Stan and Abbasi from having too much fear, respect, and sentimentality in American-made myths. They especially devoured the great rags-to-riches legend of the “American Dream,” which to them was nothing more than a hugely destructive scam.
Ali Abbasi, Maria Bakalova and Sebastian Stan (from left) at the Zurich Film Festival.Image: Getty Images Europe
Do you think your film could influence the U.S. presidential election? “No,” Abbasi said Saturday afternoon at the Ball Oak Hotel next to Sebastian Stan, “we're not going to tell people anything they don't already know.”
He thinks there's a good chance Trump likes his movie, but doesn't take it entirely seriously: “We're sincerely trying to get to know the guy. I think he owes it to a group of well-respected actors, well, and I'm not all bad, for him. Dedicated six years of his life and a lot of money. We could have done better! If we wanted to eliminate him, it would have been so easy for him to give us a love letter! Did a lot of research, without bias, and asked ourselves about every element of the script, how could we be responsible for it historically, legally, morally, etc. We discussed the rape scene alone two hundred times if you did it! I would love a movie like this about me.”
Donald and Ivana 1986.Image source: IMAGO/ZUMA Press
Hence the rape scene. In 1990, Ivana Trump testified under oath during her divorce trial that her husband raped her. Later, under pressure from her ex-husband's lawyer, she softened her story.
“We didn't say, hey, we're going to do a rape story,” Abbasi said. “We said to ourselves, there's a rift between two people who once loved each other very much, and a tragedy culminated in a tragedy.” Display of power, sexual assault. We didn’t want to shoot a spectacular scene, but we wanted to shoot an emotionally believable scene. In the first version, we heard so much about the producer (the son-in-law of a Trump supporter who is currently in the midst of a family revolt) about the law that the scene died. But moviegoers don't care what fights you have with producers. “
Despite Abbasi's desire to prevent his Trump from being read too simplistically, reviews of the film have been mixed. Some consider The Apprentice to be a great humanization of Donald Trump. While that's exactly why some in Trump circles like the movie, it sounds more innocuous than it is meant to be. “To be human is to be flawed. We humanize Trump by showing him his flaws and hurts. How those affect his decisions,” Sebastian Stan said. “Then you instinctively ask yourself: Can I trust this person? So far we’ve only seen the most extreme version of Trump, and we don’t even know what’s going on behind it.”
Others see the film as the horrific origins of the monster. Finally, you sit in front of a screen with ice crystals coursing through your veins. This in turn short-circuits the film from Abbasi's last film, The Spider, about a popularly acclaimed murderer of an Iranian prostitute.
“Of course it makes sense dramatically and morally to describe 'The Apprentice' as a monster story, a Frankenstein story, but to me Trump is the epitome of the American character,” Abbasi said. “Spider” I always say: this is not a movie about a serial killer, it is a movie about the society of serial killers. Both movies are about the society and the systems that provide support for these people.
Assuming that Trump is a German real estate entrepreneur who is building several luxury buildings in Munich, has a wife from Eastern Europe, and is also interested in politics, his ambitions will soon reach the ceiling. In the social Darwinism of the American system, there is no such ceiling, only greater and greater amplification.
The amplification of America also includes the amplification of fear. Abbasi actually wants to get out and about these days, go places, be with people who generally disagree with him, “in Trump country.” He thought it would be fun. “But after the first assassination attempt on Trump on July 13, I said to myself, well, if they're going to try to kill their own presidential candidate, there's no way someone like me is going to Get out alive.”
“The Apprentice” will be released in theaters starting October 17.
