Filmmaker Ali Abbasi has played down the threat of legal action over his Donald Trump biopic “The Apprentice”, which caused a stir at the Cannes Film Festival this week but may struggle to secure a US theatrical release in the run-up to the November 5 presidential election.
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A key component of the Cannes experience, the festival’s press conferences are a prime platform for the type of political statement that is strictly banned on the red carpet – and, sometimes, for filmmakers to put their foots in their mouths (think Lars von Trier’s infamous “I’m a Nazi” remark).
On Tuesday, the upcoming US presidential election took centre stage as director Ali Abbasi addressed the press about his explosive biopic “The Apprentice”, responding to a threat of legal action from the Trump campaign.
Abbasi, a Danish-Iranian dual national, referenced von Trier as he defended his “humanistic” take on Trump, who is mired in a hush-money trial in New York even as he gears up for another presidential election in November.
“Remember that these are human beings,” the director said of the characters in his film, which traces Trump’s rise as an ambitious young property developer in 1970s and ’80s New York under the sinister mentorship of cutthroat attorney Roy Cohn.
“The most despicable monster – the most reprehensible person in history – also liked a dog or fell in love with someone or was nice to somebody at some point,” Abbasi added. “So if there’s an ideology to the film it’s a humanistic ideology.”
The acclaimed director of “Border” and “Holy Spider” also offered to screen the film for Trump and talk it over, suggesting the Republican presidential candidate might find the experience interesting.
“I don’t necessarily think that this is a movie he would dislike,” Abbasi said of the biopic, which some reviewers described as lenient with the former president, despite portraying him as a bully, a swindler and a rapist.
He continued: “I don’t necessarily think he would like it. I think he would be surprised, you know? And like I’ve said before, I would offer to go and meet him wherever he wants and talk about the context of the movie, have a screening talk and a chat afterwards, if that’s interesting to anyone at the Trump campaign.”
Trump’s origin story
Labeled as inspired by true events, “The Apprentice” portrays Trump’s dealings with Cohn as a Faustian bargain that transforms the initially naive real-estate striver into a self-styled “winner” and “killer” – guided by Cohn’s three cardinal rules: attack at all times, deny everything, and never admit defeat.
The movie stars Sebastian Stan as an insecure and impressionable young Trump in a nuanced performance likely to elicit very different responses from viewers.
Anticipating reactions from the audience, the Hollywood Reporter’s David Rooney wrote in his review: “Liberals will see it as a stomach-churning making-of-a-monster account while the MAGA faithful might conceivably misconstrue it as an endorsement of their guy, who has made the killer instinct his brand.”
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The film notably contains a grisly scene depicting Trump raping his first wife Ivana (played by Maria Bakalova) – who accused Trump of rape in her 1990 divorce deposition and later retracted the accusation, saying she didn’t mean it literally.
That scene, and others in which Trump gets liposuction and becomes addicted to pills, make “The Apprentice” a potentially explosive big-screen drama in the run-up to the US presidential election, with the Trump campaign already railing against a movie it describes as “garbage” and “pure fiction”.
‘Malicious defamation’
Following the Cannes premiere, Steven Cheung, Trump’s campaign spokesperson, said in a statement that the Trump team will file a lawsuit “to address the blatantly false assertions from these pretend filmmakers”.
Cheung added: “This ‘film’ is pure malicious defamation, should not see the light of day, and doesn’t even deserve a place in the straight-to-DVD section of a bargain bin at a soon-to-be-closed discount movie store. It belongs in a dumpster fire.”
The threat of legal action is a serious concern for the Canadian-Danish-Irish co-production, which is yet to find a distributor in the US.
As “The Apprentice” premiered in Cannes on Monday, Variety reported that a battle has played out behind the scenes with billionaire Dan Snyder – a Trump donor – fighting the release of a film he helped finance, apparently believing it would be a flattering portrayal of the 45th US president.
But at the Cannes presser, Abbasi appeared to play down those threats, suggesting the film be released in the campaign’s final stretch.
“We have a promotional event coming up called the US election that’s going to help us with the movie,” he joked. “The second debate is going to be Sept. 15, if I remember right, so that’s a good release date for us.”
Asked whether he was concerned about a Trump lawsuit, Abbasi added: ““Everybody talks about him suing a lot of people – they don’t talk about his success rate though, you know?”
(With AP)
