It’s not uncommon for directors to express anxiety when showcasing their work at a film festival, but as he addressed the audience Saturday before a sold-out Telluride midnight screening of “The Apprentice,” the controversial Donald Trump biopic, director Ali Abbasi found himself sweating with a unique kind of nervousness.
The screening, which was kept a closely guarded secret ahead of the festival, will be the first time U.S. audiences will see the film that caused a furor at the Cannes Film Festival in May, where “The Apprentice” received an 11-minute standing ovation despite threats of legal action from the Trump campaign.
“I don’t usually get nervous, but I am actually nervous,” the Iranian-born Abbasi (“Holy Spider”) told the Telluride audience. “This movie has been years in the making, and now it’s coming back to you all.”
“The Apprentice” depicts Trump’s rise to fame and power in 1970s and ’80s New York, starring Sebastian Stan as real estate developer, future reality TV star and politician Trump and Jeremy Strong as his ruthless lawyer and mentor Roy Cohn. Written by journalist Gabriel Sherman, who wrote the 2014 best-selling book about the late Fox News CEO Roger Ailes, the dark comedy portrays Trump as a sleazy, ruthless yet charismatic socialite who, under the tutelage of the amoral and deeply flawed Cohn, learned to gain power through aggressive aggression, a disregard for ethics and strategic manipulation of the media.
After the film’s release at Cannes, Trump campaign communications chief Steven Chung slammed the movie as “garbage” and “complete fiction” and vowed to sue the filmmakers to block its release. Film studios, streamers, and indie distributors were understandably wary of taking on such a politically fraught issue, but Briarcliff Entertainment eventually stepped up to distribute it domestically, slated for a release just under a month before the most eventful and bitterly contested presidential election in US history.
The morning after the Telluride screening and just 64 days before the election, The Times caught up with Abbasi, Sherman, Stang and Strong to discuss the film’s history, the challenges of portraying such a polarizing character and the impact “The Apprentice” will have as the country braces for the final stretch of a deeply divisive election season.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
Ali, when you introduced the film last night you said, “This is not a political attack piece. It’s meant to be a mirror, to hold up an image of you as a community.” Can you expand on this?
Abbasi: This is not a political attack piece. It’s the nature of politics to rationalize things to a certain effect, to gain power or to regain power. And that’s not the project here. We’re all interested in exploring complexity.
“Why watch this movie? Does it tell us something about Trump that we don’t already know?” people ask. If you think you can get to know the characters by reading their Wikipedia pages, feel free to do so. But this is not information. This is an experience, an experience of the complexity of the characters. And for me, as an outsider, it was a chance to see the American system and the utter corruption that is, at least from my perspective, an institutionalized part of it.
Strong: Of course, there are political maneuvers that the film explores and examines, but I think it’s really a psychological investigation, a humane interrogation of these people.
I think all great movies are about relationships, and this movie is about relationships and the formative aspects of relationships. Emerson said that every institution is the shadow of a man. In this movie, I feel like we’re looking at the very long shadow of this man refracted through that man. We’re looking at that shadow that’s casting a dark light on us right now.
Ali’s making a fantasy horror movie in a way. It’s a monster movie. It’s a Frankenstein movie. It’s like an origin story of the birth of an idea. By combining Gabe’s journalistic integrity with Ali’s Lynchian punk rock filmmaking, we’ve got something that’s not “1 + 1 = 2.” Politics aside, this is the movie you should see.
The Trump in this film is very different to the Trump we see today. He’s younger, more vulnerable, still figuring out how to project himself to the world. Sebastian, how did you get into him?
Stan: When I first read the script in 2019, it oddly reminded me of The Godfather Part II. If you forget the characters’ names and just look at what’s on the page (which I eventually had to do), it’s like witnessing someone turn to stone. In many ways it reminded me of the Michael Corleone storyline. When you take away your subjective judgment of things, you start to see them in a different way.
Strong: As a fellow actor, I thought Sebastian’s performance was just an incredible achievement. I didn’t see any seams in the performance. It was completely alive. I got to know a whole different Donald, to the point where at some point in the script he alluded to the Darth Vader-like character we know today. And then when I met that Trump, I really understood what he was trying to do.
Sherman: For me, when I started writing the movie, one of the things I really wanted to explore was how to humanize him. He’s a larger-than-life character who lives in our imagination, but he’s also just a human being. I love the scene where Roy calls Donald when he’s asleep on the couch. There are no superpowers there. He’s just a guy who passed out on the couch. Making him as normal a human being as possible is something that I think hasn’t been done much with his character.
The Trump campaign claims not only is the film defamatory, but that its release is a form of election interference. Was it always expected for it to be released before the election?
Abashi: I think it’s actually really important to talk about the timing. I’m happy about the timing, and I’m certainly excited about it. But we’ve been trying to make this film since 2018, and every year it was like, “We’re almost there.” Then January 6th came around, we had some funding and everything was in place, and then everyone was like, “Nah, thanks. Bye.”
Sherman: I think it was 2019, and a very prominent Hollywood executive came up to me at an event and said, “If Trump loses, contact me. We’d be interested.” We weren’t releasing the film in a political sense. It was just a fight to get the film made.
The film includes scenes of Trump raping his wife, Ivana, on the floor of his apartment, as well as undergoing liposuction and cosmetic surgery for his baldness. Why were these scenes important to include, and how did you decide where to draw the line between what was acceptable and what was too obscene?
Sherman: For me, the Ivana scene was a touchstone of the film, because you have to let the audience spend time with this character and show all sides of him. We would be betraying ourselves as writers and as journalists if we didn’t include that scene. He’s been accused of sexual assault by more than 10 women. A New York jury found him liable for sexual assault and defamation against E. Jean Carroll. It’s a side of his character that, especially in this (post-#MeToo) situation, if it’s not there, it’s just a glaring absence.
Ivana made these claims under oath in her divorce affidavit and under threat of perjury. Whenever she corrected her statements, it was because Trump’s lawyers were pressuring her before the book was published or when she was running for president in 2016. So when you’re trying to determine the veracity of something, if she says one thing and then retracts it because Trump’s lawyers are threatening her, which one seems more true? To me, her original statement feels more true. That’s why we thought that was the most honest way to present this scene.
Given the importance of the election and the “attack, attack, attack” mentality that Trump learned from Cohn, how are you all prepared for what may come out of Trump and his supporters when this film comes out?
Strong: We feel that the stakes of this work are much larger than our personal stakes. Our role as artists has always been to mirror nature, and that might involve some risk. This is not the type of film that most are making. But in an age of alternative facts and fantasy, we feel it is more important than ever for art to speak the truth and to fearlessly question it. Neither of us has any interest in judging or demonizing or denigrating these people. We tried to understand them. That is now our obligation to all of us.
Stan: I’m sure the people who support and respect him will see what they want to see in this film. But we’ve taken each day for granted, and it’s good to enjoy this moment in time. We live in uncertain times. Consider the very unusual weekend we’ve had, from an assassination attempt to the resignation of a president. So who has the answers? I don’t know.
Abbasi: When I did Holy Spider, I went through something similar. It’s similar to what the Trump campaign did without seeing this movie, but in Iran, they saw the trailer for Holy Spider and said, “This is blasphemy. This guy should be executed.” I don’t know how much they really said, but you never know. My parents still live in Iran, and my mom called me crying and begged me to remove some things from the movie for my parents’ safety. I thought, “We’re on the back of a dragon. There’s no way to control the dragon, so let’s at least have as much fun as we can.”
I don’t feel like I’ve done something really dangerous and scary and that I need to escalate security and hire two guys with guns. There are complexities there. The experience of the film and the acting trumps the political message or whatever. Ultimately, I think people will see it that way.
You know how “Barbie” worked? They said, “If you like Barbie, this is the movie for you. If you don’t like Barbie, this is the movie for you.” So we say the same thing. If you like Trump, this is the movie for you. If you don’t like Trump, this is the movie for you.