Director Ali Abbasi was caught off guard when he first read the screenplay for “The Apprentice,” his new movie about the relationship between New York City developer Donald Trump and cutthroat attorney Roy Cohn.
“I think I had the same initial reaction as a lot of people who watch the movie now, which is, I was surprised,” says Abassi, an Iranian-Danish filmmaker making his English-language debut with “The Apprentice.” “I was expecting it to be harsher or like a hit job, to be honest, and to rip him apart and tell me how despicable he is and how everything is bad about him and his family.
“And it wasn’t that,” he says of the film, which was nominated for the Palme d’Or at Cannes this year. “It was like a real genuine desire to understand him as a human being – and understand not only him but people around him.”
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“The Apprentice” explores the relationship between the ruthless attorney Roy Cohn and a young Donald Trump in New York City in the ’70s and ’80s. Seen here is Maria Bakalova as Ivana Trump and Sebastian Stan as Donald Trump. (Photo by Pief Weyman)
“The Apprentice” stars Sebastian Stan, best known for playing Bucky Barnes, the Winter Soldier, in Marvel movies, as ’70s and ’80s-era Trump. Jeremy Strong, who played Kendall Roy in HBO’s “Succession,” plays Roy Cohn, the onetime communist-hunting counsel of Sen. Joseph McCarthy turned cutthroat attorney who takes Trump under his wing. Maria Bakalova, who played Borat’s teen daughter in “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm,” plays Ivana Trump.
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“The Apprentice” created controversy with its Cannes debut, primarily for a scene that depicted Trump sexually assaulting Ivana Trump, an attack she alleged in a sworn deposition during her divorce from Trump but later walked back. (Steven Cheung, a spokesman for Donald Trump, said in a statement that the film is “pure malicious defamation” that “should never see the light of day.”)
Outside of that scene, and a few that portray Trump’s vanity over weight gain and hair loss, “The Apprentice” isn’t all that controversial, telling the story of Trump as a young man with big dreams and Cohn as the fixer who helped him until Trump cast off Cohn when he was dying of AIDS.
The story takes place entirely before Trump publicly expressed any political aspirations, and that allowed Abbasi to tell a story that is more intimate and personal than many might expect.
“I think it’s almost like a Frankenstein story,” Abbasi says. “You sort of see how Roy creates him in his own image, or recreates him in his own image, and how he goes from someone who maybe does not necessarily have a lot of political ambitions, who is not necessarily well aware of politics and this intricacy of the power and media around him, to being hyper-aware of that.
“I think that transformation is really the subject of the movie,” he says. “That’s why I think it makes sense to sort of focus the movie on that transformation.
The first half being sort of the ’70s, is more organic,” Abbasi says. “It looks like film looks. We’re in New York and things are going really bad. It has, like, a little bit of a vibe of these movies – maybe reminds you of ‘Taxi Driver,’ maybe reminds you of ‘Dog Day Afternoon.’ There’s some grit and authenticity about that.
“Then you go to the ’80s, and you went from, you know, newsreels of ’70s being shot on 16 millimeter [film] to ’80s where video became cheap enough to use instead, and that gave this whole thing a sort of artificial spin.”
The story behind the man
For Stan, the first reaction to receiving Gabriel Sherman’s screenplay for “The Apprentice” was simple: Why me?
“It was just a curiosity to begin with of why I would be getting this call and not somebody else,” he says. “But then Ali Abbasi is an incredible, fearless filmmaker. I really admired his films, particularly the last one, ‘Holy Spider.’ There was a rawness and a truth to it that was undeniable. All of that was really exciting to me as it pertained to this story.”
Add to that, Abbasi’s outside perspective and Stan was in.
“I felt if there’s anybody who should tackle Donald Trump and the American Dream then it perhaps should be him,” Stan says. “In the hopes that there’s something different to be told. Because he’s not playing for the red team, he’s not playing for the blue team, he’s out there on the outside kind of looking in.
“I think we’re too far deep in the trenches to be able to see our way out of it or into it,” he says.
Stan dove into research for the role, tracking down clips and documentaries of Trump in the ’70s and ’80s, reading Trump’s book “The Art of the Deal” and other books and “a gazillion interviews that were done in that time period with the New York Times and GQ and Playboy.”
He says he came away with the story behind the man.
“The more I looked at it the more universal it was,” Stan says. “There were things about the story that seemed very universally relatable. What is capitalism? What is the American Dream? What does it really do in terms of a person? How does it affect their morals or their empathy or lack there of?”
That resulted in a portrait of a man who wasn’t always the bombastic personality Americans know from his presidential campaigns and one term, so far, in the White House. Yes, the Trump of the movie does some cruel things to Cohn and Ivana, but he’s also seen with empathy through Abbasi’s lens at times, too.
“I don’t think anything in this world is black or white,” Stan says of the nuances he and Abbasi sought to bring to the characterization. “I think we’re very selective with how we see things, good or bad, and a lot of people come from a place of what’s convenient.
“It’s easy to sit back and point the finger at the big, bad boogeyman on top of the mountain,” he says. “It’s also lazy, in my opinion, because no one’s morally above it or morally safe when it comes to a bigger thing than a person, which is an ideology, a way of thinking.
“I think the right kind of movies, the right kind of stories … don’t sit there and hand you a manuscript and a map on how you should think, but inspire you and challenge you,” Stan says. “And that’s what I think this movie is trying to do.”
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