Why making a film about Donald Trump turned into a minefield

Ali Abbasi doesn’t want to play down the physical transformation of his two male leads in The Apprentice – Marvel regular Sebastian Stan almost unrecognisable as a very recognisable Donald Trump, and Succession’s Jeremy Strong seeming to waste away before our eyes as lawyer and kingmaker Roy Cohn as he succumbs to AIDS. But he wants to call out something else, too.

“That’s part of their job,” he says. “Like, it’s an impressive part of their job, but it is part of the job nevertheless. Any good actor knows that in order to transform themselves into a character, they not only need to be mentally there, they need to be prepared and do research, but they also need to facilitate the physical transformation.”

What makes his cast in The Apprentice special, he argues, is that they put that transformation at the service of a film that was almost guaranteed to earn them brickbats rather than bouquets.

“I think we were always going to be seen as either doing too much to humanise Trump or doing too little to humanise Trump, doing too much to explain or doing too little,” says Iranian-born, Denmark-based Abbasi. “This is not one of those cool drama parts where you get the Academy Award nomination. I mean, I hope it will be. But I’m saying that is also part of the actors’ equation – that usually they choose things strategically. And I think these guys really cared about art, they really cared about the story, without caring so much about the aftermath and all the negativity they would have to deal with.”

Jeremy Strong, left, as Roy Cohn, the lawyer who takes a young Donald Trump (Sebastian Stan) under his wing and grooms him.Credit: Madman

The Apprentice starts in the mid-1970s, with New York at its lowest ebb, riddled with crime and violence, crippled by debt. Young Donald is collecting rent for his father Fred (Martin Donovan), a brute of a man. Donald is a callow, cowering youth who just wants his daddy to take him seriously. The old man is a monster; Donald’s older brother Freddy (Charlie Carrick), an airline pilot, is so shattered by his relentless criticism that he’s on a fast track to suicide by bottle.

One night, Donald crosses paths with Roy, a hyper-aggressive litigator, in a private club in Manhattan, where he’s trying – with little success – to impress his date. Cohn spots him, waves him over to his table, tells him he’s handsome (Cohn is also aggressively homosexual, though Trump is so unworldly he doesn’t pick it up), and offers the first intimation of an entree to the world of power and influence that the young Donald is desperate to be part of. The date is forgotten, the apprenticeship begun.

By the time the film ends, Trump is firmly established as the self-made billionaire real estate developer of his own mythologising, passing off Cohn’s three rules for success as his own, the foundation on which his Art of the Deal manifesto is built. The apprentice has learnt his master’s rules, and the master is cast aside.

The central thesis is that Cohn was a brutal operator who taught Trump everything he knew. The Apprentice has, with good reason, been dubbed a super-villain origin story. And yet, in its early stages at least, it has real empathy for the man who would eventually lie, cheat and manipulate his way to the top.

For some observers, a little sympathy for the devil will be too much. But Abbasi insists he’s just trying to paint a picture of a character, not take sides.

“I think the problem we’re facing is it’s difficult to deal with the movie as a movie,” he says of the reception to The Apprentice since its debut at the Cannes Film Festival in May.

“The conversation comes around to, ‘Do you think Trump is a good guy or a bad guy, do you think he’s going to win the election, do you think he deserves it?’ And there’s very little conversation about the movie itself, actually. And this is what I’m up against a little bit.

“I’m trying to pinpoint that this is not a history lesson, these are conscious choices to show you certain characters, very colourful characters, in certain colourful environments. It’s a character journey. But there seems to be a minefield around Donald, and you step in and you blow up. It doesn’t matter what your intentions are. And I think that is not a healthy way of looking at human beings, whether it’s him, whether it’s Hitler, whether it’s my mom, it doesn’t matter. People are people. Human beings are human beings. They can be truly flawed. They can be despicable. They can have a lot of problems. Talking about someone doesn’t mean you approve of them, it doesn’t mean they’re forgiven.”

There is one key scene in The Apprentice, though, that belies the neutrality to which Abbasi is seemingly aspiring – though arguably it too is merely a representation of character. It is Trump’s alleged rape of his wife Ivana (Maria Bakalova).

Drawn from Ivana’s sworn testimony delivered during divorce proceedings in 1990 and later cited in Harry Hurt’s biography Lost Tycoon: The Many Lives of Donald J. Trump (the affidavit itself was sealed, and later lost), the scene is brutal and shocking – though not as bad as it might have been. Trump has denied he raped Ivana.

“The deposition says he pulled her hair out, among other things,” says Abbasi. He didn’t include that because, he says, “there is a limit to how graphic and how crazy I want this to be, how uncomfortable I want the audience to feel. As a filmmaker, I also thought, ‘What is the point of this scene?’ This is not a movie about rapists; the climax of the movie is not there.”

Maria Bakalova as Ivana and Sebastian Stan as Donald Trump.Credit: Pief Weyman/Briarcliff Entertainment

Perhaps not. But it is the point at which the film depicts Trump passing irredeemably to the dark side. His avarice rules all. He takes what he wants, and feels utterly justified in doing so. It is in some respects the keystone in the edifice of Trump’s towering ego and ambition.

The real Trump has repeatedly denied this and the many other allegations of sexual assault and misconduct that have been levelled against him.

What complicates matters is that just as Hurt’s book was about to go to print in 1993, Trump’s lawyers provided a statement from Ivana, which the publisher included as “Notice to Reader” on the first page of the book, in which she claimed she didn’t want her use of the word rape “to be interpreted in a literal or criminal sense”. The publisher added, however, that this new statement “does not contradict or invalidate any information contained in this book”.

Ivana, who died in 2022, was at that time in the midst of protracted divorce proceedings from her then husband. She eventually received a settlement of $US14 million, plus a mansion and use of the Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida for one month each year.

Trump’s lawyers have, of course, been in touch over this scene in The Apprentice. “There have been many, many legal discussions. It passed I don’t know how many legal filters,” says Abbasi. Still, he adds, “we got a cease and desist letter in Cannes threatening us with legal action, and we’re anticipating another round when the movie comes out in the US on October 11″.

Assuming there is no injunction against the release, what does he want people to take from his character study when (if) they see it?

“As much as the movie is about Roy and Donald’s relationship, which is a key relationship in the making of Donald Trump as the person we know today, it’s also about the US political system, the judiciary system,” he says.

“There is an inherent corruption and space for manipulation in the system. This whole notion that Democrats are so much better and Republicans are evil, or vice versa, is a really funny sort of theatre, in a way. It’s not about liberal versus conservative. It’s about winning.

“There is this amazing quote from Kurt Vonnegut,” he adds. “‘There are two political systems in the United States, winners and losers.’ And I think that’s ultimately what the movie is about.”

The Apprentice is in cinemas from October 10.

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