The team of the film ‘The Apprentice’, faced with Trump’s threat to sue them: “We will show it wherever they want” | Culture

Just because of the echoes they have received, Donald Trump’s campaign team has combusted because of the portrait that is made of him in The Apprentice, Ali Abbasi’s film (Border, Holy Spider) which was screened yesterday in the Cannes festival competition and which describes Trump’s rise in real estate business, catapulted by pressure from his father and his friendship with lawyer Roy Cohn. However, after the press conference this morning The Apprentice, The feeling that remains is that the film’s creators are absolutely calm.

“We will file a lawsuit to address the blatantly false claims of these fake filmmakers,” Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung said yesterday. in a statement to Variety. “This garbage is pure fiction that sensationalizes long-debunked lies. “This is electoral interference by Hollywood elites, who know that President Trump will retake the White House and defeat his preferred candidate because nothing they have done has worked.” It refers to the sequence in which Donald Trump rapes his wife Ivana, a fact that she recounted in her divorce suit. Years later, Ivana, who died in 2022, assured that she did not want her words to be interpreted in a literal or criminal sense.

Before the press, the Iranian-Danish Abbasi, in his third participation in Cannes, the producers, the screenwriter, Gabriel Sherman, and the actors Sebastian Stan (who plays the former president), Maria Bakalova (who plays his then wife) and Martin Donovan (putting a face on the Trump patriarch) have taken that threat quite relaxed. “Everyone talks about Trump suing a lot of people, even though they don’t comment on his success rate, you know?” Abbasi explained. Furthermore, he offered to meet with Trump and screen the film for him: “I don’t necessarily think this is a movie he doesn’t like. I don’t think he likes it either. Yes, he would be surprised. And as I said before, I would offer to go meet him wherever he wants and talk about the context of the film, have a talk before and after the screening.” And already launched, he noted: “If I were him, I would be sitting in New Jersey, Florida, New York, or wherever I am now, and I would think: ‘Oh, this crazy Iranian and some liberal buzzards in Cannes got together and made this movie and it’s screwed.” A phrase that Abbasi accompanied with a shrug of his shoulders.

When asked at the conference about a possible release date for The Apprentice, which has not yet achieved distribution in the United States, Abbasi continued with the same tone: “We have a promotional event called the American presidential election that will help us with the film. The second debate will be on September 15, something like that, so I would say that’s a good launch date.”

From the cast, only Jeremy Strong was missing (Succession), who has not been able to travel to Cannes because he is in New York representing An enemy of the people, by Ibsen. Strong plays Cohn, the man who sent the Rosenbergs to the electric chair for alleged espionage, was Senator McCarthy’s right-hand man in the witch hunt, and who, after leading a double life, died of AIDS in 1986. Cohn In the film, he is the teacher who teaches Trump to always lie, to deny everything, to consider that every battle ends with his victory. Over time, well indoctrinated by the teacher, Trump would end up betraying him. Abbasi has read a statement from Strong sent by WhatsApp: “An enemy of the people is a phrase that has been used by Stalin, Mao, Goebbels and, most recently, Donald Trump when he denounced the free press and called out CNN, NBC, ABC, CBS News or The New York Times ‘fake news media’. “That is an enemy of the people.”

Abbasi and Stan defended that on screen we see a human being, with his lies and his successes, and the screenwriter insisted that the main facts shown are true, such as the rape of Ivana Trump, her liposuction and facelift operation, or His beginnings collecting rent house by house. “We like it when he says it comes from Hollywood liberals,” commented one of the producers, “because we have nothing to do with Hollywood.” And Trump’s team knows this, because a friend of his, Dan Snyder, has partially financed The Apprentice.

Dan Snyder is a billionaire, former owner of the Washington Commanders, an American football team, who has invested money in The Apprentice. According to Variety, Snyder — who donated $1 million to Trump’s 2016 campaign and another $100,000 to the 2020 campaign — invested money in the film through the company Kinematics because he thought it would be a flattering portrait of the former president. When he saw a first montage in February, he exploded, and warned Trump. Snyder has involved his lawyers in his effort to stop the film, but Kinematics president Emanuel Núñez clarified, days before Cannes, that Snyder has no power “in the creative and commercial decisions that involve The Apprentice.” By the way, Snyder, staying on his yacht, is a regular at Cannes.

And yet, Abassi insisted that the center The Apprentice was not his main character: “This is not a movie about Donald Trump. This is a movie about a system, and the way the system works, the system is built, and how energy runs through the system. We tell how Roy Cohn was an expert in using the system,” and everything that Donald Trump ultimately learned from him.

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