Trump wanted to stop the movie “The Apprentice”
Published: Thursday, Oct 10th 2024, 10:50
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"The Apprentice" by director Ali Abbasi is about the rise of Trump in the 1970s. It does not portray the politician in a good light. The team around Trump was unable to prevent a cinema release before the US election.
US presidential candidate Donald Trump's team threatened to take legal action against this film. However, it was unable to prevent "The Apprentice" from being released in cinemas before the US elections. The film by Iranian-Danish director Ali Abbasi is about the rise of Trump in the 1970s. It does not paint the politician and entrepreneur in a good light.
"The events and people depicted in this film are based on real events and people, but some events and names of real people have been fictionalized for dramaturgical reasons," it says at the beginning of the film. Only those involved know which events from "The Apprentice" actually took place.
Unscrupulousness, greed, rape
"The Apprentice" bears the same name as Trump's former reality show. The film depicts his rise to power in the New York real estate business. It tells of Trump's friendship with the lawyer Roy Cohn, who was probably once an important mentor to him but was later allegedly disowned by him.
Trump, played by Romanian-American actor Sebastian Stan, is portrayed in the film as a greedy, unscrupulous man who will go to any lengths to gain power. In the film, which is set in the 1970s and 80s, Trump is also shown raping his then wife Ivana.
In her divorce file, Ivana Trump had actually stated that she had been raped by Trump. She later stated that this was not meant literally, but rather to express that she had felt mistreated.
The movie audience also sees a Trump who has liposuction and his scalp tightened and who swallows supposed diet pills that turn out to be amphetamines. He drops his secretly gay mentor Roy Cohn, who was instrumental in his success, in the film after it becomes known that he had AIDS.
"Blatantly false claims"
Trump's spokesman Steven Cheung called the movie a pure fabrication in May and announced a lawsuit "to challenge the patently false claims of these alleged filmmakers. This garbage is pure fiction, sensationalizing lies that have long been debunked."
The US screenwriter and journalist Gabriel Sherman said in Cannes that he had based his portrayal of Trump on real events. Many producers did not think much of the film idea. In his opinion, it would not have been possible to realize the film in Hollywood. "The Apprentice" was filmed in Canada.
According to the film's portrayal, the influence that the unscrupulous lawyer Cohn had on Trump should not be underestimated. Right at the beginning, he teaches the young millionaire's son his "three rules of winning". First: attack, attack, attack. Second: Never admit anything, deny everything. Third: claim victory and never admit defeat.
The research for the film
"There is no truth. It's a construct," Cohn also tells Trump. One recognizes certain parallels to Trump's actual political style. Screenwriter Sherman conducted several interviews with Trump over the course of his journalistic career. For the film, he also spoke to sources in the White House, people close to Trump and former professional colleagues of Cohn.
"People think of Trump as this 'outrage machine,' this hateful, divisive figure, and in many ways he's like an actor playing a role - but he's been playing it for so long that it's become his identity," Sherman says.
However, "The Apprentice" does not portray the young Trump without empathy. Actor Sebastian Stan, who can imitate Trump's facial expressions, such as his pursed lips, amazingly well, portrays him as an ambitious but also insecure man who longed for confirmation and recognition from his father and those around him.
Cohn, embodied by Jeremy Strong ("Succession") in a diabolically expressionless way, first creates Trump's later persona in the film. And then loses control of his creation, which takes on a gruesome life of its own.
For a long time, it was not clear when the film would be released in the USA. The major film studios did not want to distribute the film. In the end, a US distributor was found in Briarcliff Entertainment and the theatrical release was scheduled a week earlier than in Switzerland, where it opens on October 17.
It will be interesting to see what impact the movie will have on the remainder of the US election campaign leading up to the November 5 election. Whether it will have any impact at all. In any case, Abbasi has succeeded in creating a very entertaining piece of fiction with "The Apprentice", which makes you want to find out more about a special chapter in Trump's life.
©Keystone/SDA
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