Ali Abbasi, the critically acclaimed director of the new film The Apprentice, faced questions from the right and left when he decided to take on a project about the making of Donald Trump and his relationship with Roy Cohn. Would he demonize Trump or glorify him? Abbasi dismissed both simplicity and neat ideological boxes, making the film as a “humanist project,” meant to capture and dramatize the origin story of a polarizing political persona.
On this week’s episode of Mediaite’s Press Club, Abbasi discussed the making of the film, which was written by Vanity Fair correspondent Gabriel Sherman, and the extraordinary fight to get it released. The Apprentice focuses on the relationship between a young Donald Trump (Sebastian Stan), trying to make it in 1970s New York as the scion of a real estate developer, and Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong), the ruthless prosecutor and political fixer who taught Trump how to wage war: shamelessly, and ideally in the press.
“Roy had an intuitive understanding of the U.S. political, legal, and media system,” Abbasi told Mediaite editor in chief Aidan McLaughlin. “He saw all this together as one ecosystem that you could manipulate back and forth. And we see this with Trump today.”
Abbasi explained why the movie, which Sherman first wrote in 2017, took years to be made and released. “Nobody wanted to touch anything that had to do anything with Trump after January 6th,” he said. “A media conglomerate would say, okay, if he becomes
The timing of the 2024 election also played a role in scaring off major Hollywood studios and streamers.
“During the time we were producing the movie, Mr. Trump went from a former disgraced president that people laughed at, to on his way to becoming the most powerful person on earth again,” Abbasi said. “And that scared a lot of people.”
And although he lives in Copenhagen, Abbasi is studied in the American qualities of this story. “I think what is uniquely American about this is the social Darwinism that allows people to go up, or sink to the bottom, and there’s not much in the middle. This is about the system itself, not only a system of who wins the elections, but one where the whole power structure favors people like [Trump], favors people like Roy Cohn. It catapults them.”
Abbasi also spoke about billionaire Trump donor Dan Snyder pulling out of the film after objecting to its depiction of Trump, his decision to include the alleged sexual assault of Trump’s ex-wife Ivana Trump (which Trump denies and Ivana has recanted), and why he thinks Trump will “one-hundred percent” see the film, which is in theaters now.
Mediaite’s Press Club airs in full Saturdays at 10 a.m. on
How did you get involved with this movie?
Back in 2018, I was trying to get into the US to show my movie at the time, Border, which was a Swedish movie. And it was exceedingly difficult because I still had my Iranian passport, so it took me a long while. And some congresspeople wrote me letters, it became almost a political campaign to get me in the country.
Because of Trump’s travel ban?
That’s right. And once I got in, I remember I was at Telluride Film Festival, and I was talking to Gabe Sherman’s manager, who was friends with my manager that I started working with. And he goes, I love this Trump movie. Do you want to do a Donald Trump movie? And then I read the script and met with Gabe. I think the interesting thing about that, I was like, this guy has all the material and motivation to go after Trump as a so-called liberal, as someone who conservatives would label as liberal, but then, I saw that he actually wants to understand this guy. He wants to understand how he became the person he became. And it’s about human beings, and about the complexity of human beings. And that became interesting to me,
That’s what I like about this movie. It’s not a conventional biopic about Trump, and it also doesn’t fit neatly into an ideological box. It’s not a tacky anti-Trump screed, it’s not a pro-Trump propaganda piece. It’s a poignant and thoughtful examination of this man and his origin story. And it’s done in a really stylish and compelling way and tells, I think, the truth about the the persona that Trump created – the man that we know today. From your view, was that the idea of the movie from the outset?
Yeah, it was a humanist project in a way. And my friends and the left, the liberal side, they were like, aren’t you afraid that you’ll give him too much humanity, or show him in good light, show him as a human being that has feelings and whatnot? I’m like, I don’t think you ever should be afraid of that. You should be afraid of the other way around, because all the problems we have, all the reasons that people are being shot at, all sorts of very inflammatory rhetoric, it’s because we are dehumanizing people who disagree with us. And this was the other way around.
Also, because these characters, Donald, Roy Cohn, Ivana, these are larger than
You want the viewer to be smart enough to recognize that these people are not black and white. They’re complex. You have experience doing this, working with a character that a lot of people find loathsome, in Holy Spider, which is a brilliant movie. It’s about a serial killer, and there are scenes where the serial killer is interacting with his family, and being loving towards his children and his wife. And you could argue that’s humanizing someone who’s done an enormous amount of evil.
Look, I’m interested in the other. And I’m not only interested in the other, but I’m also interested in how the other looks at me, or at us, or whatever our tribe would be. Because without the other, you can’t define yourself. You always need that other person, the other side. And I think for me, what becomes interesting is when I have empathy or sympathy for the other. Even if I know that they are very wrong in certain things, even if they’re very flawed, that’s where there is a moral complexity, a character complexity worth talking
There’s something endearing about Trump at the beginning of the movie because he’s this young guy in New York trying to make it. And he’s soft-spoken, he’s not the brash figure we know later on. Did you get complaints after people had seen the movie that you humanized him too much?
It’s funny, we’ve been between a rock and a hard place from the beginning. Because I remember when we were talking to people in Hollywood about trying to crew up, casting, all sorts of things, there were people who were just very hesitant to get involved in the project because they thought, why would you want to give Donald Trump more airtime? Why would you want to give him more oxygen? Why would you want to be fair and balanced? This is a guy who doesn’t deserve to get fair and balanced. And then on the other hand, you have the people who are like, from the beginning, this is a crazy Iranian-Danish, blah, blah, blah, getting money from foreign governments, and trying to take our president. So there is
And it’s actually pretty interesting because now, both of these people, I’ve been hearing it from both sides, my Democratic friends, my Republican friends, Roger Stone, random people that don’t necessarily align in any way other than they have a relationship in the Trump orbit, they go in, and they all tell me the same thing. They’re surprised. And they find it interesting and they find it accurate, not that accuracy is a virtue necessary for movies. But I think there is a moral obligation here because this guy has so much polarization. So I think accuracy, at this particular moment, is a good base for a movie.
It helps that a journalist wrote the script. Roy Cohn is a fascinating character. Jeremy Strong, who played Roy Cohn, described the character as “living in a Lynchian hellscape, a sort of Francis Bacon meets garish, vaudeville portrait of the American psyche.” I thought that was spot on.
Yeah, I think it’s very interesting that one aspect of that character is Roy was famously closeted gay. And there’s this tradition of these characters like Liberace, people who everyone knows they’re gay and they deny it throughout their life. So it’s almost like it was a subgenre of a certain way of being gay. So instead of going there, we try to again, depict his humanity, but also depict the complexity
His complexities and his contradictions are fascinating because he’s at times this loathsome character, but he’s also pitiful. What did you learn about the relationship between Roy Cohn and Donald Trump when you were filming this?
We were discussing it, Gabe and I. I think they met each other when Don was looking for a lawyer to help them with the Department of Justice case against the whole Trump organization, his dad’s real estate empire, because they didn’t want to rent out to black people. They brought a civil rights case against them, which actually looked very solid. And everyone said, you have to settle with the government, you have to take the fine and whatnot. Except Roy. Roy says you have to countersue them, you’ve got to fuck them over. And that’s what he did. And they settle out
But then how it became so close, if you look at Roy Cohn’s type, the kind of guys he was attracted to, they were tall, they were blond, they looked a little bit innocent, Aryan-looking. It was exactly Donald Trump. Does that mean that they were lovers? I don’t really think so. But I do think that there was attraction to start with, that turned into friendship, that turned into mentorship. Because I think Roy saw something in him that he recognized, this naive relentlessness, bordering on shamelessness, going towards shamelessness, that he recognized from himself.
There’s a sequence towards the end of the film when you cut between the memorial service for Roy Cohn, and Trump on the operating table getting liposuction and a scalp reduction surgery. I thought it captured the transition of this man from wide-eyed mentee of Roy Cohn, to coldblooded businessman and media figure. What were you trying to say there?
There is a little bit of a Frankenstein theme in the movie. It’s not even that subtle.
The surgery table really hammers that home.
In a way, the movie ends where Donald Trump, the political person, begins. And I always felt that, yes, he was doing all sorts of things, but what he really learned from Roy was how to deal with media
And I don’t think people realize how much Roy Cohn had a real role in forming Donald Trump. So much of what we see today has its roots in what Roy Cohn taught him.
And what was so interesting with Roy is that he had an intuitive understanding of the U.S. political and legal and media system, and saw all this together as one ecosystem that you could manipulate back and forth. And he knew all the loopholes and he also knew how you can marry your personal interests to a bigger ideology. And this is something I think that you can see. Roy was a person, a political operative who would go to Republican donor parties in leather pants and a bow tie. At the same time, he was a patriot. And this is not to deny that he was a patriot, but he was a patriot of a certain sort. A patriot that never paid taxes, a patriot that had gay porn cinemas, a patriot that had a parking lot scheme going on.
And back to Mr. Trump, the idea that if
It’s a very transactional way of looking at America.
It’s how you can put your petty interests together into a bigger ideological system.
Gabe Sherman first wrote this script in 2017. It is now October 2024 and the movie is coming out, which even in the slow-working world of Hollywood is a long time. Why did this movie take so long to come out?
Gabe had to write his drafts. I had to write my drafts. Then we had to go through the financing. Then we had to change that, and we had to go through the financing again. Then that fell through after January 6th because, at that time, we could have just as well sold plutonium cookies on the street.
Why after January 6 was it so hard to sell this movie?
Because nobody wanted to touch anything that had to
Which is crazy because it’s the biggest story in the world. You would think that a movie about at least his origin story would have been appealing.
But here’s the thing. That logic is accurate logic, but that doesn’t accurately reflect the corporate logic of Hollywood, because the logic of this business is even if you made money on that one movie, even though I think this is the most commercial movie I’ve ever done, the cost of alienating all the people who would buy your toilet paper and ice cream, all the other stuff you’re selling online, or your other movies, that cost is far bigger.
Do you think that studio heads and streamers were scared about the possibility that Trump would get elected a second time? He’s known to be a little bit retributive.
Sure. And this is something they told me. Some of these people I know personally, they privately told me, look, we loved the movie. We think it’s entertaining. We actually think it’s nonpartisan and impartial. But we also think that the board, which is a telecom company or media conglomerate or whatever it is, that it’s a tough sell. Because these guys would say, okay, if he becomes president, he can use trade rules and the IRS and everything, weaponize it against us. And he’s done that before. I do
Dan Snyder, billionaire Republican donor, his son-in-law was a producer but that fell apart. What happened there? Why was he involved in the first place and how did that come to fall apart?
I haven’t met or communicated with Mr. Snyder myself.
Have you been on his boat?
I was.
Is it true that there’s an IMAX theater on his yacht?
Yes there is. And we were supposed to have our big party on that boat, and then we went to being persona non grata. I was thinking maybe I should swim over from the shore, just show up with a memory stick, and say, here you go, here’s your investment. But I think what happened was, Mark, at the time, I think he was genuinely interested in the project. He was getting funding from his father-in-law, so I don’t think that Snyder knew exactly what was going on and what movies he was going to do. And then he chose this. I think, to their credit, he was the person that wanted to take the chance not a lot of other people
But during the time we were producing the movie, Mr. Trump went from a former disgraced president that people laughed at, to on his way to becoming the most powerful person on earth again. And that scared a lot of people. And allegedly Dan Snyder saw a cut of the movie and really hated it and got scared. That’s what I heard. And then they came back to us and they said, you have to balance this. Meaning you have to take some of these scenes out that would piss him off. And that would have him file a lawsuit.
And that’s where the problem was. Because they read the script multiple times, there was a lot of legal vetting. This kind of project would not get made just like that. So at that point, I felt like this would amount to us doing a retouched version of Mr. Trump’s story. And I think that would have been dangerous in an election year. I didn’t know at the time that our release date would be so close to the election. But I would have guessed that, okay, if we want to premiere in Cannes, that at some point right before, right after the election, we would release it. And I felt like history would judge us. I really felt that. So therefore, we fought and we had to buy them out.
One of the most scandalous scenes in the
So the journalistic evidence around that is that it’s based on a deposition under oath in court, which she later reiterated in her memoir in detail, even going much further than what we show in the movie, saying that he pulled her hair out and all these things. And then at the end of that, there is a disclaimer which says, well, I know I said he raped me, but I didn’t mean rape in the literal criminal sense. Now, that sounds to me that someone’s lawyers came and really pushed you.
Also, because Mr. Trump was convicted of sexual assault in civil court. And he talked about grabbing by the pussy. And last week he was talking about, I can go backstage and kiss whoever I want. So this is not a personality trait that comes out of thin air. And I don’t think this is a movie about sexual assault. As much as I don’t mind talking about it, I don’t think this is the climax of the movie.
The point of the movie is not that he’s a rapist. The point of the movie is that he also raped his wife as he had the friendship with Roy Cohn, as he
What was it like working with Sebastian Stan and Jeremy Strong, the two leads of this movie? They wore a lot of prosthetics, no?
Sebastian had some pieces. I’ve done worse. I’ve done more prosthetics. So if you ask me, I’ll say, okay, that’s medium. Jeremy really wanted this Roy sunken eyelid thing. So we had to tape the eyelids and then put something on top of it so that you don’t see it. It was funny because someone asked him the other day on a Q&A, you’re not blinking in the movie. And he was like, yeah, I can’t really.
Roy Cohn’s eyes are an important part it.
Absolutely. They were a joy to work with. I think they were professional. They had their own firm opinions. Jeremy and I, we fought for a few weeks over one scar on Roy’s nose. Because historically, Roy had this thing on his nose that they tried to remove when he was a teenager and they did a really bad job. So he had a big scar on his nose. And I wanted to recreate that according to historical fact, and he felt that would demonize him. It would make him too much of a villain. We had
Jeremy Strong does not seem like a pushover when it comes to those sorts of artistic decisions.
He certainly is not a pushover. None of them are. But that being said, they have their own very strong will and artistic integrity, but they’re also open. And this movie, the way we work, the way I work, would be impossible without that, because I would put them in situations that they are not prepared for so that they can be surprised, so we can keep the material fresh. And they also kept each other on their toes. In that way, I think it was a perfect balance between them being professional, doing their homework, having the integrity, but also being open to the game.
The Trump campaign sent a cease and desist as the movie was premiering at Cannes and getting its nice seven-minute standing ovation or whatever absurd ovation you guys got. Is that an issue for the movie? Have you heard anything more from the Trump campaign? Do you expect any more legal threats?
Something really interesting is happening right now. I have a feeling that some of these right-wing media, some of these personalities, including Mr. Trump himself, would definitely watch the movie. It’s not a question of if. It’s a question of when.
You think he’
One hundred percent. The person I have studied, he cannot not see it.
And he might not hate it.
That’s what I’m saying. This is the interesting thing. I’m hearing all these things that all this right-wing media, they were very reluctant to look at it. And now they watch it, they love it. And I don’t know, part of me is a bit concerned. But also the other part of me is happy. I did the movie, we did the movie for everyone. We didn’t do the movie for a liberal elite on the coast. We didn’t do the movie for critics.
And in fact, I have to say as a filmmaker, I had to constrain myself cinematically, because usually I want to take bigger swings with the visuals of it, be less ABC in taking the audience’s hand. This time around, I wanted to constrain myself because I wanted to reach a wider audience. And it’s interesting to see that it is actually reaching those people who initially were reluctant and bashing us. They actually watched the movie. Now they’re like, wait a minute, it’s not that bad.
You have immersed yourself in this story of Trump and how he was made. And it’s a uniquely American story.
I need to do a Trump detox after this.
I was watching the last
I think what is uniquely American about this story is not the story of someone who has ambitions, or is relentless, or wants to get something. That story is actually a quite common story. I think it’s the magnitude of things, and the social Darwinism here that allows people to go up and sink to the bottom, and there’s not much in the middle. It is like you either are a killer or you get killed. You either win everything, or you lose and have nothing.
And I think that if I was talking to my friends and I was like, if Mr. Trump was a builder in Germany, in Munich, like his grandpa, Frederick Drumpf, who was from Germany, who owned a brothel in the Yukon. If he was in Germany, he would have been a sort of good, mediocre builder, had a couple of buildings, had two Mercedes, had maybe a wife from Eastern Europe, that would have been very predictable. But it would be that. I think this build-up that you see here, it’s also possible because you have these forces, you have the very, I’m on slippery ice, but the very flawed legal system where you can weaponize the
So the system itself, which is not only a system of who wins the elections, is not Democrats versus Republicans, this is a system where the whole power structure that’s built up favors people like him, favors people like Roy Cohn. It’s not only that they find loopholes, it catapults them. And I think that is the bigger context of all this, that if you look at Fred Trump, Mr. Trump’s dad, he was a lifelong Democratic donor, Democrat. Mr. Trump himself was almost a pro-abortion Democrat. And now is an anti-abortion Republican. Roy Cohn was a Democrat. On the media side, the same guy who created MSNBC in ’92 or something, then a few years later created Fox News.
Right.
What does that tell you about the political divide, about this party line? It’s theater.