The Apprentice director says he was surprised by Trump's condemnation of the film
‘I was expecting a thank you letter or something like that,’ Ali Abbasi says in a Q interview
Ali Abbasi is no stranger to controversy. In 2022, the Iranian-Danish filmmaker faced severe backlash from the Iranian government for his serial killer drama Holy Spider. Now, he's ruffled the feathers of former U.S. president Donald Trump with his new biopic, The Apprentice.
The film follows a much-younger Trump (Sebastian Stan) as he builds his real estate business in New York City under the mentorship of the infamous lawyer and political fixer Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong). While there's no evidence that the former president has seen Abbasi's film, he has threatened to take legal action against its producers, describing the project as "fake and classless" and a "politically disgusting hatchet job." But Abbasi doesn't see what the big deal is.
"I never thought that the movie was controversial," the director tells Q's Tom Power in an interview. "There's no information in our movie that is not readily available out there…. We're not coming with new dirt or a new angle."
While the film is billed as "an American horror story" on posters and in other marketing materials, Abbasi doesn't agree with that tagline. He sees The Apprentice as a tragedy that cautions against the dark side of power.
"It's a tragedy of missed opportunities and missed potential," Abbasi says. "If the reality is not working for you, then you manufacture the reality that is working for you; you manufacture your own truth or reality. In that process of gaining power, [Trump] loses his humanity. And that's where the tragedy is, I think."
Reactions to the film have been critical on both sides of the political spectrum, with some calling it a biased takedown of Trump and others saying it's too sympathetic. As for the former president's comments, Abbasi says his reaction surprised him. The director expected Trump to be grateful for the portrayal.
"It's very unpleasant and funny at the same time," Abbasi says about Trump's comments. "I have to say, I don't understand why he's so angry…. [We] depict him in a human way, a complex way with a lot of nuances, a lot of care. So I think I was expecting a thank you letter or something like that."
Abbasi thinks Trump would feel differently if he actually watched the film. "I think the person he has become now is very different from the person he was when he was young," he says. "That is the whole point of the movie, that transformation. So the person who he was might have appreciated it even more. The person who he is now probably thinks anything that is not a praise is an attack."
Earlier this month, The Apprentice hit theatres across the U.S. and Canada, but its journey to the big screen hasn't been straightforward. Variety reported that the Trump biopic will not be released in the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait, possibly for political reasons.
"I'm hurt and I'm disappointed," Abbasi says about the decisions and threats to ban the film in some countries. "I think there's a censorship epidemic going on in the world … [and] the time of censorship being the gatekeeper is over, so it doesn't make sense."
With the U.S. election only two weeks away, some have wondered if Abbasi will make another Trump film down the road. But he says that's not going to happen.
"I don't think this is a Donald Trump movie either, actually," he says. "I think this is about that relationship between him and Roy Cohn. It's really about the transformation he goes through…. He is both a product and a symbol of a broken reality that we are in — a kind of reality where you don't really know what's real, what's not, what's true, what's not, what's fake, what's not — and that is intellectually interesting, but that doesn't have to do with Mr. Trump as a person."
The full interview with Ali Abbasi is available on our podcast, Q with Tom Power. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
Interview with Ali Abbasi produced by Catherine Stockhausen.
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