Director Ali Abbasi was caught off guard when he first read the screenplay for “The Apprentice,” his new movie about the relationship between New York City developer Donald Trump and cutthroat attorney Roy Cohn.
“I think I had the same initial reaction as a lot of people who watch the movie now, which is, I was surprised,” says Abassi, an Iranian-Danish filmmaker making his English-language debut with “The Apprentice.” “I was expecting it to be harsher or like a hit job, to be honest, and to rip him apart and tell me how despicable he is and how everything is bad about him and his family.
“And it wasn’t that,” he says of the film, which was nominated for the Palme d’Or at Cannes this year. “It was like a real genuine desire to understand him as a human being – and understand not only him but people around him.”
“The Apprentice” stars Sebastian Stan, best known for playing Bucky Barnes, the Winter Soldier, in Marvel movies, as ’70s and ’80s-era Trump. Jeremy Strong, who played Kendall Roy in HBO’s “Succession,” plays Roy Cohn, the onetime communist-hunting counsel of Sen. Joseph McCarthy turned cutthroat attorney who takes Trump under his wing. Maria Bakalova, who played Borat’s teen daughter in “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm,” plays Ivana Trump.
“The Apprentice” created controversy with its Cannes debut, primarily for a scene that depicted Trump sexually assaulting Ivana Trump, an attack she alleged in a sworn deposition during her divorce from Trump but later walked back. (Steven Cheung, a spokesman for Donald Trump, said in a statement that the film is “pure malicious defamation” that “should never see the light of day.”)
Outside of that scene, and a few that portray Trump’s vanity over weight gain and hair loss, “The Apprentice” isn’t all that controversial, telling the story of Trump as a young man with big dreams and Cohn as the fixer who helped him until Trump cast off Cohn when he was dying of AIDS.
The story takes place entirely before Trump publicly expressed any political aspirations, and that allowed Abbasi to tell a story that is more intimate and personal than many might expect.
“I think it’s almost like a Frankenstein story,” Abbasi says. “You sort of see how Roy creates him in his own image, or recreates him in his own image, and how he goes from someone who maybe does not necessarily have a lot of political ambitions, who is not necessarily well aware of politics and this intricacy of the power and media around him, to being hyper-aware of that.
“I think that transformation is really the subject of the movie,” he says. “That’s why I think it makes sense to sort of focus the movie on that transformation.
The first half being sort of the ’70s, is more organic,” Abbasi says. “It looks like film looks. We’re in New York and things are going really bad. It has, like, a little bit of a vibe of these movies – maybe reminds you of ‘Taxi Driver,’ maybe reminds you of ‘Dog Day Afternoon.’ There’s some grit and authenticity about that.
“Then you go to the ’80s, and you went from, you know, newsreels of ’70s being shot on 16 millimeter [film] to ’80s where video became cheap enough to use instead, and that gave this whole thing a sort of artificial spin.”
The story behind the man
For Stan, the first reaction to receiving Gabriel Sherman’s screenplay for “The Apprentice” was simple: Why me?
“It was just a curiosity to begin with of why I would be getting this call and not somebody else,” he says. “But then Ali Abbasi is an incredible, fearless filmmaker. I really admired his films, particularly the last one, ‘Holy Spider.’ There was a rawness and a truth to it that was undeniable. All of that was really exciting to me as it pertained to this story.”
Add to that, Abbasi’s outside perspective and Stan was in.
“I felt if there’s anybody who should tackle Donald Trump and the American Dream then it perhaps should be him,” Stan says. “In the hopes that there’s something different to be told. Because he’s not playing for the red team, he’s not playing for the blue team, he’s out there on the outside kind of looking in.
“I think we’re too far deep in the trenches to be able to see our way out of it or into it,” he says.
Stan dove into research for the role, tracking down clips and documentaries of Trump in the ’70s and ’80s, reading Trump’s book “The Art of the Deal” and other books and “a gazillion interviews that were done in that time period with the New York Times and GQ and Playboy.”
He says he came away with the story behind the man.
“The more I looked at it the more universal it was,” Stan says. “There were things about the story that seemed very universally relatable. What is capitalism? What is the American Dream? What does it really do in terms of a person? How does it affect their morals or their empathy or lack there of?”
That resulted in a portrait of a man who wasn’t always the bombastic personality Americans know from his presidential campaigns and one term, so far, in the White House. Yes, the Trump of the movie does some cruel things to Cohn and Ivana, but he’s also seen with empathy through Abbasi’s lens at times, too.
“I don’t think anything in this world is black or white,” Stan says of the nuances he and Abbasi sought to bring to the characterization. “I think we’re very selective with how we see things, good or bad, and a lot of people come from a place of what’s convenient.
“It’s easy to sit back and point the finger at the big, bad boogeyman on top of the mountain,” he says. “It’s also lazy, in my opinion, because no one’s morally above it or morally safe when it comes to a bigger thing than a person, which is an ideology, a way of thinking.
“I think the right kind of movies, the right kind of stories … don’t sit there and hand you a manuscript and a map on how you should think, but inspire you and challenge you,” Stan says. “And that’s what I think this movie is trying to do.”
The dark side of it
Bakalova, like Stan, was excited by the prospect of working with Abbasi on “The Apprentice.”
“To be completely honest, I fell in love with the idea of collaborating with Ali,” says Bakalova, who was nominated for best supporting actress Oscar for her work on the second “Borat” film. “From beginning to end, my biggest motivation was to be able to work on something with him.”
But the screenplay transported the young Bulgarian performer back to the exciting, sometimes scary world of New York City in the ’70s, and the role of Ivana, like those of Trump and Cohn, seemed larger than life.
“All three characters are way too big than normal human beings,” she says. “They’re just extra. And how do you deal with people like these three in New York in the ’70s? What does it take to have power? Because we all have heard about the American Dream. I have heard about it, and I dreamt about coming here and exploring opportunities, having the freedom to do certain things.
“But what’s the dark side of it?” Bakalova says. “I think that’s what the movie deals with. Are you willing to sacrifice your humanity, your morals, in order to achieve your goals? If you do, how is this going to make you feel? It’s bigger than just these characters, but I found myself fascinated by Ivana’s choices because she’s been, to be completely honest, way much ahead of her time.”
Ahead of her time in her outspoken desire to be the equal of her husband, Bakalova explains.
“If Donald is the Empire State Building, she wanted to be the Statue of Liberty,” Bakalova says. “She didn’t want to be his mistress. She wanted to be his master. Did she allow herself to say that? Probably not. But that’s how she wanted to be treated.”
Bakalova also dove deep into the research for her character, working with an accent coach to capture Ivana Trump’s vocal style, a base of Czech-tinged English with hints of British and New York influences, too.
“I read her biography and I read her fictional book called ‘Glamour’ – I’m not sure is that the right translation,” she says of a novel that in English was titled either “For Love Alone” or “Free To Love.” “I just found the book in an antique shop in Bulgaria, and I read it in Bulgarian.”
Their shared background as natives of Eastern European countries that once were under Soviet control also gave Bakalova insight into her character.
“Of course, Bulgaria and the Czech Republic are two different countries and they’ve been through different regimes, yet they share some kind of similar history,” Bakalova says. “Growing up in a place like these places teaches you a lot, teaches you that you can literally count on yourself only, and if you want to succeed in life, you really have to get to work.
“It doesn’t happen just like falling from the sky,” she says. “You don’t have the support of being born with the privilege of the silver spoon, and if something fails, you will still remain. It doesn’t happen like that. I find myself similar to her in that demanding, hardworking way of living, and knowing that if I stop, I’m taking a step back. so I have to continue to provoke myself and challenge myself in order to grow.”
With an open mind
Many critics have praised the performances of the three leads in the film, but in the heat of a presidential campaign that features Trump seeking a return to the White House and Vice President Kamala Harris aiming to become the country’s first woman president, will audiences want to watch a movie about a vintage version of Trump that ultimately doesn’t resemble this year’s model?
Abbasi, and Stan and Bakalova, say they hope so.
“I mean, the biggest thing we’re up against is people don’t treat this as a movie,” Abbasi says. “They treat it as a political piece for or against someone, or something that is supposed to be sort of an eye opener or change the votes.
“I think what we have going for us is the fact that every single person that talked to me after watching it said they’ve been surprised by this,” he says. “They’ve been surprised by how entertaining it is. They’ve been surprised by how well-played everything is. They’ve been surprised by the layers that are there, the sort of reimagining of New York and the ’70s and ’80s, and the texture and the music.
“So there is a lot to talk about in those terms,” Abbasi says. “But at the same time, I do understand. Here I’m interacting with the reality that is so explosive and it’s so urgent, and I’m commenting on the person, although it’s not the same person. The Mr. Trump who’s running for office now is not the person that’s the subject of our movie, but they do have overlaps.
“I do understand that,” he says. “So, yeah, I can’t just simply ask people, ‘Hey, you know, go and watch it with an open mind. And it’s not what you think.’ But I want to convey the message that you don’t need to be a Trump lover or Trump hater or political activist or whatnot, to go and watch the movie.
“It does fill some blanks for you, Abbasi says. “I think not in a historical sense, but in terms of the emotional and character and the transformational sense. I think that’s exciting. I think that proposition would be exciting for me no matter what.”
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