“The Apprentice” director Ali Abbasi has responded to the Trump campaign’s threat to sue over the movie, which premiered at Cannes Film Festival on Monday night.
“Everybody talks about him suing a lot of people — they don’t talk about his success rate though, you know?” Abbasi said. He even offered to meet with Trump and screen the movie for him, saying, “I don’t necessarily think that this is a movie he would dislike.”
Abbasi continued, “I don’t necessarily think he would like it. I think he would be surprised, you know? And like I’ve said before, I would offer to go and meet him wherever he wants and talk about the context of the movie, have a screening and have a chat afterwards, if that’s interesting to anyone at the Trump campaign.”
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Trump’s 2024 campaign put out a lengthy statement Monday night calling the film “garbage” and “pure fiction.”
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“We will be filing a lawsuit to address the blatantly false assertions from these pretend filmmakers,” the Trump campaign’s chief spokesperson Steven Cheung said in a statement to Variety. “This garbage is pure fiction which sensationalizes lies that have been long debunked. As with the illegal Biden Trials, this is election interference by Hollywood elites, who know that President Trump will retake the White House and beat their candidate of choice because nothing they have done has worked.”
Asked about a potential release date for the film, which has not yet found U.S. distribution, Abbasi said: “We have a promotional event coming up called U.S. Election that is going to help us with the movie. The second debate is going to be Sept. 15, something like that, so that’s a good release date I would say.”
Stan embodies the real estate tycoon turned president in Ali Abbasi’s film, alongside Jeremy Strong as his lawyer and mentor Roy Cohn. “The Apprentice” does not flinch away from putting Trump in a harsh light, including a scene that shows him raping his first wife, Ivana.
At its Cannes premiere on Monday night, “The Apprentice” received an eight-minute standing ovation as Abbasi made an impassioned speech. “There is no nice metaphorical way to deal with fascism,” the director said. “It’s time to make movies relevant. It’s time to make movies political again.”
Though Strong was not present at the premiere or press conference due to starring in Broadway’s “An Enemy of the People,” he sent along a message that Abbasi read aloud at the press conference.
“‘An Enemy of the People’ is a phrase that has been used by Stalin, Mao, Goebbels and, most recently, by Donald Trump when he denounced the free press and called CNN, NBC, ABC, CBS News, the New York Times ‘fake news media.’ An enemy of the people,” Strong wrote. “We’re living in a world where truth is unresolved. That assault on truth, in many ways, [with Trump’s] apprenticeship under Roy Cohn. Cohn was called an assault specialist by the National Law Journal. We are experiencing Roy Cohn’s long, dark shadow — his legacy of lies, of outright denialism, of manipulation, of a grand disregard for truth.”
Before its premiere, “The Apprentice” had already been the subject of great controversy, with a billionaire investor in the movie — who thought it would be a more flattering portrait — already putting a legal team together to try and get it recut.