Ali Abbasi might not be the obvious choice to tackle a biopic of Donald Trump. The Tehran-born filmmaker made the Danish horror drama Shelley (2016), Swedish supernatural fable Border (2018) and Iranian serial-killer thriller Holy Spider (2022) – all unfolding far away from the hotbed of American politics.
Yet in his first English-language feature film, Abbasi bracingly tells the origin story of Trump as the ruthless force we know today. Written by journalist-author Gabriel Sherman, The Apprentice stars Sebastian Stan as a young Trump, Succession star Jeremy Strong as lawyer-turned-fixer Roy Cohn and Borat Subsequent Moviefilm breakout Maria Bakalova as Trump’s first wife, Ivana. Opening with a disco soundtrack and grainy shots of Times Square, Abbasi immediately echoes the street-level spark of 1970s and ’80s tabloid journalism.
Needless to say, there’s a lot going on in the movie. Having made his name in the 1950s assisting politician Joseph McCarthy at the height of America’s Second Red Scare, Cohn takes a young Trump under his wing and proceeds to mould him into his own influence-obsessed image of power. As the pair plot to push through the construction of Trump Tower, despite a crowded field of obstacles, the student soon surpasses the master in sheer treachery.
Ahead of the film’s Australian debut, Broadsheet chats to Abbasi about the film’s ongoing controversies and some of his more notable creative decisions over Zoom.
Hi Ali! The Trump team has filed cease-and-desist lawsuits against the movie. Were you ever worried that people might not be able to see it?
It’s like crewing up a pirate ship. You get into the harbour and hoist your flag, and then nobody shows up. We’ve tried to make the movie since 2018, and it has collapsed a few times, including right after January 6 [2021]. A few times at least, I did have the sense that this was not going to get made.
But once we actually did make the movie, it’s been crazy that we’ve gotten into trouble. I flew to Telluride Film Festival [in late August] not knowing if I could show the movie or not. And that’s not fun. I can laugh about it in hindsight, but when you’ve spent so many years on something and it ends up in a vacuum, that’s pretty brutal. So I’m really, really happy that it’s coming out.
Its subtitle is “An American horror story”, and one scene in particular has notes of Frankenstein. Do you see this as a horror movie?
Look, I’m not right-wing [or a] populist conservative. So I see Donald and Roy as the Other. It’s like if I did a movie about Kim Jong Un, who I have huge ideological differences with. Or [the serial killer] in Holy Spider or the trolls in Border. I’m interested in investigating the other – but also seeing ourselves from the other’s perspective. I think that’s a really transformative, cathartic part of moviemaking, if you genuinely commit to the other side.
Metaphorically, you can always call them monsters. But you have to be careful when you use that dehumanising language, because that’s what he’s doing to his opponents. There’s a long tradition of that. There’s a straight line, you can argue, from Joseph McCarthy and Roy Cohn to Richard Nixon [and beyond]. This is their modus operandi.
It’s horror in the way that the story of human existence can be horrific: the wasted potential of humans. And it’s equally a tragedy, really. As in the movie, this guy was a young guy with a lot of drive. I’m not saying he was lovely, but I don’t think he was a psychopath. And then going through this Social Darwinism of, ‘If you don’t kill, you’re gonna get killed’, that’s how it’s created.
He’s so green and baby-faced at the start of the movie. And by the end, he’s so calcified. You can see what he gives up to “win”.
If you look at archival footage of Donald Trump and follow his development, you can see that transformation physically. He goes from this innocent-looking young guy to someone who really looks the part of a New York mogul celebrity-sleaze.
As Sebastian Stan plays him, he very gradually develops the tics we know so well today. He starts adding certain phrasing or mannerisms that build into the composite we have now.
If you look at interviews from the ’70s, you can recognise a Queens/Brooklyn accent and certain speech patterns. But a lot of things you associate with him and the way he talks now has developed over time. We tried to keep that realism. But those mannerisms are something you associate with the person he is today, [not] the person he was then. Our story is not really the story of Donald Trump, the president. But by the end of the movie, the Trump as we know him starts.
The movie starts with the conception of Trump Tower and ends with the conception of the book The Art of the Deal. Did you always want to focus on that period?
Gabe [Sherman], who wrote the first version of the script, envisioned it with the story closing after the opening of Trump Tower. That was his arc. And I thought the whole casino side [in Atlantic City] – Trump the gambler – is a very important aspect of his character. That’s where you really see him in earnest as he is now: being ruthless, gaming society and running this Ponzi scheme in a way. Borrowing money from one project to pay the debt of the other project. So that whole thing was added.
But the arc of the characters has always been the same: the protégé who overtakes the master and becomes better at this game. That is the core of the movie.
You shoot it in this verité style, with handheld cameras and hard zooms. Why did you want to capture it that way?
Because we were very inspired by the newsreels and archival footage from the ’70s or ’80s, we wanted to incorporate those in the texture of the movie. It was one cameraman and reporter in the ’70s. They didn’t have time to go do coverage. They’d run into a room, find a place and start shooting. That immediacy and authenticity, I thought, was a good counterbalance to the stiffness and the dustiness that you usually have in biopics. Biopics are really my least favourite genre.
It’s also bringing that rawness that’s in the characters and story of New York in the ’70s, which was a completely apocalyptic place to be. Even in the ’80s, the yuppie period was like a bubble in the middle of destruction. So I thought that texture – the punk-rock attitude – needs to rhyme well with the place and the characters.
The Apprentice opens in Australian cinemas on Oct 3.
