Following the announcement that the former US president’s campaign will sue the filmmakers for making “blatantly false assertions,” Ali Abbasi, the director of The Apprentice, stated he would like Donald Trump to see his Cannes Competition selection.
“I don’t think this is a movie he would dislike,” Abbasi said on Tuesday at a press conference for Cannes. “I believe he would be taken aback. I would offer to go see him, have a screening, and then have a discussion about the film.
The genesis narrative, which takes place in the 1970s and revolves around Trump’s relationship with his infamous fixer Roy Cohn, was dubbed “pure fiction which sensationalises lies that have been long debunked” by Trump’s team.
In one scene, Sebastian Stan’s character Trump is shown raping Maria Bakalova’s character Ivana, his ex-wife. When the couple filed for divorce a year later, Ivana Trump still referred to the 1989 event as rape. She stated a few years later that she didn’t want her remarks to be taken literally or in a criminal sense. In 2022, she passed away.
“Everyone is talking about [Trump] suing a lot of people,” said the Danish-Iranian director, whose works include Holy Spider and Border. “The success rate is not discussed.”
When asked when he planned to release the film, Abbasi proposed a date that coincided with the second impending presidential debate between Trump and incumbent Joe Biden on September 10. “The US election is a promotional event that we have coming up,” he joked. “We sincerely hope it can be released.”
As of right now, there is no US distributor associated to this project, which may be difficult to market given public fatigue with excessive political coverage and possible worries about lawsuit threats. US rights are handled by WME International and CAA Media Finance. Before Cannes, Rocket Science surreptitiously sold foreign territory.
The main character of the movie, according to Abassi, is not its main focus: “This is not a movie about Donald Trump.” The film explores the inner workings of a system, including its construction, power distribution, and operation, and highlights Roy Cohn’s proficiency with it.
The Succession actor Jeremy Strong, who plays Cohn in Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy Of The People, was unable to leave New York. “We are in a world where truth is under assault… At this moment in history we are expiring Cohn’s long dark shadow,” Strong declared in a statement.
When questioned about why he contributed to the US elections in a “partisan” manner and why an Iranian-Danish filmmaker would choose to present an apparently American tale, Abbasi retaliated. He claimed he did not view his career as a straight line in which he told tales specific to each nation before branching out into the US and other countries.
Stan, whose achievements include the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the movie A Different Man, said of his version of Trump, “He’s a human being like everybody else.” I suppose everyone has their own set of rules and values. All that matters is what they are. It varies depending on who you ask.
Bakalova, who made her breakthrough in the movie Borat afterwards, expressed Ivana’s opinion as follows: “The more I got to know Ivana, the more I fell in love with her.” She was going to be late. Seeing that was motivating.
