Early Trump biopic "The Apprentice" faces legal threats and controversy
"A story of greed and betrayal" - that's how foreign journalists describe the new film "The Apprentice." It tells the story of a young Donald Trump at the beck and call of a wealthy businessman. The creators are facing serious lawsuit threats.
"Donald Trump has threatened again but hasn't followed through," write "Deadline" journalists after the premiere of the film "The Apprentice" at the Telluride Film Festival. Just a few months ago, Donald Trump, who is running again in the presidential campaign, threatened to sue the creators if anyone sees their film. Something didn’t go as planned for the politician.
"The Apprentice" - a film about Donald Trump's beginnings ignites emotions
In May of this year, Dhillon Law Group, Donald Trump's lawyers, sent a warning letter to the creators. The letter stated that if the film ever sees the light of day, legal consequences will be pursued against the director, among others.
"We will be filing a lawsuit to address the blatantly false assertions from these pretend filmmakers. 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," read the statement from the politician's lawyers.
The film was already shown at the Cannes Festival, now at Telluride, and in October of this year, just before the elections, Canadians will see it in theatres. - This is not a film about Trump. It's a film about the American political system. It's a "Frankenstein" type story where Roy Cohn creates Donald Trump in his own style. These guys show what the system really looks like - film director Ali Abbasi now says in an interview with "Hollywood Reporter."
Sebastian Stan plays the young Trump, and his mentor, Roy Cohn, is played by "Succession" star Jeremy Strong. The controversy doesn't come solely from the film's subject matter, which portrays Trump as the king of American business, but also from certain scenes that have been buzzing online. In one part of the film, Trump is shown forcing his wife, Ivana, into being intimate with him.
- She made those allegations under oath in a divorce proceeding under the penalty of perjury. She then clarified her statement under pressure from Trump’s lawyers when a book was about to come out. And then in 2015, when he was running for president and she was the mother of his children who could go to the White House, she said, "Oh, this didn’t happen." So if you’re a writer and you’re striving for an emotionally true version of the story, what feels the most true to you? - explains Gabriel Sherman, the film's screenwriter.
In the same interview, Jeremy Strong emphasized: - I came to this not as a Democrat or a Republican, but as a humanist. And through a humanistic lens, your job always is to interrogate human experience and life. And the mirror thing [Abbasi said, during his introduction of Saturday’s screening, that he was trying to hold a mirror up to American society] makes me think of Hamlet. In Hamlet, he writes that our job is to hold a mirror up to nature and to show the age and body of the time — its form and pressure. I think that’s what this movie does. It’s an attempt to show the form and pressures of this moment in time that, in a sense, formed Donald Trump.
