'The Apprentice' director talks about the film Donald Trump doesn't want you to see

At first glance, Ali Abbasi might seem like the least likely candidate to make a film about former President Donald Trump's origin story.

The 43-year-old director was born in Tehran, lives in Denmark and has made films that deal with the supernatural (Border, 2018), horror (Shelley, 2016) and serial murder (Holy Spider, 2022). But that background also gives him a uniquely detached outlook on a deeply polarizing topic on the eve of November's presidential election in which Trump is seeking another term.

"You're so good with monsters and trolls... Do you want to make a movie about Donald Trump?" Abbasi recalls screenwriter Gabriel Sherman's manager telling him in 2018. The Apprentice, out in theaters on Oct. 11, takes what Abbasi calls a "radically humanist angle." The story focuses on Trump's (Sebastian Stan) formative years as a New York real estate businessman under the tutelage of Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong), his attorney and unlikely mentor.

Trump at first seems like a plucky, somewhat naïve young man trying to please his father

Similarly, Trump's mistreatment of a dying Cohn toward the end of the film elicits empathy for the one-time mafia fixer and "Red Scare" prosecutor. Abbasi also mined Trump's relationships with his older brother Fred (Charlie Carrick) and with his first wife Ivana (Maria Bakalova).

Another character in the story is New York itself, portrayed in its '70s and '80s grime and grit glory with grainy, saturated documentary-like images.

Cohn, who also appears as a maligned figure in Tony Kushner's play Angels in America, "is not as well known as he should be," Abbasi told NPR's A Martínez. "He was famously a closeted gay, homophobic, anti-intellectual intellectual, some say a self-hating Jew, all these contradictory things... But he was also a very colorful, very interesting person and charming and had a room full of frog dolls."

Cohn died of AIDS complications in 1986, but he insisted to the end that his disease was liver cancer. In the months leading to his death, the man who had rubbed shoulders with celebrities and political heavyweights was disbarred and sued by the IRS for $7 million in back taxes.

Abbasi sees Cohn as an integral part of the genealogy of the American populist right, and particularly adept at creating his own truth via the media. In one scene, Cohn tells Trump: "There is no right and wrong. There is no morality. There is no truth with a capital T. It's a construct. It's a fiction. It's manmade. None of it matters except winning."

The director recalls a conversation he had with Sherman, the screenwriter, about how Trump's rise in American politics has been portrayed in the past.

"I told him that there's this thing I feel in America that our liberal friends, they think he's a monster and he showed up and destroyed the health care, destroyed the infrastructure. That also implies that we're innocent, that we good liberal people, we tried to stop him and failed," Abbasi said. "But that's not the case... We're sort of saying, 'Oh, you think he’s the other. Let's watch him. Let's watch us, from his perspective. Is he really the other? Is it that different? Really?'"

Humanist or not, Trump's portrait is unflattering and the film has been mired in controversy from the beginning

The film depicts a scene of Trump allegedly raping Ivana. In her divorce deposition, the Czech-born entrepreneur and model said that Trump had raped her in 1989 after undergoing a painful scalp reduction to remove a bald spot. She later walked back that claim in a statement published in the Harry Hurt III biography Lost Tycoon: The Many Lives of Donald J. Trump (1993). In that statement, Ivana Trump said: "I referred to this as a 'rape,' but I do not want my words to be interpreted in a literal or criminal sense." She died in 2022.

Trump's team made legal threats to prevent The Apprentice from being screened in the U.S. "When when we were premiering [at the] Cannes Film Festival, they made a very conscious attempt to scare away all the distributors, sending us a cease and desist letter... They were really succeeding in burying us, up until very, very recently," Abbasi said.

At the same time, he added, financing for the film "fell apart" several times because liberal figures in the Hollywood scene thought the film was "too sympathetic" of Trump.

"What's crazy is the whole notion that this is a controversial movie because there's nothing really controversial about this... you could write the script with info from Wikipedia," Abbasi added. "For me, that's the most controversial part is that corporate Hollywood thinks that we're dangerous and out there."

Abbasi speaks of his film as "an experience" that takes the viewer through the arc of Trump going from fledgling businessman to the politician he is today. Rather than examining the hyper-polarized nature of American politics, Abbasi is interested in the underlying structure that fosters this kind of polarization.

"If there is a bigger sort of message in the movie, for me, it's that... the fundamental levers of power, they're not as partisan," he said.

"This sort of flexibility of ideology, I think that's interesting, because then it means that someone like Mr. Trump, when the time arrives, becomes a Republican after being Democrat for 30 years. I think that is the way to look at this system and, sort of try to tear this two-party thing... apart and look at the sort of the naked structure of power."

The broadcast version of this story was produced by Julie Depenbrock. The digital version was edited by Obed Manuel.