Cannes 2024: Donald Trump biopic ‘The Apprentice’ premieres amid possible lawsuit
As the Donald Trump biopic The Apprentice, directed by Ali Abbasi, premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, the former President of the United States had his campaign team threaten to issue a lawsuit against the filmmakers and producers attached to the project.
The film sees Sebastian Stan play Trump during his early years as a real estate developer in New York, with the focus being on his relationships with his first wife, Ivana Trump, and the lawyer and political fixer Roy Cohn, played by Jeremy Strong.
Steven Cheung, the chief spokesperson of Trump’s campaign, recently told Variety, “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.”
Cheung went on to compare Abbasi’s film to “the illegal Biden Trials” by calling it “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.”
When The Apprentice premiered on May 20th at Cannes, it received an eight-minute standing ovation and Abbasi himself took to the microphone to address the current socio-political events that seem to be growing in intensity in recent years.
Abbasi told the audiences that he wanted to make cinema “relevant” again. “There is no nice metaphorical way to deal with the rising wave of fascism,” the director said. “There’s only the messy way. There’s only the banal way.”
According to Abbasi, the true way of dealing with the current global political climate is “on its own terms, at its own level.” He noted, “It’s not going to be pretty, but I think the problem with the world is that the good people have been quiet for too long. So, I think it’s time to make movies relevant. It’s time to make movies political again.”
The Apprentice features a portrayal of Trump in which he uses drugs and gets plastic surgery, while one scene sees him rape his wife, which has led to the former President’s campaign seeking legal action against the movie.
In addition, Dan Synder, a business and associate of Trump, had personally invested in Abbasi’s film through the production company Kinematics, but once the film was complete, he allegedly took great issue with the negative portrayal of Trump.
The Apprentice has secured a distribution deal in the UK and Ireland and will be released later this year, but Abbasi is still awaiting a US distributor at the time of writing.
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