According to media reports, former US President Donald Trump wants to take action against a film that portrays him in a negative light. “We will file a lawsuit to address the blatantly false claims made by these alleged filmmakers,” Trump spokesman Steven Cheung told Variety.
“Everyone talks about the fact that he sued a lot of people, but they don’t talk about his success rate,” the film’s director, Ali Abbasi, said in Cannes on Tuesday. It’s about his film “The Apprentice”, which premiered at the film festival. The work is a film biography of Trump in his younger years and is set in the 1970s and 1980s when he was expanding his real estate business in New York. The film portrays Trump as some kind of ruthless monster.
“This is a film about a system”
In one scene, Trump, as a character in “The Apprentice,” rapes his former wife Ivana Trump, and in another, he is shown having liposuction performed. The Romanian-American actor Sebastian Stan portrays the now 77-year-old.
Trump is running again as a candidate in the presidential election in November and currently has to answer in court for a hush money lawsuit. The trial concerns the prosecution’s accusation that Trump wanted to improve his chances of success in the 2016 presidential election by paying $130,000 to the porn filmmaker Stormy Daniels and then incorrectly recorded the flow of money.
Cannes is also the subject of a documentary about Daniels called “Stormy.” The work in which Daniels is involved will be marketed at the “Marché de Film”, the business equivalent of the film festival. According to media reports, the documentary describes from Daniel’s perspective how she dealt with the aftermath of the alleged sexual relationship with Trump.
There was no financing for the film in Hollywood
“The Apprentice” also tells of the friendship between Trump and lawyer Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong). In the film, it is portrayed as if Cohn was instrumental in helping Trump’s career – but Trump later dropped him when he was no longer useful to him. Cohn died of AIDS in 1986. In the film, Trump also distances himself from Cohn in view of this illness.
The American screenwriter Gabriel Sherman said in Cannes that he based his portrayal of Trump on real events. Many producers didn’t think much of the film idea. From his point of view, it would not have been possible to make the film in Hollywood. “The Apprentice” is a Canadian, Danish and Irish co-production.
Abbasi added: “In recent years, my optimism for the world has waned.” It would be more comfortable to hope that times would get better again, he said. It feels better to say, “These wars and political debates and so on come and go, and the corrupt politicians come and go, and they don’t affect me – but they affect us.”
At the same time, he emphasized: “This is really not a film about Donald Trump. This is a film about a system. It is a film about a system and the way the system works and how the system is structured and how power works expressed in this system.”