Around the time Ali Abassi was first offered Donald Trump biopic The Apprentice in 2018, the Iranian-born Danish director couldn’t actually enter the US due to Trump’s infamous travel ban.
After jumping through numerous hoops, Abassi was granted entry… temporarily.
“I thought it was quite funny having gone through all this, and I was saying, ‘If I leave the country, I can’t get in again’,” Abassi told The Screen Show’s Jason Di Rosso.
“So maybe I can do this on Zoom. The first feature directed from Zoom.”
The Apprentice is the semi-biographical story of Donald Trump’s ascension through New York’s real estate scene in the 80s, and his relationship with lawyer/mentor Roy Cohn. Since its premiere at Cannes in May, it has been a lightning rod for controversy.
Jeremy Strong plays ruthless lawyer Roy Cohn alongside Sebastian Stan’s Donald Trump in The Apprentice. (Supplied: Madman Entertainment)
With an election looming, Team Trump has called the film everything from “pure fiction” to “election interference”, even going as far as to threaten a defamation lawsuit.
But after a months-long struggle to find distribution, The Apprentice will hit cinemas worldwide this week.
Here’s what you need to know.
What is The Apprentice about?
Despite being named for the reality show that made Trump a Hollywood name, The Apprentice picks up in the early 80s when Donald (Sebastian Stan) was trying to break into the NYC real estate market.
The film chronicles Trump’s relationship with the controversial Cohn (Jeremy Strong), who would eventually become the younger businessman’s mentor.
While the film has stirred up controversy in the political world, Abassi refutes the assumption that his film is a Trump hit piece.
Sebastian Stan as a young Donald Trump in The Apprentice. (Supplied: Madman Entertainment)
“When I actually read the script, I realised that this is a script that’s trying to understand Donald Trump as a human being,” he says.
“[It’s] trying to understand him as an ambitious young guy: his ascent; his way up in New York real estate; and how he became the person he is through that very formative relationship with Roy Cohn.”
Who was Roy Cohn?
Roy Cohn was a US lawyer and staunch anti-communist who rose to notoriety in the early 50s as a US prosecutor during the trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were found guilty of spying on the US for the Soviet Union and executed.
He then became chief counsel to Republican senator Joseph McCarthy, with both men becoming main players in the “Lavender Scare” — pushing gay people out of their government jobs under the guise of protecting the US from communism.
In 1953, Cohn and McCarthy were accused of pressuring the US Army to give preferential treatment to a former aide of McCarthy and friend of Cohn, David Schine. During the televised inquiry hearings, it was implied that Cohn and Schine had engaged in a romantic relationship, which both parties denied.
Following the hearings, Cohn returned to New York to practise law, representing high-profile clients such as Rupert Murdoch, then-Archbishop of New York Francis Spellman, Mob figures Carmine Galante and Tony “Fat Tony” Salerno.
How are Ray Cohn and Donald Trump connected?
In 1973, Cohn represented a 27-year-old Donald Trump and his father, Fred.
The Trumps had caught heat from the US Government for allegedly refusing to rent to tenants of colour in 39 of the 14,000 New York apartments their company owned.
Donald J. Trump (L) and Roy Cohn attend a party at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Washington in 1983, three years prior to Cohn’s death. (Getty Images: Guy DeLort)
Calling the accusations “irresponsible and baseless”, Cohn and Trump turned around and filed a $US100 million (roughly $US700 million today) countersuit against the US government.
It was another two years before Trump reached an agreement with the US government to “not discriminate against blacks, Puerto Ricans and other minorities“. Trump Management made sure to clarify that the agreement was not an admission of guilt.
Trump and Cohn remained extremely close throughout the late 1970s and early 80s, with Cohn saying that Trump was his “best friend” whom he called “15-20 times a day”.
Abassi says he sought to show the closeness of Trump and Cohn’s relationship in The Apprentice.
“I definitely think that there was some sexual tension in the beginning because Trump would fit Roy’s type perfectly. His type was young, tall, blond, Aryan-looking guys,” Abassi says.
“But I also think that Roy probably saw his relentlessness and his willingness. As they say, when the student is ready, a teacher appears. I think that was the case with these guys.”
By 1986, Cohn’s questionable legal practises had caught up with him — he was disbarred by a New York court for, among other things, forcing a dying client to appoint himself executor of his estate.
Just weeks later, Cohn died from AIDS-related complications at 59 years old. He vehemently denied rumours of his homosexuality right up until his death, insisting that liver cancer was the illness causing his demise.
“Roy Cohn was not gay,” fellow close friend Roger Stone said in a 2008 New Yorker profile.
“He was a man who liked having sex with men. Gays were weak, effeminate. He always seemed to have these young blond boys around. It just wasn’t discussed.”
Why did Donald Trump try to stop the film being released?
Aside from closely detailing Trump’s relationship with Cohn, The Apprentice includes a scene that features Trump raping his then-wife Ivanka (Maria Bakalova), something she accused him of in her early 1990s divorce deposition.
She later clarified that she didn’t mean it literally, but rather that she felt violated by Trump.
Scenes such as this, as well as Abassi’s desire to release the film before the November 5 US presidential election, quickly caught the ire of Team Trump.
Days after The Apprentice premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung released a statement saying they intended to file a lawsuit to stop the film from being released.
“This garbage is pure fiction which sensationalises lies that have been long debunked,” Cheung said.
The threatened lawsuit never materialised but the threats saw the film struggle for months to find a US distributor, despite landing eager distributors in the UK and Australia.
At the end of August, it was announced that independent studio Briarcliff Entertainment had picked up the film for US and Canadian release on October 11.
In response, Cheung said the film’s release was “election interference by Hollywood elites right before November” and that it “belongs in a dumpster fire”.
Abassi has consistently defended his film; he even offered to screen it privately for Trump, saying he might not hate it as much as he thinks.
“This is a very classic story of master and protégé, you can also call it a Frankenstein story,” he says.
“But it’s not really dependent on and it’s not really about the person who was in the White House.”
Maria Bakalova as Ivana Trump and Sebastian Stan as Donald Trump in The Apprentice. (Instagram: @madmanfilms)
What are reviews saying?
The Apprentice enjoyed a warm reception out of Cannes, with critics in particular praising the key performances from Stan and Strong.
“Strong does a magnetic impersonation of Roy Cohn, who turned bullying into a form of cutthroat vaudeville (and a new way to practise law), putting his scoundrel soul right out there, busting chops and balls with his misanthropic, Jewish-outsider, locker-room wit. He’s not just cutting, he’s nasty,” Variety’s Owen Gleiberman said.
“The most chilling effect of The Apprentice: the way it makes even a duplicitous manipulator and big-time hypocrite like Roy Cohn seem, at least in the end, believably sympathetic,” Time’s Stephanie Zacharek agreed.
“Strong is terrific at capturing Cohn’s deadpan sharpness.”
But not all critics had praise for the film; The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw gave it two stars, calling it a “lenient TV movie”.
“The Apprentice worryingly moves us back to the old Donald, the joke Donald who had a cameo in Home Alone 2 and of course his own hit TV show, the joke that is now beyond unfunny. It feels obtuse and irrelevant.”
The Apprentice comes to Australian cinemas on October 10.