‘The Apprentice’ Director Offers to Screen Movie for Donald Trump After Campaign Threatens Lawsuit: ‘I Don’t Necessarily Think It’s a Movie He Would Dislike’

Matt Donnelly and Ellise Shafer
·2 min read
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“The Apprentice” director Ali Abbasi has responded to the Trump campaign’s threat to sue over the movie, which premiered at Cannes Film Festival on Monday night.

“Everybody talks about him suing a lot of people — they don’t talk about his success rate though, you know?” Abbasi said. He even offered to meet with Trump and screen the movie for him, saying, “I don’t necessarily think that this is a movie he would dislike.”

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He continued, “I don’t necessarily think he would like it. I think he would be surprised, you know? And like I’ve said before, I would offer to go and meet him wherever he wants and talk about the context of the movie, have a screening talk and a chat afterwards, if that’s interesting to anyone at the Trump campaign.”

Stan embodies the real estate tycoon turned president in Ali Abbasi’s film, alongside Jeremy Strong as his lawyer and mentor Roy Cohn. “The Apprentice” does not flinch away from putting Trump in a harsh light, including a scene that shows him raping his first wife, Ivana.

At its Cannes premiere on Monday night, “The Apprentice” received an eight-minute standing ovation as Abbasi made an impassioned speech. “There is no nice metaphorical way to deal with fascism,” the director said. “It’s time to make movies relevant. It’s time to make movies political again.”

Before its premiere, “The Apprentice” had already been the subject of great controversy, with a billionaire investor in the movie — who thought it would be a more flattering portrait — already putting a legal team together to try and get it recut. Trump’s 2024 campaign is also threatening legal action, putting out a lengthy statement Monday night calling the film “garbage” and “pure fiction.”

“We will be filing a lawsuit to address the blatantly false assertions from these pretend filmmakers,” the Trump campaign’s chief spokesperson Steven Cheung said in a statement to Variety. “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.”

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