Getty The Apprentice stars with the director in the middle.
The director of the new movie “The Apprentice” is fighting back to CNN after a spokesman for former President Donald Trump called the film “garbage” and multiple news outlets labeled it the movie “Trump doesn’t want you to see.”
The site “Democracy Now!” also interviewed director Ali Abbasi and labeled the film, “the movie Trump doesn’t want you to see” before the November election. The film opened in theaters on October 11, the site reported. NPR also labeled the movie “the film Donald Trump doesn’t want you to see.” Business Insider made a similar comment.
According to CNN, “The Apprentice” director received a “cease-and-desist letter from former President Donald Trump’s legal team shortly after the film’s premiere at the Cannes Film Festival.”
Anchor Kaitlan Collins asked Abbasi about it on October 11, now that the film has debuted in theater. She noted that the film has a disclaimer on it that “some of the events have been fictionalized” while calling it “fact-based.” She read the comment from Trump’s spokesman to Abbasi on the air and asked him for comment on it.
In the May quote, Trump’s spokesman Steven Cheung said, “This garbage is pure fiction which sensationalizes lies that have been long debunked.”
“I think that’s a sign that they definitely have not watched the movie because as we saw the other day, Roger Stone, Trump ally, long-time friend and advisor, saw the movie and he was happy about it,” Abbasi told Collins.
“He praised us for the portrait of Ray Cohn. Our liberal fans were saying this wasn’t critical enough of him and Trump camp is saying it was too critical. If we are succeeding in pissing off both sides, we’re doing something right. That’s the point of being nonpartisan.”
The Director Said People Can Consider Trump a Villain or Superhero After Seeing the Movie, Reports Say
According to Democracy Now!, the movie “looks at how Trump was mentored by Roy Cohn, former chief counsel to Senator Joseph McCarthy during the Red Scare.”
According to the site, Cohn “went on to represent Trump as he built his New York real estate empire,” quoting Abbasi as saying that Cohn “was the person who sort of built Trump, as a person, as a brand, as an identity.”
In the interview with “Democracy Now!,” Abbasi said, “For me, The Apprentice is not a Trump biopic as such. It’s about a, you know, transformative relationship of him and the mentorship of Roy Cohn. You know, it’s sort of a buddy movie for two villains, if you like, or two superheroes or, you know, two antiheroes, whichever way you want to look at it.”
Abbasi told Democracy Now!, “Yeah. Look, I’m born and raised in Iran, and, as such, I have this sort of outside view of the American politics and justice and legal system. And I think, you know, this system was not created by Donald Trump. It wasn’t created even by Roy Cohn. The system is in place, and these people are very good at navigating it.”
According to The New York Times, the movie “is hardly a flattering portrait of the former president, and includes scenes where the business mogul goes under the knife for liposuction and a scalp procedure to fix his bald spot.”
It also accuses Trump of having sexually assaulting his wife Ivana, who, in real life, “accused Trump of rape in her divorce deposition, though she disavowed the claim later,” The Times reported.
According to Business Insider, the film also “humanizes Trump, and creates a three-dimensional character that has flaws and maybe even some upsides.”
Donald Trump’s Spokesman Said He Planned to File a Lawsuit to ‘Address the Blatantly False Assertions’ in the Movie
GettyDonald Trump, former President and current Republican presidential nominee, plans to attend an upcoming college football game.
According to Variety, in May, Trump’s spokesman also promised, “We will be filing a lawsuit to address the blatantly false assertions from these pretend filmmakers.”
“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,” Cheung told Variety at that time.
On IMDb, the caption describes the movie as, “The story of how a young Donald Trump started his real-estate business in 1970s and ’80s New York with the helping hand of infamous lawyer Roy Cohn.”
It stars Sebastian Stan as Trump and Maria Bakalova as Trump’s then-wife, Ivana. The movie has an 89 percent positive audience score on Rotten Tomatoes and a 77 percent positive score from critics.
“A young Donald Trump (Sebastian Stan), eager to make his name as a hungry second son of a wealthy family in 1970s New York, comes under the spell of Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong), the cutthroat attorney who would help create the Donald Trump we know today,” the Rotten Tomatoes blurb says. “Cohn sees in Trump the perfect protégé — someone with raw ambition, a hunger for success, and a willingness to do whatever it takes to win.”
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New ‘Apprentice’ Film Called the ‘Movie Trump Doesn’t Want You to See’