The Fire Behind The Film: ‘The Apprentice’
After much pre-release turbulence, The Apprentice today opens on 1,740 screens across the country. Inspiring coming-of-age tales are a Hollywood staple, but most are warm and cozy compared to The Apprentice. In this ‘70s-set Manhattan tale, an ambitious real estate developer looking to crack the big time finds a mentor and role model in a take-no-prisoners lawyer who during the Red Scare was Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s henchman, and who sent the Rosenbergs to the electric chair.
Donald Trump had no political or even reality TV ambitions; he mostly wanted to prove himself to an impossible-to-please father, who had Donald going door to door to collect rent from hostile low-income tenants. Cohn helped fuel Trump’s rise, even showing him the dark arts that included an office where he surreptitiously taped intimate conversations of his enemies. Cohn used these like brass knuckles, in one scene threatening to expose same-sex trysts of one married man whose vote got Trump and his father a slap on the wrist for discriminating against Black renters in their apartment buildings.
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Trump was wide-eyed as Cohn revealed the three rules by which he lived: 1) Attack, attack, attack; 2) Admit nothing, deny everything; and 3) No matter what happens, you claim victory and never admit defeat. Though the events are 50 years old and meant to guide Trump’s growth into a real estate mogul, they’ve proven useful in presidential politics all these years later.
That playbook came into focus as The Apprentice premiered at Cannes, and the Trump campaign widely publicized a cease-and-desist letter that threatened legal action. It labeled the film a “libelous farce,” and “direct foreign interference in America’s elections,” because some financing came from Canada and Ireland. The whole thing was a bluff, but an effective one. Potential distributors ran for cover. This despite an 11-minute standing ovation at its Cannes premiere, and critical adulation for Ali Abbasi’s direction of Gabriel Sherman’s script that brings to life the seedy ‘70s Manhattan before Trump’s name began to dot the skyline, and for Sebastian Stan’s performance as the future ex-president, Jeremy Strong’s reptilian turn as Cohn and Maria Bakalova’s Ivana Trump, the kind of work that drives awards-season trophies.
“The Apprentice is an extraordinary motion picture, and it deserves the right to be seen,” said Briarcliff Entertainment’s Tom Ortenberg, who, last May, never imagined the film would fall into his lap. “This was a tragedy, that nobody else in Hollywood was willing to distribute this amazing motion picture. The major studios ran away from The Apprentice like their hair was on fire. The corporate hierarchy in Hollywood ran away from The Apprentice like their hair was on fire, because of cowardice. And all I can say about that is, if you bend your knee in advance to the aspiring authoritarian, you are only increasing the chance of that authoritarian taking power because you are telling him in advance that you will obey.”
Add to that a scrum with one of the film’s major financiers, Kinematics. It’s partly backed by former Washington Commanders owner Daniel Snyder, who walked out of a showing at the moment Trump gets into a fight with his wife and sexually forces himself upon her. The filmmakers felt it was an important moment: Ivana was his dream and he worked hard to court her. As his overall ambitions grew, that wasn’t enough, particularly when his wife also began to crave the spotlight. This was the narrative moment when Trump sold his soul, when buildings and women became conquests. While Ortenberg (who previously distributed hot-button hits like Fahrenheit 9/11 and Best Picture winner Spotlight) stood by with an offer, money was raised to buy out Snyder and the producer. I’d heard Snyder got a $2 million premium on the $5 million investment, but others say that is not the case and that even the initial outlay is still not recouped.
It was so touch and go that the cast and filmmakers did not know until 48 hours before if a surprise showing at Telluride would happen. With limited P&A, the film is tracking for a soft opening that might be as low as $2 million. Meaning Trump might fall behind two screen villains that also go heavy on the pancake makeup: Art the Clown in Terrifier 3 and Arthur Fleck in Joker 2. The Apprentice hopes to hold screens through the elections, fueling a rosier ancillary future that would be helped by nominations.
What follows are interviews done during the film’s twisty road, beginning with Abbasi, Sherman, Sebastian Stan and Jeremy Strong right after their Telluride premiere, when they seemed dazed to even be there. A follow-up story will add commentary from Briarcliff’s Ortenberg and producer Amy Baer, who seven years ago started all this by buying a pitch by Sherman, who then was a top journalist who took down former Fox News chief Roger Ailes for his predations against young on-air talent, and had covered Trump for years.
DEADLINE: I can’t remember a story we held as long as The Apprentice and its post-Cannes odyssey, and here you are with a hot-button movie dropping in the high head of the presidential race. We gave you guys some grace, because we were persuaded it might imperil a worthy movie…
JEREMY STRONG: It was very precarious.
ALI ABBASI: Honestly, I’d ask, how’s the negotiation going? They’d say, We can’t tell you. And then I’d read it on Deadline. I’m like, so are we buying them out? It’s a secret. I’d say, it’s on Deadline! So I think you knew more about it all than me.
DEADLINE: We did get to the point where we could no longer bite our tongue because the job here is to break this stuff and other outlets didn’t care. We moved when we were sure the legal hurdles would be cleared…
ABBASI: I was not really part of all this, but I was on the sideline, and it was pretty frustrating. It’s been our baby and we worked on this for so long with the only goal that we be able to actually show the movie to people. This was no publicity stunt, where we were drumming up attention having a beef with some people. A great feeling today, when for the first time I had this moment with the real audience of this movie, which is an American person, this lady is asking a question about the movie. I was like, yes, this was seven years in the making to get here.
STRONG: As a spectator to everything that happened in this saga, it feels like it wasn’t a given that we would be here. A lot of people I spoke to said this was unprecedented in 25 years of doing what they do. This is a testament to how invested people were in this movie getting seen in this country.
DEADLINE: I started at New York Newsday, where Donald Trump became a constant, a mover and shaker. Ali, you grew up in Tehran and settled in Sweden. You’ve made previous movies on harsh subjects on how people can become twisted and corrupted with power. What was the advantage and biggest challenge of coming at the Trump story as an outsider?
ABBASI: One of the best things is I’m not playing for the blue team and I’m not rooting for the red team. I don’t think in that axis, which frees me up. I don’t have a cousin who’s a Democrat, my dad is not Republican. I’m not tied to anything so I could look at it more in an anthropological, mythological, dramatic way. The challenge is, if I grew up in New York and lived there and grew up with this guy, I would maybe have a different insight in some stuff and different way of seeing things. I don’t know about my disadvantage, but I think my approach doesn’t really change, even if I wanted it to. To give you an example, I was offered some years ago to do a movie about Josef Mengele…
DEADLINE: The Nazi SS doctor who performed ungodly medical experiments at Auschwitz…
ABBASI: The person or the company who offered it said, you’re really good at humanizing monsters, and at looking for humanity in unexpected places. I’m like, okay, that’s interesting. And he seemed an interesting guy, in a really strange way. I started reading about [Mengele] and I was like, there’s nothing with this guy that I can find that is sympathetic. He was not only a psychopath and a murderer, he was also cheating on his wife and didn’t like his kid. There was not a place I could hang my hat on. I was like, this is just darkness. I don’t know what to do with it. Here, where it becomes interesting is, there’s this guy who is a brilliant lawyer, a closeted gay guy, he is all sort of things. He’s talking about existential poetry, but also maybe blew up his boat and killed a young guy, just to make some money. That is complexity. I don’t know how I feel about this anymore. And that’s where it becomes interesting. This is a long way of saying my approach to Donald Trump in this story is not very different from my Iranian movie [Holy Spider] or my Swedish movie [Border].
DEADLINE: Sebastian and Ali and Gabriel, where did you find empathy in Donald Trump you saw you could use to make a more fully formed person when he was still forming, and not some unrepentant monster?
GABRIEL SHERMAN: When I sat down to kind of map out the structure of the movie, I always felt that Donald as a counterpoint to his older brother, Freddy, was a real way to track the transformation or the devolution of Donald’s character. Because early on in the film, they’re aligned. They’re both growing up under this oppressive father and they both feel that their father has this warped worldview. But as Donald is pulled into Roy’s sway, he finds a way to supersede his father, and he loses any kind of empathy for Freddy. Seeing Donald have this alcoholic older brother and struggle with how he feels about that, and ultimately turn his back on his brother, and that leads to his death. … That I felt was a way that the audience can really follow his character on the way down.
SEBASTIAN STAN: And then we have to stop talking about him like this separate thing…
DEADLINE: What do you mean?
STAN: We keep referring to him as if it’s sort of, oh, can you imagine that he’s capable of feelings? I actually feel he is one of the most emotional people out there actually out there in terms of reactivity. That’s the word, his woundedness. But I think we have to stop separating ourselves from him and therefore kind of giving ourselves a pass. It’s easier to just objectify him and then just we can just throw all we want at him. We have to kind of understand that he was born on this planet and he shits on a toilet like the rest of us. Things happen as you grow up and you evolve and I don’t feel like any of us are spared because if you had been following that trajectory that he was on, who’s to say that you would’ve been more morally true, that you would have turned out a better and more conscientious person, or not? I think we have to kind of start looking at the things that even we don’t want to admit, but feel very familiar about him, to us. Those are the things that, if you’re looking at the behavior that we’ve adopted from him, there’s not a lot of us that are behaving any differently right now. And the way we’re treating people and the way we are attacking one another and the brutality that’s happening online is the result.
DEADLINE: Jeremy, what about Roy Cohn? What did you lock into in terms of finding vulnerability in this tough guy, so we would not just see him as some reptilian villain?
STRONG: I am not sure I understand it myself. It’s not a methodical process. I think you set out to initially learn everything you can about the person, and there’s a great deal there. Biographies, there’s an autobiography; Roy wrote a few books himself. There’s a tremendous amount of interviews and archival stuff. You absorb all of that and try to internalize it.
DEADLINE: What did you come away with?
STRONG: I think Roy needed to elevate himself above the pack because the pack had rejected him so resoundingly. And so having clout became a kind of supreme value. There was something about success being its own exculpation and success being the ultimate moral measure. That is the thing that he imparted to Donald, or at least reinforced in Donald. How did I find my way in? I don’t know. You hope to just connect on a visceral level to some things about a person. But I didn’t set out to try and make him sympathetic or not sympathetic. I tried to just be in his skin and render stuff pretty precisely that I had observed. But it’s a tightrope walk. He is fascinating. Ken Auletta, who interviewed him in Esquire, told me he was the most monstrous person he’d ever encountered. Kai Bird, who wrote Oppenheimer, is writing about Cohn now. His legacy is upon us, and his influence is really incalculable now.
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DEADLINE: There is a scene in which he’s interviewed by Mike Wallace in 60 Minutes. Cohn’s health is failing and though he aggressively denies it, AIDS is ravaging his body. Till the end, he followed the rules he taught Trump. How much of that was Cohn being in denial about who he actually was?
STRONG: Denialism was a way of life for him. Defiance of reality and denial of reality, denial of truth and fact, but also denial of his own emotional reality, is the other thing. I think that is the central artery that goes through from him to Trump. Roy was a very tender man to the people that he was tender to. He had a lot of friends. Everybody would go to his townhouse on 68th Street for New Year’s Eve. Every side of the aisle, and the cultural elite and the New York elite. He was beloved by people as much as he was reviled by people. I personally found there to be … I worshiped Tony Kushner, but his Roy in Angels In America is purely a monster. I was interested in other sides of Roy as well; the man-child in him, but also what has to happen to a person to make them capable of that level of acuity and ruthlessness. But he’s also gleeful.
DEADLINE: When I watched the film and the lessons that Cohn taught Trump, I thought back to January 6th, when Trump fired up his supporters who stormed the Capitol while Biden’s election win was being ratified. Trump had an opportunity to snuff that out and chose not to, until the damage was done. I could see where he got that inability to admit he lost the election, but I also wondered how all of you felt watching January 6 on TV?
ABBASI: This is an age we are in, this sort of cubistic reality. I think maybe we entered it for the first time with 9/11. We watched that footage and it’s like, is this real? My brain says it’s real, but part of my brain is also, what kind of reality is this? That feeling stayed with me throughout this whole thing, and it still stays with me. It still, there’s a reason where last night when I was presenting movie for I think first time in my life, I got genuinely … I started having difficulty talking because I can feel it in my body, that we’re dealing with levers of power and energies that are so much bigger than us. It’s like, we are in an exorcist movie and the exorcism is happening and you have no idea which way it’s going as the head is spinning. This this has been what we felt on January 6th or in that assassination attempt. I was emotionally, I didn’t know even how to describe it. Part of me, it was almost as if they shot my dad. Part of me was like, am I happy? Part of me, I’m conflicted. Part of me is, is it good for the movie? I was so conflicted. I didn’t know what to do and this is what I love about this, the complexity of it.
SHERMAN: I remember I covered his 2016 campaign for New York magazine, and attending his election-night party at the New York Hilton. I remember the mood in the room early in the night when Hillary won Virginia, but the margin was much closer than anyone expected. And then the other states started to fall for Trump. And even the Trump people, it was that surreal feeling of, is this happening? And I felt that ever since then, Donald has reordered the world to fit his reality. He hijacked the system because what Roy taught him was that there are no norms, there is no system. It’s whatever you make of it. And Donald was able to play by a completely different set of rules, and his political opponents were completely powerless.
They didn’t know how to react to that. For me, I think it’s that feeling of when you’re living in a historical moment, and you’re in the middle of it, you have perspective, but you don’t have perspective. I think that’s what hopefully this movie will do; give a larger sweep to say, where do these ideas of relativity and denialism at all costs come from?
STRONG: The discussion around this is a political discussion, but the real question becomes, yes, it’s controversial, it’s all these things, but how’s the movie? Does it stand on its own as a movie if you change these guys’ names to Bob and Steve? And that’s the way we engaged with this. As sort of process junkies, Sebastian and I are both similar in an immersive way, in our levels of commitment to the thing. And the combination of Gabe’s journalistic rigor and veracity, and Ali’s kind of, as he says, riding the dragon, punk-rock Lynchian style, gave us this really incredible canvas to work on where we had a tremendous amount of freedom to play.
SHERMAN: I saw that when I visited the set, and saw Ali’s style of not yelling cut, but continuing and seeing where it might go …
STRONG: No two takes were alike at any given time. And we would come prepared with a lot of other stuff around every scene and then we would just go with it.
STAN: You’re going to these places that you didn’t anticipate and the feeling, the honesty and the truth that gets mined out of that can be extremely exciting and fulfilling. But even the stuff that didn’t make it into the movie fed our relationship so much. There were so many pieces here that made this work as a whole, and in the way it all came together.
STRONG: We talked about Midnight Cowboy while we were doing it, but now having seen it with an audience … apart from how terrifying I find it in its real-world ramifications, it made me think of Boogie Nights. It made me think of Barry Lyndon.
SHERMAN: The movie Network is very relevant today, and to this. Faye Dunaway’s character becomes this complete immoral vacuum who feels, whatever it takes to get ratings, is the value. That’s Trumpian. I’m not trying to make a correlation here with the movie, but in Network, again, you have a madman of some sort and people see the profit of that and he may be killing himself slowly, but no one seems to really care because it helps everybody. And I think that’s one of the things that sometimes I hope the movie continues to lead further conversation, that we can get past the hypocrisy piece that we seem to apply to this subject matter. There’s a reason why this is continuously happening and that’s why the movie speaks to this bigger ideology, this way of life that maybe we’ve habituated to. He certainly has made us more desensitized in various ways. And now look at how we approach it.
DEADLINE: Since it’s set in the seedy NYC of the 1970s, I might put Taxi Driver in there. You have this disillusioned guy who wants to do something important, and could have ended on the right or wrong side. Trump has fomented extreme polarization, but I personally see him as mostly serving himself and the wealthiest, but his most fervent devotion comes from the common folk whose interests he seems to care less about.
STAN: Nobody wins from that. The divisiveness. And I think again, there has to be a better way to talk about these things in the long run, to come back to the human part rather than the blue and the red and the whatever. Maybe we can watch the film, walk out and go, yeah, I’m good, right? We all have some moral center somewhere.
SHERMAN: On a certain level, I’ve walked away from the film thinking that this is a movie about the ways in which people try to outrun themselves. Roy Cohn spent his life trying to outrun himself, and eventually it caught up to him, when he was on Mike Wallace in that famous interview, and he was dying of AIDS and he was disbarred, and he eventually died ignominiously, and the jig was up. Donald is still running and still successfully evading and outrunning. Although the recent developments and the felony charges and everything, in a way, we don’t know what the ending is yet. For Roy, it did catch up to him. You cannot outrun yourself forever.
DEADLINE: The rules Cohn laid out for Trump is a great storytelling device because it just explained so much about the baseless denial of the last election results, January 6. Never admit you’ve lost is chief among Cohn’s Commandments.
STAN: But here’s the complex question. Those rules are asking, what if they work? Then why do you still follow through? I think there’s a deeper way of looking at it, and that’s why I say there’s some people that will see this film and see the rules and go, they’re wrong, but they’re effective.
SHERMAN: But that’s Machiavellian, that the ends justify the means. Because Roy and similarly Donald felt so rejected by a certain part of the establishment. For Roy, it was the Kennedys, it was the liberals, it was the New York Bar Association. And he impugned the yo-yos. He just assumed the worst about his enemies, which then justified his own depravity. And that is, unfortunately, what we need to get beyond. Someone needs to say, okay, maybe everyone’s not perfect, but just because I don’t agree with someone doesn’t entitle me to break every kind of social norm and rule.
DEADLINE: Sebastian, what you were saying is what if it works? I guess it all goes back to the way we were raised and it doesn’t seem like Trump had that backing from the hard-edged father who scorned his son and likely had a lot to do with Trump’s older brother crawling into a bottle and dying early. I was very charmed by the story you told at the Telluride premiere, when your mom brought you from Romania to New York and you were wide-eyed at the glitz of the city. Feels like you were raised with core values that even if you were given those Roy Cohn rules, you would’ve interpret them differently based on the values instilled in you, including empathy. The movie showed Trump’s upbringing, how with his dad it was always about winning at any cost, and those two boys were never going to be able to measure up. That would be my answer to what you said.
STAN: No, of course. Yeah. Again, what if it works? Because I can say, well, yeah, I’m a successful privileged person, and there are many times that I can say to myself, again, I worked hard. But you get haunted because you could just shut up and not ever question anything and keep doing well. And many people do that quite well, and I suppose part of me is envious of them. But then I guess sometimes you start to just find yourself on the hamster wheel, and it never ends. Someone says a beautiful thing to you and then two hours later you’re still there looking in the mirror going like, oh fuck. What if they see I’m fake?
DEADLINE: We all feel that.
STAN: I’m saying that this ideology, it’s his thing, right? I’m a self-questioning person. I guess I’m referring to why I use that is because I feel that’s a real thing in America. It’s never enough. There’s always the other mountain, and I feel sometimes I see these people we’re discussing that they look like they’re going to run until they’ve run off the cliff. I actually find that to be really sad. And it’s on smaller scales as well. It’s not just someone that’s in the public eye. I just hope that we should look at that.
DEADLINE: As opposed to simply signing up with one side or the other. Jimmy Kimmel hosted the Oscars, and he was hammering Trump every night on his talk show. So in the red states, they’d say, I’m not watching the Oscars because of him. But it’s like you say to yourself, why does it have to be that way? Why do you have to be one or the other, and live in a world full of insults?
SHERMAN: We might have to reassess our relationship to comedy, and that’s a whole other conversation. For me as a writer, I am more interested in a question of curiosity. I think having more curiosity as a culture will do us a lot of good. Approaching subjects and people with like, Hmm, that’s interesting. I wonder how that works. Instead of immediately going to a place of judgment. That’s what this movie was attempting to do, to explore in an honest way and not hide anything, but not come in with any preconceived ideas. It’s not a political polemic the way some other movies are. Here are these people, they existed, let’s try to live with them and see what it was like.
DEADLINE: When you play real characters who are slippery people, is it hard to slip out of their skin or do you carry Donald Trump and Roy Cohn around with you, as Sebastian did playing Jeff Gillooly in I, Tonya and Tommy Lee in the series Pam & Tommy.
STRONG: I think there’s a lot of misinformation and almost mystique surrounding the actor’s process and who you’re talking about. The truth is like Mark Rothko once said about painting, “silence is so accurate.” It’s so hard to talk about the doing of it. You enter into something that, or I do, that you don’t quite understand. You’re trying to follow an inchoate instinct. Your unconscious dictates a lot of what’s happening, and you sort of go somewhere. I guess at a certain point, a long time ago, I stopped trying to understand it and just tried to start trusting it.
But when it’s over, it’s over. I feel very divorced from it, having sat and watched it. I don’t quite relate to it as mine, though there’s an element of finding it painful to watch anything because of all of the moments that are not in the edit. There’s always a feeling of loss. You never crossed the finish line, it’s all just a series of imperfect attempts and it’s a search, and then that’s what gets committed to film. But you hope to touch the third rail of something in the process of that, and I feel like we did that here.
DEADLINE: What about you, Sebastian? You’re playing the most famous man in the world, and managed with subtlety to not do an impersonation or caricature you’d see on Saturday Night Live. Was there a quality in Trump’s younger years you latched onto as a North Star?
STAN: I guess that was why I offered that story with my mom in New York. I don’t think I’ll be able to explain it as better than Jeremy just did. I think as you get older, you realize that I feel like these things are more and more taxing. You’ve got families, or you’re starting a family. There are aspects in this and there’s a lot of time and effort. You just start to go, if this is going to happen now for the next few months, I want to be with people I trust, who are fearless. I want to be able to have it be a challenging question, a conversation I can learn something from.
There are some universal things we all look for in wanting to go there, to make the commitment to begin with. I find that if you don’t have those things anymore, it’s harder. It just happened that each of the things I was involved in were really good collaborations that I needed in getting me to a certain place. I look at the people first and who’s going to be there. It is a machine. And I think the last thing I’ll say, because at one point, I think you said it better than me, but it’s weird. You’re preparing yourself to go out there. If you were going to war, you might be seeing a lover, you might never come back, this might be your last time. You’re basically worrying, okay, so I just need a thousand things because I don’t know what’s going to happen out there. You’re trying to arm yourself as best as possible to go out there for whatever’s going to happen. That’s how I think of it. And you may not use 90% of it, you just want to have it if you need it.
STRONG: But you still feel [that preparation] on the screen. You feel that everything that didn’t make it on the screen is informing what we’re seeing. That’s why, to me, [Stan] 360 degrees mastered that man and that history. And I thought, that’s my job as well. But also, acting is not conveying information. He’s playing arguably the most well-known and famous person on planet Earth. The challenge, the degree of difficulty of that is just incalculable. But that’s what I love so much, the risk involved and the ability to kind of block that out entirely and just do it.
DEADLINE: Gabe, I’ve followed your journalism with admiration, and watching the film I thought the journalist who’s probably going to squirm in his seat when he watches that movie is Tony Schwartz, who helped fuel the Donald Trump master dealmaker mythology co-writing the book The Art of the Deal, which he has often said he regrets [Editor’s note: In a New York Times guest column today, Schwartz called the book “an unintended work of fiction”].
SHERMAN: Ali and I had dinner with Tony, during an early scouting trip in New York, and we got some really interesting insights about Donald in those years. Tony was obviously grappling with the role he played in the book creating this Myth of Trump. But yeah, that last scene was just a really kind of a great way to spin the movie forward so that we never obviously talk about present day, but everything we’re living in now is there in that scene.
DEADLINE: My accountant might say different, but I’m glad I didn’t help Trump write that book, given the bankruptcies and lawsuits that put the lie to the idea he was a deal whisperer.
SHERMAN: I was covering his campaign, this was in, I think 2016, and Trump made me an offer. He was doing a rally in Florida. I was going down to cover and I was interviewing him in New York, and he’s like, well, come down, you can stay at my Trump Doral. I’m like, I can’t do that. I’m a journalist. There are rules. “Don’t be a baby. Don’t be a baby. Just do it. Come stay.” And in the back of my mind, I’m thinking, if I stayed there and then I wrote something he didn’t like, he’d be the first person to call up Page Six and be like, this journalist mooched a free room off me. But that seduction is real. There is this tractor beam when you’re in his orbit. I had to consciously say to myself, no, this is not appropriate. And if you turn that voice off, you can just get pulled right in. We all knew we were playing with fire by taking this on. Ali’s no stranger to playing with fire. There’s a place for everything under the sun. But we also need more work that attempts to speak difficult truths and explore those complexities and not offer easy pat solutions.
DEADLINE: What makes this movie a success for you guys? You’ll probably get beaten up in the New York Post, praised by the Daily News and New York Times…
STAN: I just hope people see it. The whole point of anything creative and artistic is it frees you to go and have your own experience with it. Ali really said something I hadn’t thought about, and it’s true. It’s like when everybody says, why do we need a Trump movie? Why do we need to watch things that we already know about, and blah, blah, blah? Well, a lot of people actually don’t know about the Roy Cohn-Donald Trump relationship. Beyond that, I would say it’s the experience in the theater. You’re not going to read that in a book or online. It’s this experience of being with these people in the movie theater. That’s what is important, what’s visceral.
STRONG: After working on it, what I learned did make me feel like I was peering into the heart of darkness, a glimpse into a heart of darkness in the American psyche. I think maybe it can serve as a cautionary tale. But the hope is ultimately a humanistic one, which is, and I know a few people who have seen it, who have said to me, the next time I saw Trump, I just perceived him a little differently. Not worse, or in a vilifying way, but just in a human way. But also not in an overly sympathetic way. I forget what age it is, but anyone over 30 or 40 can no longer blame their parents for everything. Choices happen, and define you. So this is also about the formation and the choices made, and holding him accountable for those choices and holding up the mirror, as Ali said. But I just want people to see it and understand better where this all is coming from. There was something, there was a Persian poet named Omar Khayyam from the 11th century that Roy Cohn’s father loved. And in one of the poems, he said “Yesterday, this day’s madness did prepare.” That’s what this movie’s about. It’s about how the madness of today was prepared in this moment in time between these two people. And I think that’s a really important story to tell the world right now.
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