After much pre-release turbulence,The Apprenticetoday opens on 1,740 screens across the country.
Inspiring coming-of-age tales are a Hollywood staple, but most are warm and cozy compared toThe Apprentice.
The whole thing was a bluff, but an effective one.
‘The Apprentice’Pief Weyman
Potential distributors ran for cover.
This was a tragedy, that nobody else in Hollywood was willing to distribute this amazing motion picture.
The major studios ran away fromThe Apprenticelike their hair was on fire.
The corporate hierarchy in Hollywood ran away fromThe Apprenticelike their hair was on fire, because of cowardice.
Add to that a scrum with one of the films major financiers, Kinematics.
This was the narrative moment when Trump sold his soul, when buildings and women became conquests.
ALI ABBASI: Honestly, Id ask, hows the negotiation going?
Theyd say, We cant tell you.
And then Id read it on Deadline.
Im like, so are we buying them out?
Id say, its on Deadline!
So I think you knew more about it all than me.
This was no publicity stunt, where we were drumming up attention having a beef with some people.
I was like, yes, this was seven years in the making to get 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 atNew York Newsday, where Donald Trump became a constant, a mover and shaker.
Ali, you grew up in Tehran and settled in Sweden.
Youve 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?
I dont think in that axis, which frees me up.
I dont have a cousin whos a Democrat, my dad is not Republican.
To give you an example, I was offered some years ago to do a movie about Josef Mengele… Im like, okay, thats interesting.
And he seemed an interesting guy, in a really strange way.
There was not a place I could hang my hat on.
I was like, this is just darkness.
I dont know what to do with it.
I dont know how I feel about this anymore.
And thats where it becomes interesting.
Because early on in the film, theyre aligned.
Theyre both growing up under this oppressive father and they both feel that their father has this warped worldview.
… 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?
Thats the word, his woundedness.
But I think we have to stop separating ourselves from him and therefore kind of giving ourselves a pass.
Its easier to just objectify him and then just we can just throw all we want at him.
DEADLINE: Jeremy, what about Roy Cohn?
STRONG: I am not sure I understand it myself.
Its not a methodical process.
Biographies, theres an autobiography; Roy wrote a few books himself.
Theres a tremendous amount of interviews and archival stuff.
You absorb all of that and take a stab at internalize it.
DEADLINE:What did you come away with?
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?
You hope to just connect on a visceral level to some things about a person.
But I didnt 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 its a tightrope walk.
Ken Auletta, who interviewed him inEsquire, told me he was the most monstrous person hed ever encountered.
Kai Bird, who wroteOppenheimer, is writing about Cohn now.
His legacy is upon us, and his influence is really incalculable now.
DEADLINE:There is a scene in which hes interviewed by Mike Wallace in 60 Minutes.
Cohns 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.
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 Years 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 inAngels In Americais purely a monster.
But hes also gleeful.
Trump had an opportunity to snuff that out and chose not to, until the damage was done.
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 its like, is this real?
That feeling stayed with me throughout this whole thing, and it still stays with me.
This this has been what we felt on January 6th or in that assassination attempt.
I was emotionally, I didnt 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, Im conflicted.
Part of me is, is it good for the movie?
I was so conflicted.
I didnt know what to do and this is what I love about this, the complexity of it.
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.
Its whatever you make of it.
They didnt know how to react to that.
Does it stand on its own as a movie if you change these guys names to Bob and Steve?
And thats the way we engaged with this.
But even the stuff that didnt make it into the movie fed our relationship so much.
It made me think ofBarry Lyndon.
SHERMAN: The movieNetworkis very relevant today, and to this.
He certainly has made us more desensitized in various ways.
And now look at how we approach it.
DEADLINE:Since its set in the seedy NYC of the 1970s, I might putTaxi Driverin there.
STAN: Nobody wins from that.
Maybe we can watch the film, walk out and go, yeah, Im good, right?
We all have some moral center somewhere.
Donald is still running and still successfully evading and outrunning.
For Roy, it did catch up to him.
You cannot outrun yourself forever.
Never admit youve lost is chief among Cohns Commandments.
STAN: But heres the complex question.
Those rules are asking, what if they work?
Then why do you still follow through?
SHERMAN: But thats Machiavellian, that the ends justify the means.
Because Roy and similarly Donald felt so rejected by a certain part of the establishment.
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.
DEADLINE:Sebastian, what you were saying is what if it works?
That would be my answer to what you said.
STAN: No, of course.
Again, what if it works?
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.
What if they see Im fake?
DEADLINE:We all feel that.
STAN: Im saying that this ideology, its his thing, right?
Im a self-questioning person.
I guess Im referring to why I use that is because I feel thats a real thing in America.
I actually find that to be really sad.
And its on smaller scales as well.
Its not just someone thats 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, theyd say, Im not watching the Oscars because of him.
But its 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 thats 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, thats interesting.
I wonder how that works.
Instead of immediately going to a place of judgment.
Its not a political polemic the way some other movies are.
The truth is like Mark Rothko once said about painting, silence is so accurate.
Its so hard to talk about the doing of it.
You enter into something that, or I do, that you dont quite understand.
Youre trying to follow an inchoate instinct.
Your unconscious dictates a lot of whats happening, and you sort of go somewhere.
But when its over, its over.
I feel very divorced from it, having sat and watched it.
Theres always a feeling of loss.
DEADLINE:What about you, Sebastian?
Was there a quality in Trumps 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 dont think Ill be able to explain it as better than Jeremy just did.
Youve got families, or youre starting a family.
There are aspects in this and theres a lot of time and effort.
I find that if you dont have those things anymore, its harder.
I look at the people first and whos going to be there.
It is a machine.
Youre preparing yourself to go out there.
Youre trying to arm yourself as best as possible to go out there for whatevers going to happen.
Thats how I think of it.
STRONG: But you still feel [that preparation] on the screen.
You feel that everything that didnt make it on the screen is informing what were seeing.
Thats why, to me, [Stan] 360 degrees mastered that man and that history.
And I thought, thats my job as well.
But also, acting is not conveying information.
Hes playing arguably the most well-known and famous person on planet Earth.
The challenge, the degree of difficulty of that is just incalculable.
Tony was obviously grappling with the role he played in the book creating this Myth of Trump.
He was doing a rally in Florida.
Im like, I cant do that.
Dont be a baby.
Dont be a baby.
But that seduction is real.
There is this tractor beam when youre in his orbit.
I had to consciously say to myself, no, this is not appropriate.
And if you turn that voice off, you’re able to just get pulled right in.
We all knew we were playing with fire by taking this on.
Alis no stranger to playing with fire.
Theres a place for everything under the sun.
DEADLINE:What makes this movie a success for you guys?
Ali really said something I hadnt thought about, and its true.
Its 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 dont know about the Roy Cohn-Donald Trump relationship.
Beyond that, I would say its the experience in the theater.
Youre not going to read that in a book or online.
Its this experience of being with these people in the movie theater.
Thats what is important, whats visceral.
I think maybe it can serve as a cautionary tale.
Not worse, or in a vilifying way, but just in a human way.
But also not in an overly sympathetic way.
Choices happen, and define you.
But I just want people to see it and understand better where this all is coming from.
And in one of the poems, he said Yesterday, this days madness did prepare.
Thats what this movies about.
Its about how the madness of today was prepared in this moment in time between these two people.
And I think thats a really important story to tell the world right now.
