Following its screening at the Cannes Film Festival, Donald Trump’s reelection campaign branded “The Apprentice,” a biopic about the former US president from the 1980s, as “pure fiction” and threatened legal action. But the film’s director, Ali Abbasi, has offered to show Trump a private screening.
A statement released by Trump campaign spokeswoman Steven Cheung stated that the Trump team will sue “to address the blatantly false assertions from these pretend filmmakers” after the film’s Monday screening in Cannes.
“This nonsense is just fiction that exaggerates falsehoods that have been proven wrong,” Cheung remarked.
Sebastian Stan headlines “The Apprentice” as Donald Trump. Roy Cohn, played by Jeremy Strong, was the lead defense counsel for Joseph McCarthy’s investigations of communists in the Senate in the 1950s, and Trump’s relationship with him is pivotal to the film.
“Everybody talks about him suing a lot of people — they don’t talk about his success rate though, you know?” Abbasi told reporters in Cannes on Tuesday when asked about the Trump campaign’s claims.
However, during his discussion of the film at the festival’s press conference, the Iranian Danish filmmaker likewise adopted a more subdued tone. He volunteered to have a look at “The Apprentice” and discuss it with Trump.
The film paints Cohn as Trump’s longstanding adviser who taught him the ropes of New York City politics and business. Cohn initially helped the Trump Organization through a federal housing discrimination lawsuit.
In the thick of the American presidential campaign, “The Apprentice” has all the makings of a bombshell of a Hollywood thriller. There is no set release date for the film because it is now for sale in Cannes.