Entertainment Weekly The Apprentice filmmakers on ‘shocking’ struggle to find a buyer: ‘It’s cowardice in the face of Donald Trump’
For much of the six years it took to make The Apprentice, the filmmakers and actors involved weren’t sure it would ever see the light of day.
But when it finally premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May, earning an 11-minute standing ovation and positive reviews, director Ali Abbasi felt like his final hurdle — finding a distributor — would soon be behind him. And yet, the major Hollywood studios and streamers weren’t calling.
“It was pretty shocking for me after the reception we got in Cannes,” he admits. “I understand it from the business perspective of not wanting to have trouble, but we’re not in the business of ice creams. We’re not selling shoes. So yeah, it was shocking.”
He knew it wouldn’t be easy. After all, it’s a movie about the makings of Donald Trump, who many consider to be the most controversial, divisive, and litigious man in America. The former president has already threatened to sue the filmmakers, as has his friend, billionaire Dan Snyder, who helped finance the film, reportedly under the false impression that it depicted Trump in a purely positive light.
While the filmmakers believe the well-researched film to be a fair and balanced portrait, The Apprentice is nevertheless full of shocking scenes. Throughout its two-hour runtime, we see the former president taking diet pills, receiving liposuction and having scalp-reduction surgery, and, most incendiary of all, raping his ex-wife Ivana, as she alleged happened in a 1990 divorce deposition, according to one unconfirmed account. (She later denied her initial testimony, saying she felt “violated” but did not mean to be alleging rape “in a literal criminal sense.”)
“Listen, Trump threatens to sue the mailman, so I’m not surprised,” says journalist Gabriel Sherman, who wrote the script. In fact, Sherman says he finds the legal threats “sort of perversely satisfying.” That’s because the film presents Trump as we know him today to be largely a product of his relationship with his mentor, Roy Cohn, who taught the real estate scion three lessons that he has continued to live by: Always attack, deny everything, and never admit defeat.
“He’s basically just doing what Roy Cohn told him to do — he’s attacking,” Sherman explains. “I know how rigorously researched and solid the movie is, so I’m not worried from a legal perspective.”
Still, the fact that Hollywood largely shunned a film with a stellar cast (Marvel star Sebastian Stan as Trump, Succession Emmy winner Jeremy Strong as Roy Cohn, and Oscar nominee Maria Bakalova as Ivana), a red-hot director making his English-language debut, a script by a bestselling author (The Loudest Voice in the Room), and a hugely pertinent subject matter (due to delays, the film will release just weeks before the election) was disheartening for all involved.
“I remember having conversations with everybody at the beginning of the summer that this movie’s not going to come out,” says Strong. “They’re going to block it. It’s going to be banned. And the possibility of that level of, ultimately, censorship in this country, in this moment, felt like a dangerous harbinger of where we’ve come.”
Or, as Sherman calls it, “a chilling glimpse of how Hollywood was self-censoring themselves to prepare for a possible Trump presidency.” He adds, “I’m not the one who’s at the studios having to spend millions of dollars to buy movies, but from an artistic standpoint, I find it really, really distressing that we’re at a time in Hollywood where they don’t want to offend anybody. Basically, if you look at the groundbreaking movies of the ’70s, like All the President’s Men, you wonder if those movies would be made today. After the writer and actor strikes, after COVID, after the streaming bubble burst, they’re just so cautious. And I think our movie was just a casualty of an industry that doesn’t really have faith in itself.”
Ultimately, it was veteran studio exec Tom Ortenberg, under his Briarcliff Entertainment banner, who swooped in at the last second to ensure the film got a theatrical release. “I’m so disappointed that literally nobody else in Hollywood would distribute The Apprentice,” he says. “It’s shockingly disappointing to me to be living and working in an industry where that’s the case.”
Still, he adds, “I’m also so glad that I’m here and that we’ve been handed this terrific opportunity to work on a film that I think will have success both at the box office and in the award season but will have a cultural impact that will live on for a long time. So I’m thrilled at the opportunity but disappointed at this circumstance.”
As for why he thinks other studios balked, Ortenberg says, “I can’t really speak for others, but my sense is it is in large if not complete part cowardice in the face of Donald Trump. Anybody who claims otherwise, I would probably accuse of fibbing.”
Ortenberg began his film career as a Columbia Pictures clerk in 1985 before going on to become the president of Lionsgate, growing it from an indie arthouse distributor to a leading studio. After working as president of theatrical films at the Weinstein Company, he left to become the founding CEO of Open Road Films, where his tenure included a Best Picture Oscar win for Spotlight (2016).
The Apprentice stars Sebastian Stan and Jeremy Strong say biopic does not attempt to ‘vilify’ Donald Trump
After an illustrious 40-year career, his experience with The Apprentice has left him feeling like Hollywood is a town he no longer recognizes. “It’s not the industry that I felt like I was working in,” he says. “If the artistic community — and yes, the movie business is very much a business — but if the artistic and business communities in Hollywood are going to bend the knee in unison at the first sign, literally the first moment, even before the first moment, just in anticipation of difficulty… And that really gets to the heart of the matter, which is, when you bend the knee in advance to the authoritarian, you are only increasing the likelihood of that authoritarianism. So to watch Hollywood in unison bend the knee to Trump, I find particularly disturbing.”
“I think our industry has generally become very conservative and toothless, to be honest with you,” adds Abbasi. “There are a lot of great experiments, and there is a lot of risk-taking, but they’re done on the fringe on a small scale, and they don’t really get the venue to show themselves.”
For Stan, it’s difficult to separate the situation with The Apprentice from the general turmoil and upheaval in the film industry over the past several years. “Honestly, it’s hard for me to know because so much in this business currently feels uncertain,” he says when asked what he makes of the difficulty finding distribution. “It’s hard to know, coming out of the pandemic and going into the strike and coming back out, what the lane for this film would’ve been.”
He adds, “You look at a lot of projects out there that are trying to get going, or they get going, and then they fall apart anyway. It’s hard to know what kind of movie is going to work or not. It seems that, obviously, hot topics will always generate publicity, and it seems that we are leaning into that more and more as a way to bring attention to something, for better or worse. But I honestly have no idea. I’m still learning and trying to understand how our business has been changing since the strike, and also with technology and the studio system versus streaming.”
In the end, Abbasi says he hopes the film can prove to Hollywood “that you can take chances.” He adds, “I say this humbly. It is not about, ‘Oh, look how crazy we are, how cool we are.’ But I think we did stuff that a lot of people advised us not to do. And I really hope that this model of taking chances and dealing with stuff that is relevant and timely and people are interested in but maybe are too afraid to touch, I hope that the audience rewards this not only for us but also for the health of this whole ecosystem. I think we really need that right now.”