Category: Articles

Oct
04

News: The Apprentice filmmakers on ‘shocking’ struggle to find a buyer: ‘It’s cowardice in the face of Donald Trump’

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.”

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Oct
03

News: The Apprentice star Sebastian Stan explains why he thinks ‘there’s a Trump in all of us’

Entertainment Weekly – “I know that might not be a popular thing to say,” the actor admits to EW for our cover story on the movie.

While The Apprentice attempts to find the humanity in Donald Trump, its star, Sebastian Stan, also believes the film shines a light on the Donald Trump in humanity.

“I think that there’s a Trump in all of us to some extent,” the actor tells Entertainment Weekly for our latest cover story. “I know that might not be a popular thing to say, or people maybe don’t want to admit it.”

And if you feel yourself having a strong reaction to that statement, Stan thinks that may be a sign that “there’s some truth” to what he’s saying.

But first, let him explain.

The Marvel actor stars in the film as the former president before he becomes the famous business mogul and politician he’s known as today. The Apprentice charts Trump’s rise to power through the late ’70s and ’80s as he grew from a wannabe power player to a man synonymous with wealth and success — all thanks to the tutelage of his mentor, the infamous Roy Cohn (played by Jeremy Strong).

By peeling back the layers of both men’s personalities, Stan, Strong, and filmmakers, including visionary director Ali Abbasi and journalist screenwriter Gabriel Sherman, want audiences to come away not only with a better understanding of Trump but also of themselves.

“It’s important for us to explore perhaps the darker elements that live within all of us so that by bringing them into the light, we can understand how to have a better relationship with them rather than suppressing and avoiding and pretending that they’re not there,” Stan explains. “I think that’s where the value is because I don’t think anyone is on a moral high ground.”

And the actor is willing to take his own advice. If there was one Trumpian quality he saw most in himself, it was the politician’s innate need to win at all costs. It’s an urge Stan has had since he immigrated to the United States from Romania at age 12.

“I understood that drive to rise, to overcome at whatever cost, and to win. I understood that simply from my own very, very small, humble beginnings with the American dream,” he says. “We love a winner in this country. It’s a fact that, to me, felt relatable in many ways.”

Still, some critics have taken issue with how the film attempts to empathize with two men whom many don’t believe deserve it. While Abbasi notes that “there is a range between having empathy for someone and having sympathy with someone,” Stan sees value in “normalizing people that we feel strongly about.”

“People feel very strongly about him in two different extremes,” he says. “They think he’s either God’s son or he’s Lucifer incarnate, and I think we need to bring him back down to earth in the hope of understanding.”

More than anything, the actor hopes the film “leads people towards a reconnection with their own humanity,” adding, “We have to have a better, healthier relationship with the beast in all of us.”

Oct
03

News: ‘The Apprentice’s Sebastian Stan Says “There’s A Trump In All Of Us”: “We Need To Bring Him Back Down To Earth In The Hope Of Understanding”

Deadline

Sebastian Stan portrays Donald Trump in the Ali Abbasi-directed film The Apprentice.

In a new interview, the Captain America: The Winter Soldier star talked about humanizing the twice-impeached former president of the United States.

“I think that there’s a Trump in all of us to some extent,” Stan told EW. “I know that might not be a popular thing to say, or people maybe don’t want to admit it.”

The Apprentice, set to be released in U.S. theaters on October 11, follows Trump’s rise to power before becoming a business mogul and politician.

“It’s important for us to explore perhaps the darker elements that live within all of us so that by bringing them into the light, we can understand how to have a better relationship with them rather than suppressing and avoiding and pretending that they’re not there,” Stan said. “I think that’s where the value is because I don’t think anyone is on a moral high ground.”

Stan related to the character he was portraying in the film saying he “understood that drive to rise, to overcome at whatever cost, and to win. I understood that simply from my own very, very small, humble beginnings with the American dream. We love a winner in this country. It’s a fact that, to me, felt relatable in many ways.”

Trump has become a very polarizing figure in politics with his divisive rhetoric, and Stan knows that “people feel very strongly about him in two different extremes.”

“They think he’s either God’s son or he’s Lucifer incarnate, and I think we need to bring him back down to earth in the hope of understanding,” adding he hoped the film led “people towards a reconnection with their own humanity.”

Oct
03

News: Made in America: How polarizing biopic The Apprentice charts Donald Trump’s origin story

Entertainment Weekly – Sebastian Stan and Jeremy Strong take EW inside the making of a film so controversial, no major Hollywood studio would touch it.

Sebastian Stan didn’t become Donald Trump until the helicopter took off.

Moments earlier, before the rotor blades whirled, director Ali Abbasi was getting nervous. After five years of preparation and delays, the Iranian Danish filmmaker was finally rolling on what would become this year’s most controversial film, the Trump origin story The Apprentice (in theaters Oct. 11). But when he looked at his star sitting across from Jeremy Strong in character as Trump’s notorious mentor, Roy Cohn, he had a sinking feeling something wasn’t right.

“I was looking at them like, ‘Wow, they look weird, man. Is this going to work?'” Abbasi tells Entertainment Weekly a year later, from Copenhagen. “Then the chopper starts lifting, and I’m like, ‘Well, I guess I’m going to find out.'”

Once they were in the air, a transformation occurred that neither Abbasi nor the actors can fully explain. “Suddenly, it started to work,” the director says. “And I thought, ‘If it’s working here, it’s probably going to work on the ground, too.'”

“Until you cross that Rubicon, there’s a certain measure of dread and uncertainty,'” says Strong, sitting next to Stan at their EW cover shoot last month. “So that, compounded with the fact that we were up in the air precariously in a helicopter, being buffeted around by the wind, was a fitting first day.”

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Oct
03

News: See all the photos from Entertainment Weekly’s The Apprentice cover shoot

Entertainment Weekly – Sebastian Stan and Jeremy Strong peel back the layers on Donald Trump and his mentor, Roy Cohn, in the year’s most controversial biopic.

Sebastian Stan and Jeremy Strong are pulling back the curtain on Donald Trump’s origin story in this year’s most polarizing film, The Apprentice. The duo go toe-to-toe in visionary director Ali Abbasi’s punk-rock biopic, which charts Trump’s (Stan) rise in the ‘80s from wannabe mogul to global icon — all thanks to his mentor, Roy Cohn (Strong).

In Entertainment Weekly’s cover story on the film, Stan, Strong, Maria Bakalova (who plays Ivana Trump), Abbasi, and screenwriter Gabriel Sherman open up about the challenges they faced, Trump’s legal threats, and releasing the incendiary movie just weeks before the U.S. election. Check out our full cover story for The Apprentice, and see all of EW’s exclusive photos of Stan and Strong below.
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Oct
02

News: Inside the Fight to Release ‘The Apprentice’

Vanity Fair – The Donald Trump biopic was one of the hottest tickets at Cannes this year. So why did it take months, and a minor miracle, to sell? As the movie finally hits theaters, its screenwriter, VF special correspondent Gabriel Sherman, has some ideas.

On the night of May 20, I stood in my tuxedo inside the storied Auditorium Louis Lumière at Cannes and listened as more than 2,000 people in black tie gave an eight-minute standing ovation for the film I wrote: The Apprentice. The movie is a Frankenstein origin story about Donald Trump, played by Marvel star Sebastian Stan in heavy prosthetics and a golden toupee. It follows Trump as he rises in Manhattan real estate during the gritty 1970s and gaudy ’80s under the tutelage of right-wing lawyer turned fixer Roy Cohn, played with dead-eyed menace by Succession’s Jeremy Strong. The biggest controversy centered on a scene—spoiler alert—that depicted Trump sexually assaulting his first wife, Ivana. (There were audible gasps in the room when it played.) Other scenes showed Trump getting liposuction, undergoing scalp reduction surgery, and popping amphetamine diet pills—details reported in Harry Hurt III’s 1993 Trump biography, Lost Tycoon. (Trump denied the claims at the time.)

The premiere generated headlines worldwide. But during the after-party with views of oligarch-owned yachts anchored in the harbor, I began getting news alerts on my phone: Trump announced he planned to sue to block the movie’s release. “We will be filing a lawsuit to address the blatantly false assertions from these pretend filmmakers,” Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung said. He called the movie “malicious defamation,” “election interference by Hollywood elites,” and said it belonged “in a dumpster fire.” I felt a pit in my stomach as I scrolled the headlines. But I also felt strangely validated. Life was imitating art. Trump’s legal threat followed the first rule Cohn elucidates in the movie: Attack, attack, attack.

Two days later, Trump’s lawyers sent the film’s director Ali Abbasi and me cease-and-desist letters. The legal document sounded like an outtake from an unhinged Trump rally speech: “I demand that you immediately cease and desist distribution and marketing in the United States of the foreign-funded and directed hit piece masquerading as a movie.” It warned Hollywood companies against distributing the movie domestically: “Any person in the United States providing services, including marketing services, publicity, legal services, and public distribution of the movie, must be mindful of the restrictions of the Foreign Agents Registration Act.”

I hoped the controversy would translate into a deal. Studios and streamers normally compete fiercely to acquire the buzziest titles at Cannes. Two days after our premiere, Netflix reportedly paid approximately $12 million to acquire Emilia Pérez, the genre-bending transgender drug-cartel musical that won the festival’s Jury Prize.

But the specter of Trump’s lawsuit had a chilling effect on would-be buyers. By the time I flew home a week later, no Hollywood company had made an offer to release the movie in the United States.

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Oct
02

News: “You’re Hired!” Meet Rich Spirit, The Company That Stepped In To Back Controversial Donald Trump Movie ‘The Apprentice’, & Hear What’s Next For The New U.S. Indie Producer-Distributor

Deadline

Ali Abbasi-directed The Apprentice, starring Sebastian Stan as Trump, Jeremy Strong as his fixer Roy Cohn and Maria Bakalova as Ivana Trump, debuted to acclaim at Cannes but became bogged down by legal threats from the former President who took exception to the material. Then producers had to deal with main financier Kinematics — some of whose projects, including The Apprentice, have been backed by Trump supporter Dan Snyder — exiting the movie. All this got in the way of the team securing domestic distribution, which is now set with Tom Ortenberg’s Briarcliff for an October 11 release.

We first announced producer Rich Spirit, overseen by LA-based USC alum Shani, in May during the bustle of Cannes. The company, we can reveal, has now expanded into distribution and is backing The Apprentice‘s release with Briarcliff.

Shani tells us the evolved company will encompass production, financing, and now distribution, with a focus on creative direction and guerrilla marketing for independent films with theatrical ambitions. The company will partner with established distributors to support acquisition costs, P&A, and grassroots marketing aimed at younger audiences.

Shani invested his own capital to start Rich Spirit earlier this year, invested $500k into The Apprentice early on as an EP, and when the opportunity arose to buy out Kinematics and use the film as a pilot for Rich Spirit’s distribution ambitions, Shani raised additional capital from private investors. His model consists of buying three-four films a year, investing 50% of the capital itself and partnering with the investor group on the remaining 50%.

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Oct
02

News: Sebastian Stan, Adam Pearson and Aaron Schimberg Discuss A Different Man’s Biggest Hurdles

IGN

A Different Man is one hell of a film. The story follows Edward (Sebastian Stan), a man with neurofibromatosis who decides to have reconstructive surgery so he no longer feels isolated by his facial differences. Once on the other side of his surgery, Edward realizes that his condition wasn’t what held him back from forming meaningful relationships when he meets Oswald (Adam Pearson, who was born with neurofibromatosis), a man with the same disfigurement who makes connections with ease. Edward soon finds himself plagued by an obsession with Oswald and a play based on his former life.

Writer/director Aaron Schimberg pulls out all of the stops in a script that is bolstered by two remarkable performances from Stan and Pearson, but the film’s shooting schedule — alongside other challenges — ended up making A Different Man quite the hurdle to get made.

The film had a breakneck 22 days to film, which meant some days were literally spent sprinting around New York City in order to get shots that, if they were missed, simply would not have been in the film. I sat down with Schimberg, Pearson and Stan after the film’s Texas premiere at Fantastic Fest to talk about all the challenges of getting A Different Man through the production process.
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Oct
01

News: Inside the Fight to Release The Apprentice

Vanity Fair

The Donald Trump biopic was one of the hottest tickets at Cannes this year. So why did it take months, and a minor miracle, to sell? As the movie finally hits theaters, its screenwriter, VF special correspondent Gabriel Sherman, has some ideas.

On the night of May 20, I stood in my tuxedo inside the storied Auditorium Louis Lumière at Cannes and listened as more than 2,000 people in black tie gave an eight-minute standing ovation for the film I wrote: The Apprentice. The movie is a Frankenstein origin story about Donald Trump, played by Marvel star Sebastian Stan in heavy prosthetics and a golden toupee. It follows Trump as he rises in Manhattan real estate during the gritty 1970s and gaudy ’80s under the tutelage of right-wing lawyer turned fixer Roy Cohn, played with dead-eyed menace by Succession’s Jeremy Strong. The biggest controversy centered on a scene—spoiler alert—that depicted Trump sexually assaulting his first wife, Ivana. (There were audible gasps in the room when it played.) Other scenes showed Trump getting liposuction, undergoing scalp reduction surgery, and popping amphetamine diet pills—details reported in Harry Hurt III’s 1993 Trump biography, Lost Tycoon. (Trump denied the claims at the time.)

The premiere generated headlines worldwide. But during the after-party with views of oligarch-owned yachts anchored in the harbor, I began getting news alerts on my phone: Trump announced he planned to sue to block the movie’s release. “We will be filing a lawsuit to address the blatantly false assertions from these pretend filmmakers,” Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung said. He called the movie “malicious defamation,” “election interference by Hollywood elites,” and said it belonged “in a dumpster fire.” I felt a pit in my stomach as I scrolled the headlines. But I also felt strangely validated. Life was imitating art. Trump’s legal threat followed the first rule Cohn elucidates in the movie: Attack, attack, attack.

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Sep
24

News: Sebastian Stan describes the ‘big reactions’ from New Yorkers over his A Different Man transformation: ‘I was terrified’

Entertainment Weekly – The actor and makeup artist extraordinaire Mike Marino unpack Stan’s dramatic prosthetics turn.

Sebastian Stan was so determined to work with Oscar-nominated makeup artist Mike Marino on his film A Different Man that the actor was willing to undergo a social and professional experiment.

As Edward, the 42-year-old Marvel star would play an aspiring actor with neurofibromatosis, or NF1 for short, who undergoes an experimental procedure that radically changes his face, only to then emotionally spiral out of control when he loses the part he was born to play to Oswald (Adam Pearson), someone with NF1 who lives a much fuller life than Edward ever led, pre- or post-procedure. Stan needed the man who made Colin Farrell unrecognizable as Oz Cobb for The Batman and HBO’s The Penguin to pull off such a feat.

Since Marino was already busy on Amazon’s The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Stan walked the few blocks from his apartment in New York City’s SoHo district to Marino’s home every morning around 4 or 5 a.m. “Then you just wait till they’re ready for you on set,” Marino remembers saying to him. On some of those days, Stan would kill time by wandering Manhattan in full makeup until his call time. “I walked up and down Broadway, basically,” Stan, sitting in the New York offices of studio A24, tells Entertainment Weekly. “It was a busy street. I was terrified, but I would just go get a coffee or sit.”

Stan doesn’t consider himself to be a physical actor, and yet his body of work might suggest differently. Even when the costume shoulders the bulk of the transformation, such as playing Tommy Lee in Hulu’s Pam & Tommy, his body language molds to match the look. That skill is especially prominent in A Different Man (playing now in limited release). “Even alone, being able to only look out of one eye and then having one ear more covered immediately changes a lot,” he says of Marino’s makeup effects. “It changes how you stand. It changes how far away you are from people, how you look at people. I felt oddly on my back foot more. It’s a defensive reaction because you want to be prepared in case something’s coming, that you have enough time to react.”

“What we get is such an incredibly passionate, skilled actor that can hide within a true character,” Marino tells EW in a separate conversation on Zoom from his SoHo apartment, part of which serves as the mini studio where Stan’s makeup application occurred. “He would actually now have a chance to live with people’s reactions and how they were treating him.”

That experience informed Stan’s entire performance, and it became important for him to do so, even outside of the mornings’ wait time. He would often stroll away from set on the Upper West Side in between breaks or setups. “New York is pretty evolved in a lot of ways, but I still got some big reactions from people,” he recalls. “Like, ‘Oh s—!’ ‘Oh f—!’ ‘Look at that!’ It was scary to experience. It was hard to experience. I felt powerless in those situations in some way. And, I guess, a lot of that is how Edward feels in the film.”
Sebastian Stan transforms in the discomforting drama A Different Man

Other reactions were less intense, but equally informative. While standing at a stoplight, for instance, Stan noticed the difference between those pedestrians avoiding eye contact completely, compared to those trying to discreetly steal a look or offer him a forced smile — all bystander reactions that director Aaron Schimberg incorporates into the movie. “I don’t think it always comes from a bad place,” he says. “Sometimes people just want to connect or feel okay. It’s actually about their own experience. It’s not even about you. It’s like they’re in that moment feeling something that’s funny to them and they’re trying to deal with it. They don’t know how.”

Marino wanted to be involved with A Different Man thanks to his love of the 1980 film The Elephant Man, loosely based on the life of Joseph Merrick, who lived with a facial disfigurement. As a 5-year-old, the movie scared Marino. But as he fell in love with the art of makeup transformations on screen, he came to see it for what it was: “a beautiful” and “touching story,” he describes. “That really made an indelible mark on my life.”

He would need that motivation for the obstacles that Stan’s look on A Different Man prompted. “There were many technical challenges,” he recalls. “It is very difficult to do makeup that thick where they have very thick areas. So I had to really balance what was too big, what was too small. I still need the movement of Sebastian to come through. I still need his own face to drive the makeup and not have it look purely like a mask. I studied Adam’s photos. I really analyzed him and tried to balance how I can make it work for Sebastian.”
Sebastian Stan calls out journalist who refers to his new character with disfigurement as a ‘beast’

Stan has another transformative part coming out soon, the buzzed-about and already-controversial performance of young Donald Trump in The Apprentice. Because he’s now promoting both that film and A Different Man simultaneously, it’s been interesting for him to think about the ways in which he approached both jobs.

“I’ve been finding strange parallels that I never really thought about,” he remarks. “There’s some similar themes being explored in terms of truth, self abandonment, denial of reality to some extent. I think these last couple of roles have required a different degree of physicality. One, obviously, is specific, a real person. But I think about that, of course. You have to, because everyone walks differently and everyone carries things in their body differently. Sometimes you gain access in a different way to things by simply changing a physical aspect of yourself.”

The greatest compliment he received for that kind of work on A Different Man, even more than the glowing praise he’s seen from the critics, came from Pearson’s mother. “After she saw the film, she was like, ‘All I ever wanted was for someone to walk in his shoes for one day, to know what it’s like, and you were able to do that,'” Stan remembers of their exchange. “I came close to that, I guess, in a way, to feel that kind of invasiveness that he probably felt at some point in his life, walking around.”