Donald Trump‘s reelection campaign has called The Apprentice, a film about the former US president in the 1980s, “pure fiction” and vowed legal action following its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival.
Steven Cheung, Trump campaign spokesperson, said in a statement that the Trump team will file a lawsuit “to address the blatantly false assertions from these pretend filmmakers”.
The Apprentice, which premiered Monday in Cannes (Tuesday AEST), stars Sebastian Stan as Trump.
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The central relationship of the movie is between Trump and Roy Cohn (Succession star Jeremy Strong), the defence attorney who was chief counsel to Joseph McCarthy’s 1950s Senate investigations of suspected communists.
In the film, Cohn is depicted as a longtime mentor to Trump, coaching him in the ruthlessness of New York City politics and business.
Early on, Cohn aided the Trump Organisation when it was being sued by the federal government for racial discrimination in housing.
The Apprentice, which is labelled as inspired by true events, portrays Trump’s dealings with Cohn as a Faustian bargain that guided his rise as a businessman and, later, as a politician.
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Stan’s Trump is initially a more naive real estate striver, soon transformed by Cohn’s education.
“This garbage is pure fiction which sensationalises lies that have been long debunked,” Cheung said.
“This ‘film’ is pure malicious defamation, should not see the light of day, and doesn’t even deserve a place in the straight-to-DVD section of a bargain bin at a soon-to-be-closed discount movie store, it belongs in a dumpster fire.”
The Apprentice, which, despite the title, is not a reference to the reality competition series Trump starred in, includes a disclaimer that some parts of the story are slightly fictionalised.
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It is written by biographer and political journalist Gabriel Sherman and directed by Iranian-Danish filmmaker Ali Abbasi.
The film notably contains a scene depicting Trump raping his wife Ivana Trump (played by Maria Bakalova).
In Ivana Trump’s 1990 divorce deposition, she stated that Trump raped her. Trump denied the allegation and Ivana Trump later said she didn’t mean it literally, but rather that she had felt violated.
That scene and others make The Apprentice a potentially explosive big-screen drama in the midst of the US presidential election. The film is for sale in Cannes, so it doesn’t yet have a release date.
After the premiere, Abbasi addressed the Cannes audience, saying “there is no nice metaphorical way to deal with the rising wave of fascism”.
“The good people have been quiet for too long,” he said.
“So I think it’s time to make movies relevant. It’s time to make movies political again.”
Listing wars in Gaza, Ukraine and Sudan, Abbasi, whose previous film Holy Spider depicted a serial killer murdering women in Iran, warned of trouble ahead.
“In the time of turmoil, there’s this tendency to look inwards, to bury your head deep in the sand, look inside and hope for the best — hope for the best, hope for the storm to get away,” Abbasi said.
“But the storm is not going to get away. The storm is coming. The worst times are coming.”
The film’s premiere unfolded while Trump’s hush money trial continued in New York.
– Reported with Associated Press and CNN.
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