When Ali Abbasi’s Donald Trump biopic The Apprentice premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May, all hell broke loose. Immediately, the former president threatened legal action, a financier then wanted to exit the movie and a domestic distributor was nowhere to be found.

“I definitely think this movie will have a different life in six months or in a few years, and that people will look at it differently, when this very heated political drama subsides,” says Abbasi on a Zoom call from his Copenhagen home the day after the Oct. 17 Denmark premiere of the film. “But I am encouraging people to not look at this from a political lens of party politics in America. That is a difficult ask, because to my knowledge this is the first time someone has made a movie about a person who is currently running for office.”

Scripted by Vanity Fair journalist Gabriel Sherman, The Apprentice, which was released by Briarcliff Oct. 11 in the U.S., is essentially a Trump origin story. It chronicles Trump’s (Sebastian Stan) formative years and rise as a New York real estate businessman in the ’70s and ’80s under the tutelage of the ruthless and vicious attorney, Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong.) Cohn is the mentor, Trump is the apprentice, and what he learned is now history.

“I am so shocked that people find this so shocking,” says Abbasi about The Apprentice’s difficult path to the screen. “Because as a lot of the reviewers say, there is nothing new about Trump. Like exactly! But the experience is new. The only thing new is that we actually see him transform. So, I think there is a lot of fear on the decision-makers’ side, and that fear also carries to the audience. Some say they don’t want to give Trump too much oxygen, and some don’t want to pay for a character assassination piece. So there is a lot to work against.”

The Danish-Iranian director refers to scenes that shocked American critics and audience members, whom he talked with after U.S. screenings.

“I find it really surprising that everyone in the U.S. seems to be very focused on the personal stuff,” says Abbasi and points to the scene in the film where Trump sexually assaults his wife, Ivana (Maria Bakalova). “But it is not surprising that he got a tax break of 200 million dollars from a city that was collapsing? Or that he got away with a clearcut case of discrimination that the Department of Justice brought against him without him even getting a slap on the wrist? It was not surprising that two- thirds of his business empire have been bankrupt? That he tried to steal his father’s family trust? Those are as controversial — if not more — as anything personal that happened. But it becomes this sensational thing, where people are like: ‘I did not know he had liposuction …’ ”

Abbasi might not seem like the most obvious candidate to make a film about Donald Trump and his rise to influential businessman, then eventually ended up with the ultimate political power: as President of the United States. The 43-year-old director was born in Tehran, and lives in Copenhagen. The Apprentice is his first American film. His first film was a horror pic (Shelley, 2016), the second a fantasy (Border, 2018) and his third was a crime thriller about a serial killer in Iran (Holy Spider, 2022). But he feels his Iranian-Danish background gives him a unique perspective on an issue that can be polarizing in the U.S.

“If you grew up in Iran, you have a very complicated relationship with the U.S., because you were basically a U.S. colony before 1979 and after that you were the arch-enemy,” explains Abbasi, who left Iran in 2002 to study architecture in Sweden, then moved to Denmark to become a filmmaker. “You are so much in the American cultural sphere of influence, whether it is positive or negative. I think it is natural to be curious about it.”

Abbasi was interested in the system that produced Donald Trump, and how easy it was for him to abuse this system to his advantage. The film depicts how Cohn taught Trump three rules that were to define him: (1) Attack. Attack. Attack. (2) Admit nothing. Deny everything. (3) Always claim victory and never admit defeat.

“I was not shocked or scared, and I was not surprised,” says Abbasi about what these three simple rules imply. “I have been looking at the American system from the outside and from thousands of miles away, that yes, there is a system within the system and there is a so-called swamp, but it is not the Washington elite or the liberals. The system is a combination of forces that support each other and it is a very flawed legal system, which you can weaponize against people if you have enough resources.”

The Apprentice shows Trump’s transformation from an apprentice to someone who becomes as ruthless as Cohn. But what did this film teach Abbasi about the now-78-year-old behind the myth and the brand he created?

Abbasi states, “People are asking all the time: ‘What is the core?’  I say that there is no core. It is all surface and the core is a big, black, existential hole that needs to be constantly filled with attention, with power and with confirmation. And in the absence of that, his rage and negativity and destruction and frustration — it needs to be constantly fed and I think that for me is who Mr. Trump is.”

When explaining to Sebastian Stan, who plays Trump from 1973, Abbasi was pretty brief. “I said to Sebastian that he would be swimming in a very big pool, which is one foot deep and your hand is going to hit against the bottom,” says Abbasi about his direction. “That is the job. It is not a deep dive; it is a shallow dive.”

Abbasi sees The Apprentice as a film with many layers. The tone is hard to describe. Sometimes it is funny. Sometimes it isn’t.

“I think for me, this is a tragedy. In a way, there is a Shakespearean or Faustian angle to this. But it is a tragicomedy and I think it goes a little bit back to how I feel about fascism in general. It is funny until it isn’t.”

He refers to Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator from 1940, which was a parody on Adolf Hitler.

“If you look at it from a rational perspective and from the result perspective, it is horrifying,” says Abbasi. “It is a horror story. It is a story about how you lose your humanity and how you sacrifice your empathy and sympathy to get to where you are. But you cannot not laugh at the same time. I think it is important to have both and it is very, very tricky. Because it is sad and it is funny at the same time.”