Working on The Apprentice taught Iranian-Danish director Ali Abbasi a lot more about the rotten inner workings of American economics than one might expect—even with its subject matter. For a while, it didn't look like the controversial Donald Trump-Roy Cohn biopic would be released at all (or at least before the election, as the filmmaker intended), despite a successful Cannes premiere this past spring. The film's primary financier, a company called Kinematics founded by producer Mark Rapoport (the son-in-law of billionaire Trump donor Dan Synder), took issue with a pivotal scene in the film where a young Trump (Sebastian Stan) rapes his then-wife, Ivana (Maria Bakalova). A few weeks later, the Trump campaign hit the decidedly unflattering portrayal with a cease-and-desist. After shopping the film around for months, an indie distributor called Briarcliff Entertainment finally climbed on board. Producer James Shani was able to completely buy Kinematics out of their stake, and the film is now set to be released October 11.
Still, the film hasn't quite been able to shake the fact that it was initially backed by a Trump supporter, which Abbasi chalks up to "the fucked up financing structure of indie movies in America" in a new interview with The Hollywood Reporter. Coming from Europe, he characterizes the fact that there's no state funding for films in America—which means directors are forced to negotiate with major streamers and studios or come up with the money on their own—as "mindboggling." Adding to this challenging state of affairs, filmmakers also have to "fight for final cut" (a right he won in the Kinematics buyout), which is "another really strange battle for any director from outside the U.S." "To their credit, Kinematics were the only ones who really stepped in and said, we’ve read the script, we’ve seen your other movies and we want to take this risk with you. It wasn’t at all a hostile situation from the beginning," he explained.
Although he says he's never met Snyder, the Trump donor, Abbasi's understanding is that he gave his son-in-law a chunk of change to "finance a slate," not to specifically make a Trump movie. "Then, at some point, Dan Snyder saw an early cut of the movie and for whatever reason, he didn’t like it," Abbasi continued. "Did he hate it? Was he offended by it? Was he worried that he’d get sued by Trump? I don’t know. I wasn’t there. But from then on, our conversations were very different." Kinematics apparently began asking for edits even though they had read multiple drafts of the script, and it had already been through a rigorous legal review. In the end, these prolonged disagreements led to the eventual buyout.
Still, Abbasi reiterated his point about all of this back-and-forth tying back to the country's messed up financing system. "We needed money to make the movie," he said. "How many billionaires do you think there are in this country who haven’t donated to the Republicans or the Democrats at some time or another, or both?"
