“The Apprentice,” director Ali Abbasi‘s story of Donald Trump’s rise in the New York real estate world under the tutelage of Machiavellian attorney Roy Cohn, has a visual style that recalls New Hollywood classics like “Midnight Cowboy” and “Taxi Driver.” But as the film becomes more and more about moral disintegration, “The Apprentice” also brings to mind junky broadcast video of the 1980s. Yet for Abbasi, the key reference point was a film with surfaces quite different from those of the gritty, punk rock “Apprentice”: Stanley Kubrick’s stately, elegant 18th-century period piece “Barry Lyndon.”
While the thuggish, urban Trump and Cohn may seem far removed from the genteel European aristocrats of Kubrick’s film, Abbasi said he and screenwriter Gabriel Sherman found many similarities between Trump and the social climber played by Ryan O’Neal.
“There were some really interesting parallels,” Abbasi told IndieWire. “There’s something very striking about the rise of Redmond Barry and his downfall, which is that he doesn’t have a clear ambition. He just wants to ascend. He’s a climber. And that’s the way I felt about the young Donald.”
What Abbasi found most interesting about Kubrick’s film was how Barry’s ambition intersected with the political and economic mechanisms of his era — something else he felt was highly relevant to Trump’s story.
“What I love about ‘Barry Lyndon’ is that instead of going into his childhood and saying his dad was tough and his mom was lovely, it’s more about the system,” Abbasi said. “He’s sort of the ball in a pinball machine that bounces around and through the militaristic political system of Europe at the time. That’s very accurate for ‘The Apprentice’ as well. You get a sense following Donald and Roy Cohn of how you can navigate and manipulate the political and legal system to your own benefit.”
Abbasi’s examination of that system, and of Trump and Cohn specifically, is informed by his cultural background (he’s Iranian-Danish) and that of his department heads, nearly none of whom are American. This distance is one of the film’s greatest strengths, as “The Apprentice” feels less like a treatise or a propaganda piece than an organic drama starting from character — something important to Abbasi, the real Trump’s protestations of bias notwithstanding.
“None of us were part of this highly charged and polarized political landscape that exists in the U.S. right now,” Abbasi said. “That meant we could concentrate on the movie more as a movie and a character study and a relationship piece than a political statement.”
For Abbasi, all of the filmmaking choices grew out of Trump himself as a character rather than the desire to impose a predetermined thesis. That included the bold decision to shift from a textured, celluloid-inspired look in the first half of the movie to the appearance of garish broadcast video in the second.
“The 1970s feel like a more authentic, innocent decade for Donald,” Abbasi said. “When he becomes more vulgar and yuppie, and everything feels more constructed in the 1980s, you get this contrast between organic celluloid and a more lifeless, lower resolution VHS look.” Adopting this visual style also had the practical benefit of allowing Abbasi and cinematographer Kasper Tuxen to emulate the look of the stock footage they were using — a necessity because they didn’t have the time or money to fully recreate 1970s and 1980s New York on location in Toronto.
To that end, Abbasi decided to maximize his resources in a few key sequences where he would recreate everything down to the smallest detail, and then allow himself more flexibility in other areas.
“For those other scenes, the rule of thumb was, ‘If it’s not wrong, it’s right,’” he said. “Usually, in historical movies, people chase these fetishistic details, especially in cities like New York. I think it helped me not having that reverence, because at the end of the day, this isn’t a movie about the New York streets; it’s about these characters and their evolution. If you’re thinking about the backgrounds, then we’re doing something wrong.”
“The Apprentice” is now in theaters.
