'The Apprentice' director talks about the film Donald Trump doesn't want you to see

At first glance, Ali Abbasi might seem like the least likely candidate to make a film about former President Donald Trump's origin story.

The 43-year-old director was born in Tehran, lives in Denmark and has made films that deal with the supernatural (Border, 2018), horror (Shelley, 2016) and serial murder (Holy Spider, 2022). But that background also gives him a uniquely detached outlook on a deeply polarizing topic on the eve of November's presidential election in which Trump is seeking another term.

"You're so good with monsters and trolls... Do you want to make a movie about Donald Trump?" Abbasi recalls screenwriter Gabriel Sherman's manager telling him in 2018. The Apprentice, out in theaters on Oct. 11, takes what Abbasi calls a "radically humanist angle." The story focuses on Trump's (Sebastian Stan) formative years as a New York real estate businessman under the tutelage of Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong), his attorney and unlikely mentor.

Trump at first seems like a plucky, somewhat naïve young man trying to please his father

Similarly, Trump's mistreatment of a dying Cohn toward the end of the film elicits empathy for the one-time mafia fixer and "Red Scare" prosecutor. Abbasi also mined Trump's relationships with his older brother Fred (Charlie Carrick) and with his first wife Ivana (Maria Bakalova).

Another character in the story is New York itself, portrayed in its '70s and '80s grime and grit glory with grainy, saturated documentary-like images.

Cohn, who also appears as a maligned figure in Tony Kushner's play Angels in America, "is not as well known as he should be," Abbasi told NPR's A Martínez. "He was famously a closeted gay, homophobic, anti-intellectual intellectual, some say a self-hating Jew, all these