The Fire Behind The Film: ‘The Apprentice’
Interview with three leads.
https://deadline.com/2024/10/the-apprentice-movie-timeline-cast-director-interview-1236113612/
After much pre-release turbulence, The Apprentice today opens on 1,740 screens across the country. Inspiring coming-of-age tales are a Hollywood staple, but most are warm and cozy compared to The Apprentice. In this ‘70s-set Manhattan tale, an ambitious real estate developer looking to crack the big time finds a mentor and role model in a take-no-prisoners lawyer who during the Red Scare was Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s henchman, and who sent the Rosenbergs to the electric chair.
Donald Trump had no political or even reality TV ambitions; he mostly wanted to prove himself to an impossible-to-please father, who had Donald going door to door to collect rent from hostile low-income tenants. Cohn helped fuel Trump’s rise, even showing him the dark arts that included an office where he surreptitiously taped intimate conversations of his enemies. Cohn used these like brass knuckles, in one scene threatening to expose same-sex trysts of one married man whose vote got Trump and his father a slap on the wrist for discriminating against Black renters in their apartment buildings.
Trump was wide-eyed as Cohn revealed the three rules by which he lived: 1) Attack, attack, attack; 2) Admit nothing, deny everything; and 3) No matter what happens, you claim victory and never admit defeat. Though the events are 50 years old and meant to guide Trump’s growth into a real estate mogul, they’ve proven useful in presidential politics all these years later.
What follows are interviews done during the film’s twisty road, beginning with Abbasi, Sherman, Sebastian Stan and Jeremy Strong right after their Telluride premiere, when they seemed dazed to even be there. A follow-up story will add commentary from Briarcliff’s Ortenberg and producer Amy Baer, who seven years ago started all this by buying a pitch by Sherman, who then was a top journalist who took down former Fox News chief Roger Ailes for his predations against young on-air talent, and had covered Trump for years.