The presidential campaign for former President Donald Trump is planning to file a lawsuit against the filmmakers who are behind a new biopic movie called “The Apprentice.”
The film is set to follow Trump’s early years in real estate. The campaign said it will sue the makers of the film because they have included “blatantly false assertions.”
In a statement submitted to media outlet The Hill, Steven Cheung, a spokesperson for the Trump campaign, said:
“We will be filing a lawsuit to address the blatantly false assertions from these pretend filmmakers. This garbage is pure fiction which sensationalizes lies that have been long debunked.
“As with the illegal Biden Trials, this is election interference by Hollywood elites, who know that President Trump will retake the White House and beat their candidate of choice because nothing they have done has worked.
“This ‘film’ is pure malicious defamation, should not see the light of day, and doesn’t even deserve a place in the straight-to-DVD section of a bargain bin at a soon-to-be-closed discount movie store. It belongs in a dumpster fire.”
Ali Abbassi is the director of the film, which premiered earlier this week at the Cannes Film Festival. The Hill reported that when the film was over, it received a standing ovation from the audience that lasted eight minutes.
The film stars Sebastian Stan, who plays Trump when he was just a real estate developer in New York. Jeremy Strong, who stars in “Succession,” plays Roy Cohn, who is the mentor and former attorney of Trump.
After the film premiered Monday night, reports started to circulate quickly that the film depicts Trump, his relationship with his first wife Ivana and his working relationship with Cohn all in an unfavorable light.
At the premiere, Abbassi said:
“When we did this movie, everyone said, ‘Why do you want to make a movie with Trump? You know, if you want to tell something about the world, do it in a nice way, in a metaphorical way.’”
Then, he continued by saying this next quip, which received raucous applause from the crowd:
“There is no nice, metaphorical way to deal with the rising wave of fascism. The messy way, the banal way, is the only way of dealing with this wave on its own terms, at its own level. It’s not going to be pretty, but I think the problem with the world is that the good people have been quiet for too long.”
One investor in the film is Dan Snyder, a billionaire who is the former owner of the NFL’s Washington Commanders. Snyder considers himself to be a friend of Trump’s and invested in the movie through the film company Kinematics because he believed it was going to depict the former president in a flattering way.
Variety reported just before the film was set to premiere on Monday that Snyder wasn’t happy with the creative direction the film ended up taking.
Apparently, he tried to stop the film from being released after first seeing a cut of it a few months ago, but that didn’t work out the way he wanted.
