The director of the new Donald Trump movie The Apprentice seems undeterred by how the former president’s team reacted to his film.
Filmmaker Ali Abbasi’s latest big-screen offering premiered at the Cannes Film Festival over the summer, and while it received a somewhat mixed reaction from critics, the response from the Trump camp was much more scathing.
Steven Cheung, the spokesperson for Trump’s current presidential campaign, threatened legal action against the film back in May, branding The Apprentice “garbage” and “pure fiction which sensationalises lies that have been long debunked”.
When asked by The Hollywood Reporter about concerns over future threats from the Trump team, Ali offered simply: “I doubt they have the balls.”
“They know we’re right,” he continued. “They know there’s nothing to be sued about. They know that things are accurate and double and triple, quadruple checked journalistically and legally. There’s nothing there, you know.”
He added defiantly: “I mean, bring it on. That’s what I tell them.”
Earlier this year, Trump’s spokesperson described The Apprentice as “election interference by Hollywood elites”, claiming it “should not see the light of day”, belongs “in a dumpster fire” 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”.
Interestingly, Trump himself has remained tight-lipped about the film – which stars Sebastian Stan as a younger Trump, and Succession’s Jeremy Strong as his mentor Roy Cohn – so far.
Oscar nominee Maria Bakalova, who previously won acclaim for her work in the second Borat film, also appears as the republican presidential candidate’s late first wife Ivana Trump.
Ali previously claimed that he doesn’t think his film is one that Trump himself “would dislike”.
“I don’t necessarily think he would like it,” he clarified. “But I think he’d be surprised. So I’m happy to meet him, have a screening and then we can discuss it afterwards.”