Maria Bakalova (left) plays Ivana Trump in Ali Abbasi’s The studentopposite Sebastian Stan as Donald Trump.

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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 about the supernatural (Border2018), horror (Shelley2016) and serial murder (Holy Spider2022). But that background also gives him a uniquely detached view 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 remembers screenwriter Gabriel Sherman’s manager telling him that in 2018. The studentwhich hits theaters on October 11, takes what Abbasi calls a “radical humanist angle.” The story focuses on Trump’s (Sebastian Stan) early years as a New York real estate businessman under the tutelage of Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong), his lawyer and unlikely mentor.

Trump initially seems like a brave, somewhat naive young man trying to please his father

Likewise, Trump’s mistreatment of a dying Cohn near the end of the film generates empathy for the former mob fixer and “Red Scare” prosecutor. Abbasi also undermined 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 the grim glory of the ’70s and ’80s with grainy, saturated documentary-style images.

Cohn, who also appears as a maligned figure in Tony Kushner’s play Angels in America“isn’t as well known as he should be,” Abbasi told NPR’s A Martínez. “He was known as a hidden homosexual, homophobic, anti-intellectual intellectual, some say a self-hating Jew, all these contradictory things… But he was also a very colorful, very interesting person and charming and had a room full of frogs.” dolls.”

Cohn died of AIDS complications in 1986, but he maintained to the end that his illness was liver cancer. In the months leading up to his death, the man who had worked with celebrities and political heavyweights was suspended and sued by the IRS for $7 million in back taxes.

Director Ali Abbasi photographed at NPR headquarters on October 2, 2024.

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Abbasi sees Cohn as integral to the genealogy of the American populist right, and particularly adept at creating his own truth through the media. In one scene, Cohn tells Trump, “There is no right and wrong. There is no morality. There is no truth with a capital T. It is a construction. It’s a fiction. It is man-made. None of it matters except winning.”

The director recalls a conversation he had with Sherman, the screenwriter, about how Trump’s rise in American politics has been depicted in the past.

“I told him that I feel like in America our liberal friends think he’s a monster and he showed up and destroyed healthcare, destroyed infrastructure. That also implies that we are innocent, that we are good liberal people. We tried to stop him but failed,” Abbasi said. “But that’s not the case… We’re basically saying, ‘Oh, you think he’s the other. Let’s look at him. Let’s look at us, from his perspective. Is he really the other? Is he different? Really?’ ”

Humanistic or not, Trump’s portrayal is unflattering and the film has been mired in controversy from the start

The film shows a scene in which Trump allegedly rapes Ivana. In her divorce decree, the Czech-born entrepreneur and model said Trump raped her in 1989 after she underwent a painful scalp reduction to remove a bald spot. She later walked back that claim in a statement published in the Harry Hurt III biography Lost Tycoon: The Many Lives of Donald J. Trump (1993). In that statement, Ivana Trump said: “I called this a ‘rape,’ but I do not want my words to be interpreted in a literal or criminal sense.” She died in 2022.

The student shows Ivana (Maria Bakalova) and Donald Trump (Sebastian Stan) falling in and out of love.

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Trump’s team issued legal threats to prevent this The student from screening in the US “When we premiered (at the) Cannes Film Festival, they made a very conscious effort to scare away all the distributors, by sending us a cease and desist order… They really managed to get us buried, until very, very recently,” Abbasi said.

At the same time, he added, the film’s financing “fell apart” several times because liberal figures in the Hollywood scene felt the film was “too sympathetic” to Trump.

“What’s crazy is the whole idea that this is a controversial movie, because there’s nothing really controversial about it… you could write the script with information from Wikipedia,” Abbasi added. “To me, that’s the most controversial part: Corporate Hollywood thinks we’re dangerous and beyond.”

Abbasi calls his film “an experience” that takes viewers through Trump’s arc, from young businessman to the politician he is today. Rather than examining the hyper-polarized nature of American politics, Abbasi is interested in the underlying structure that promotes this kind of polarization.

“If there’s a bigger message in the film for me, it’s that … the basic instruments of power are not so partisan,” he said.

“I find this kind of flexibility of ideology interesting because it means that someone like Mr. Trump, when the time comes, becomes a Republican after being a Democrat for 30 years. I think that’s the way to look at this system. and try to sort of pick apart this bipartisan stuff and look at the kind of naked power structure.”

The broadcast version of this story was produced by Julie Depenbrock. The digital version was edited by Obed Manuel.