‘The Apprentice’ director warns Cannes audience: ‘The worst times are to come’

The director of the movie about a young Donald Trump says there’s “no nice, metaphorical way” in filmmaking to “deal with the rising wave of fascism.”

“The Iranian president died. The Israeli prime minister is being indicted in the international court. There’s a war in Ukraine. There’s a war in Sudan. There’s all sorts of s— going on,” Ali Abbasi, the director of “The Apprentice,” told an audience at the Cannes Film Festival on Monday, according to a video from Variety.

“I think in the time of turmoil you know, there’s this tendency to look inwards, to sort of bury your head deep in the sand, and look inside, and hope for the best and hope for the storm to get away,” Abbasi said. 

“But the storm is not going to get away,” the director, who was born in Iran, continued. “The storm is coming, actually. The worst times are to come.”

Abbasi’s film — which stars Sebastian Stan as a then-New York real estate developer Trump and Jeremy Strong of “Succession” as the future president’s real-life former attorney and mentor Roy Cohn — reportedly received an eight-minute standing ovation at its Cannes premiere.

“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,'” Abbasi recalled.

But, he said to applause, “There is no nice, metaphorical way to deal with the rising wave of fascism. The messy way, the banal way, is only the way of dealing with this wave on its own terms, at its own level.”

“It’s not going to be pretty,” he added, “but I think the problem with the world is that the good people have been quiet for too long.”