Iranian-Danish filmmaker Ali Abbasi wants to see fewer films being made that explore historic figures and a greater focus on the present, saying: “We have been too much focused on the past.”
“For the past 20 years we’ve been doing too much historical drama, guilty as charged myself. Too many things that are [set] in different times. We are living an extremely exciting, crazy times. There is more happening in a year now than happened in decade.
“If you compare this last year with any time in the 1990s or 80s, it’s blowing up. And then if you look at the movies, the cinema and the TV and everything, you don’t really see it. You might see stuff about relationship but not about our situation.”
Abbasi was speaking at his Galway Film Fleadh director’s masterclass on July 12. When asked about what he will make next, he said: “Right now, I’m trying to understand what’s going on, so I can try to react.”
His Cannes 2024 premiere The Apprentice follows the complex relationship between now-US president Donald Trump and Roy Cohn, the lawyer who influenced Trump in his formative years across the 1970s and 1980s. It was made as a Canada-Ireland-Denmark co-production.
Abbasi reflected on the challenges of portraying a figure on screen who has become “sort of as famous as Jesus Christ” and someone who “is a parody of himself”.
Before casting Sebastian Stan in the lead role, he first toyed with the idea of using heavy prosthetics, and considered having a woman play Trump, akin to Cate Blanchett as Bob Dylan in I’m Not There. “That turned out to be too gimmicky,” he noted.
Relfecting on what the recurring thread is throughout his body of work, which include Cannes 2023 premiere Holy Spider, about a spate of murders of prostitutes in the holy city of Mashhad in Iran, a place Abbasi described as “the Vatican meets Las Vegas” , and Un Certain Regard 2018 winner Border, Abbasi observed: “I like explicit cinema… I’m not interested that much in [what’s in] the middle.”
He continued, “Maybe what is a little bit of a red thread in what I’m doing is I like to look for humanity in places that you won’t you usually look.”
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