Donald Trump Has a Very Odd Interpretation of 'Citizen Kane'

Donald Trump may have some controversial political views, but as the above video shows, the 69-year-old presidential candidate (and aspiring movie star) has great taste in film — even if some of his cinematic interpretations are a bit unconventional.

Long before he was the star of NBC’s The Apprentice or the unlikely leader of the Republican presidential primary, Trump was a mere celebrity billionaire, which gave him time to participate in a mini-documentary project with Oscar-winning documentarian Errol Morris. The Fog of War and The Thing Blue Line director spent five days in 2002 with a litany of celebrities and dignitaries, filming them as they talked about their favorite movies. According to a New Yorker article about the project, Morris ended up with over 24 hours of footage; he later whittled it down to just more than four minutes for a segment that aired at the Oscars that year, which you can watch below:

One interview that didn’t make the final cut was Trump talking about his favorite movie, the 1941 classic Citizen Kane. Though his background differs greatly from that of the film’s titular character — Trump was born wealthy, while Kane, played by director Orson Welles, built an empire from modest means —the real-estate mogul had an innate understanding of the isolation that often burdens the fabulously rich. He also expertly pointed out some of the cinematic tricks Welles used to signal Kane’s growing wealth and loneliness, including the ever-changing kitchen table that kept Kane further and further from his wife.

On the topic of Kane’s wife — and the character’s troubled love life in general — Trump’s advice may have been a bit off the mark: Trump suggests the solution to Kane’s problem is simply that he “get a new woman,” which most definitely shows that Trump did not realize that the unhappiness felt by Kane’s wife, played in the film by Dorothy Comingore, was tied to Kane’s increasing wealth and megalomania. Then again, Trump has been married three times, so perhaps he was just speaking from experience.

Morris at one point intended to insert his celebrity-interview subjects into their favorite movies via digital trickery. “Isn’t it possible,” Morris asked rhetorically on his blog, “that in an alternative universe Donald Trump actually starred in Citizen Kane?” For a look at the script Morris would have used to insert Trump into Citizen Kane, check out Morris’ website.

Here’s a supercut of some of Trump’s most painful movie cameos: