Back To The Future writer backtracks about Biff's Donald Trump inspiration

Now in a new interview with The Guardian celebrating the 40th anniversary of the original film, Gale tempers his previous remarks about Trump being the outright inspo—at least at first. “Biff in the first movie is not based on Donald Trump; Biff is just an archetype bully. When Biff owns a casino, there was a Trump influence in that, absolutely. Trump had to put his name on all of his hotels and his casinos and that’s what Biff does too,” Gale explains. “But when people say, oh, Biff was based on Donald Trump, well, no, that wasn’t the inspiration for the character. Everybody has a bully in their life and that’s who Biff was. There’s nothing that resembles Donald Trump in Biff in Part I.”

Gale says that “the idea that Back To The Future is still with us after all these years, as popular as it ever was, is a blessing,” but everything could’ve been entirely different if they’d gone with the originally cast lead Eric Stoltz. “I think about it all the time that if we had not put Michael J Fox in the movie, you and I probably wouldn’t even be having this conversation right now,” Gale tells The Guardian, which is quite a thematically appropriate line of thinking. And if he’d used a time machine to come and pitch the movie in 2025, “the film wouldn’t even be made,” he guesses. “We’d go into the studio and they’d say, what’s the deal with this relationship between Marty and Doc? They’d start interpreting paedophilia or something. There would be a lot of things they have problems with.”