The prospect of Donald Trump: The Movie is as impractical as it is inevitable. Any attempt to squeeze the twists, turns, scandal, farce, outrage and horror of even a single month from the past two years of his presidency, let alone his entire life, into a reasonable runtime would be an effort in hubris. And yet, there is no future in which we aren’t inundated with a number of movies about the life and times of the Donald.

Recently, journalist Dan Rather used Twitter to pitch Martin Scorsese as the ideal director for the eventual Trump biopic. Following Rather’s lead, here is a list of film-makers most likely to take up the challenge, as well as those less likely, but well-suited to the task:

Martin Scorsese

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Rather wasn’t the first person to compare the Trump presidency to a Scorsese movie: the director himself said Trump reminds him of his Gangs of New York villain Bill the Butcher, while many have compared the most recent developments of Robert Mueller’s investigation to the third act chaos of Goodfellas. While it’s unlikely Scorsese would ever make a movie explicitly about Trump, it would follow the logical progression of his best-known crime films. From the working-class hustlers of Mean Streets and middle management thugs of Goodfellas, to the millionaire mafiosos of Casino and corporate conmen of Wolf of Wall Street, his films have long traced the ascending arc of greed and power across the American economic divide. It only makes sense that the final entry in this cycle take place within the highest echelons of power.

Jay Roach

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Jay Roach setting his sights on Trump is no hypothetical – the director is currently developing Michael Wolff’s incendiary tabloid account, Fire and Fury, for television. Although he’s best known for directing two of the biggest comedy hits of the last 20 years – Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery and Meet the Parents – Roach is just as prolific when it comes to telling political stories, like HBO dramas Recount, Game Change and All the Way. If these titles sound familiar, you probably know what to expect from Fire and Fury: spot-on casting and top-shelf production values rendered in the service of entertaining, but ultimately unmemorable re-enactment.

Adam McKay

Photograph: Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP

McKay has followed a similar career trajectory to Roach, moving from broad, crowd-pleasing comedies like Anchorman and Step Brothers to openly political fare, such as 2015’s recession drama The Big Short and his upcoming Dick Cheney biography, Backseat. It wouldn’t be surprising if, at some point in the future, he moves his lens (and his artistic ire) from the second George Bush presidency to the Trump administration.

Aaron Sorkin

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It’s going to happen at some point. Whether it’s a courtroom drama in the vein of the Social Network, or a fractured biopic like Steve Jobs, you know that Aaron Sorkin’s #Resistance: The Movie is coming. It’s coming, and there’s nothing you can do about it. Expect huffy indignation, smug monologues about the death of civility in America, and hallways. So many hallways.

Oliver Stone

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Much like Sorkin’s example, an Oliver Stone Trump film seems like a foregone conclusion. It would be surprising if the incorrigible iconoclast didn’t seek to turn his president trilogy – JFK, Nixon, W – into a quartet by way of DJT, especially when you take into account the similarities between the two: both share a taste for conspiracy theories, antipathy for “the Deep State”, and a cozy relationship with the Russian president, Vladimir Putin. Despite his public criticism of Trump, it stands to reason that his biopic would be one of the more sympathetic films made about the president.

The Coen brothers

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As much as the narrative around Trump often resembles a grand tragedy in the making, it just as often comes off as pitch-black farce. The desperate dimwits, grotesque weirdos and sleazy schlemiels and schlimazels that fill out Trumpworld would feel right at home in Fargo, Burn After Reading or The Hudsucker Proxy, while the shabby criminal enterprises they continuously find themselves undone by are as convoluted as the plot of The Big Lebowski. There’s nobody better at wrangling this type of hyperreal chaos into something meaningful as Joel and Ethan Coen, even if their miscreants are more lovable, or at least more pitiable, than the likes of Steven Bannon or Anthony Scaramucci.

Jody Hill

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Along those same lines, the films and television series of Jody Hill (Observe and Report, Eastbound & Down, Vice Principals) are master classes in slapstick vulgarity, but unlike the out-of-their-depth reprobates that populate the Coens’ universes, Hill’s toxic antiheroes tend to reveal themselves as frighteningly capable. Trump doesn’t resemble Kenny Powers in bigotry and crudity alone, but also in his dangerous magnetism and natural cunning. A Hill film (starring Danny McBride as Trump, no doubt) about the era of American carnage would probably be as terrifying as it would hilarious.

Mary Harron

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Canadian film-maker Mary Harron would likewise mine both humor and terror from a Trump biopic, although she would probably lean more towards terror. Harron is expert at telling stories about real-life figures of infamy. While most of her work revolves around notorious women – Betty Page, Anna Nicole Smith, would-be Andy Warhol assassin Valerie Solanas – her best-known film is the adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, which centers around the murderous fantasy life of deranged Wall Street stockbroker/serial killer Patrick Bateman. Bateman is often compared to Trump, which is fitting since Bateman worships Trump in the original novel. But even discarding that piece of trivia, Harron’s film is a deeply disturbing dissection of unfettered wealth, uncontrollable appetite and masculinity at its most fragile and most dangerous, all of which describes Trump to a capital, gold-plated T.

David Lynch

Photograph: PR Company Handout

Given his devotion to abstract themes and dream logic, David Lynch is the last person who would devote a film to Trump or, for that matter, any political figure (references to Harry S Truman notwithstanding). But thanks to the events of a few months ago, when a quote he gave during an interview was taken out of context and held up as supportive of Trump and his policies (leading Trump to praise Lynch as a “great film-maker” during one of his rallies), the two are now forever linked in the history books. It remains highly unlikely that Lynch would explicitly reference Trump in his next movie (if he even decides to make another one), but that doesn’t mean it might not be about Trump on some level. As an artist, Lynch follows his emotional intuition wherever it takes him, and the outrage and disappointment his comments were initially met with clearly had affected him. It’s not too much of a stretch to imagine Lynch working all this out on screen, in the process giving us the White House by way of the Black Lodge.

Stormy Daniels

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Laugh if you must, but in addition to her career as an adult actor, Daniels, who allegedly had an affair with Trump when he hosted The Apprentice, is also a director, with more than 81 credits to her name. She wouldn’t be the first director to make the transition from pornography to “legitimate” movies, and there’s no film-maker on the planet with a more intimate knowledge of Trump at his most unguarded and – literally – naked. Trump: The Movie, if directed by Daniels, would give greater insight into the man’s psyche than any other film save, perhaps, the one that’s rumored to be in the hands of the Russian government.