Paul Schrader Details Scrapped Martin Scorsese Collaboration ‘Xtreme City’ with Leonardo DiCaprio and Shah Rukh Khan Set to Star
Paul Schrader is bringing out the details on his dead movie “Xtreme City.”
Schrader was set to reunite with his “Taxi Driver” and “Bringing Out the Dead” collaborator Scorsese on now-infamous scrapped feature “Xtreme City.” Frequent Scorsese muse Leonardo DiCaprio was confirmed to star alongside Bollywood legend Shah Rukh Khan. The crime film, which was conceived during the 2011 Berlin Film Festival, was to be written by Schrader and Mushtaq Shiekh, with Scorsese as an executive producer.
More from IndieWire
During the “Pod Casty for Me” podcast (via The Film Stage), Schrader reflected on the film that never was.
“I wanted to do that, yeah. I wanted to do that with Shah Rukh Khan and Leo. In fact, we all met at Berlin. Scorsese was going to produce it. Shah Rukh was in Berlin; Leo was there; we all met about it,” Schrader said.
However, Khan’s international celebrity may have complicated things.
“Shah Rukh is the boss. He hires directors. Sometimes he hires multiple directors: he’ll hire somebody for the musical number; he’ll hire somebody else for the action; he’ll hire somebody else for the personal-relationship scenes. He can do that,” Schrader said. “He has never really worked under the harness of an auteur, and that, I could see, was starting to grate on him. And he had never done a film in the West before, and he had never been a second banana to somebody like Leo before.”
Yet Schrader continued developing the film, with Khan slated to play a gangster who is confronted by an American cop (DiCaprio) after saving his life in India.
“Bit-by-bit, I wrote the script,” Schrader said. “I went to Mumbai several times to see him and be with him — I could feel the ground slowly eroding underneath him. So finally his commitment was provisional, and then once his commitment went from ‘firm’ to ‘provisional,’ Leo’s went from ‘firm’ to ‘provisional.’ Now you have two ‘provisional’ commitments, which means you have no commitment at all.”
Schrader had previously told Open in 2013 that he was looking to expand his repetetoire to include a Bollywood-inspired film.
“I was intrigued about Bollywood for a brief period because I had flown to Delhi for a film festival and I had met some people there who asked me if I would like to work on a cross-cultural film,” Schrader said, while also citing the global state of modern filmmaking. “I just liked the idea of trying to combine an international movie with a Bollywood movie. I’m always interested in things that haven’t been done before.”
Schrader continued of “Xtreme City” at the time, “Well, in the end, I don’t think Shah Rukh wanted to make it. It was really up to him, and I just got the feeling that he was never going to be comfortable doing an international film that he didn’t control. You know that everything SRK does, he has total control over? So if he did something like this at an international level, he wouldn’t have that control. I think in the end he wasn’t that comfortable not being a hundred per cent in control. We did have a script, which was a hundred per cent paid for. We also had a meeting with SRK and Leo in Berlin, but neither of them actually ever committed. There was a lot of waiting — maybe they were waiting for each other to commit, but it never quite happened.”
Schrader almost recast Shah Rukh Khan with Salman Khan years later, though. However, that also did not come to fruition.
“I was interested in doing it with Salman Khan some years ago. I actually met with him, but I couldn’t really take it very far with Salman — because if SRK found that out, that would have killed it for SRK,” Schrader said.
Best of IndieWire
Sign up for Indiewire's Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
Solve the daily Crossword
