There was a time when Bollywood actor Shah Rukh Khan met Hollywood star Leonardo DiCaprio and filmmaker Martin Scorsese to discuss a Hollywood film titled Xtreme City. Now, director Paul Schrader has revealed why it got shelved, saying Shah Rukh had a big role to play in it.

Paul Schrader opens up

During the Pod Casty for Me podcast, Paul reflected on the film that was never made. He revealed that the three of them showed interest in the project at one point, sharing that they even met in Berlin to discuss it. Martin was supposed to produce the project. However, he claimed that Shah Rukh lost interest midway.

Paul said, “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. 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.”

Sharing the plotline, Paul shared that Shah Rukh was supposed to play a gangster in the film who an American police officer confronts, planned for Leonardo, after saving his life in India.

He added, “Bit-by-bit, I wrote the script. 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.”

In the past

In an interview with Open in 2013, Paul discussed his desire to work on a Bollywood-inspired project.

He said, “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...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.”

At that time, Paul said that he didn’t think Shah Rukh wanted to make Xtreme City, mentioning, “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”.

Paul shared that there was a time when he thought of recasting Shah Rukh Khan with Salman Khan, but didn’t because “if SRK found that out, that would have killed it for SRK".

On the work front

Paul is known for working with Martin on screenplays of his projects such as Driver, Raging Bull, and The Last Temptation of Christ. He is also known for making First Reformed in 2017, following it up with the Man in a Room trilogy. His most recent project is Oh, Canada.

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