Shah Rukh Khan and Leonardo DiCaprio were set to star in a film together which was supposed to be produced by Martin Scorsese, however, it got shelved. Writer-director Paul Schrader revealed that there was a lack of commitment from the two about the project.
During a conversation on Pod Casty for Me, Paul said that initially there was interest shown by all three of them on making the film and they even met in Berlin to discuss it. However, Shah Rukh started distancing himself along the way.
“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,” Paul said.
The film was titled Xtreme City and Shah Rukh was supposed to play a gangster who is confronted by a cop played by Leonardo. Paul 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.”
Paul is known for writing screenplays of Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976), Raging Bull (1980) and The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) among others.
