Back in the day, Bollywood’s Badshah Shah Rukh Khan was in talks with Hollywood star Leonardo DiCaprio and ace filmmaker Martin Scorsese. The trio were up for a potential collaboration for a project titled ‘Xtreme City.’ ‘Wolf of Wallstreet’ maker Martin Scorsese was going to back the film with Paul Schrader at the helm. However, the project got canned. SRK had a significant role in it. Reportedly, the leading actor of Bollywood’s disinterst in playing the second fiddle to Leonardo was the reason. In a recent conversation, Paul opened up about the reason behind the shelving of the film and its plot.

During his appearance on the Pod Casty for Me podcast, the director revealed that initially, the trio were discussing the collaboration, however, SRK lost interest soon. Paul said that Shah Rukh has always led titles his way and this started to impact his interest in the film. “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.”

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The plotline of ‘Xtreme City’ revolved around SRK, a gangster and Leonardo, an American cop. After saving the officer’s life in India, years later, the duo come face to face.

Moving ahead in the conversation, Paul opened up about the hurdles in executing the script. He said, “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. 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.”

Previously as well, Paul expressed his interest in intermingling Bollywood and Hollywood. In 2013, he told Open, “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.”

Also Read: Dua Lipa rocks Mumbai with SRK mashup, fans go wild!

During the time, the director was apprehensive if SRK would like to do the project. He said, “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.” Moreover, he disclosed that there was a time when he thought of recasting Shah Rukh Khan with Salman Khan. However, he refrained from doing so. “If SRK found that out, that would have killed it for SRK”.

Meanwhile, Paul Schrader and Martin Scorsese have previously collaborated on several hit titles. These include ‘Taxi Driver,’ ‘Raging Bull’ and ‘The Last Temptation of Christ.’