At a certain time, Bollywood big shot Shah Rukh Khan, Hollywood superstar Leonardo DiCaprio, and epic director Martin Scorsese were about to team up in a Hollywood film called Xtreme City which was going to be a cross-cultural project.
As per IndieWire, the script of the movie, which was developed at the 2011 Berlin Film Festival, was going to be penned by Paul Schrader and Mushtaq Sheikh, while Scorsese was tied to the project as an executive producer. The bold idea missed the goal - being one of the lost projects due to the lack of creativity and logistics issues, with Shah Rukh's half-heartedness having the biggest impact.
Schrader has recently shared the story during the Pod Casty for Me podcast, clouding the movie's unrealized expectations. Allegedly, they had a very high level of interest in Xtreme City, and they discussed it in Berlin. Scorsese was supposed to produce, DiCaprio was cast to play the lead American character, and Shah Rukh was supposed to be a gangster, who was saved by DiCaprio's character, an American police officer, after saving his life in India.
Just the same, the star's interest in the project became less and less. Schrader compared the Bollywood star to a creative genius who was used to calling the shots in all of his projects. He said, "Shah Rukh is the boss. He hires directors - sometimes multiple directors for different aspects of the film." Schrader supplemented by saying: "He has never really worked under the harness of an auteur And he had never been a second banana to somebody like Leo before."
Schrader unveiled he made several visits to Mumbai to have meetings with Shah Rukh, even though he was easily sensing the actor's reluctance. "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 do not commit at all," Schrader remarked.
This kind of indecisiveness had been in the air before. In a 2013 interview with Open, Schrader expressed his enthusiasm for making a Bollywood-Hollywood crossover but also pointed out the difficulties of working with Shah Rukh on Xtreme City. "I just got the feeling that he was never going to be comfortable doing an international film that he didn't control," Schrader confessed.
Schrader also announced that he even briefly thought of Salman Khan, the Bollywood actor, instead of Shah Rukh, but eventually abandoned the idea.