‘Xtreme City’: Paul Schrader Explains What Went Wrong With His Unmade Bollywood Crossover Film Starring Leonardo DiCaprio

In recent years, Paul Schrader is a filmmaker who seemingly is very precious about the types of films he makes. Over the past decade or so, his films are relatively low budget and indie because it gives him freedom to do what he wants. But back in 2011, the filmmaker was interested in teaming up with two of the biggest names in the world for a film titled “Xtreme City.” And now, he’s explaining why it never happened.

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On a recent episode of “Pod Casty for Me” (via The Film Stage), Paul Schrader was asked to detail the story behind his unmade film, “Xtreme City.” The film was to be directed by Schrader, who would also co-write the script alongside Mushtaq Shiekh. Martin Scorsese was going to produce. And perhaps most interesting of all, the film was to star Leonardo DiCaprio and Shah Rukh Khan, one of the biggest names in Bollywood. 

According to Schrader, things were coming together nicely at the beginning, but by the time the writing was happening, both actors seemingly dropped out. 

“I wanted to do that, yeah. I wanted to do that with Shah Rukh Khan and Leo,” said Schrader. “In fact, we all met at Berlin. Scorsese was gonna produce it. Shah Rukh was in Berlin; Leo was there; we all met about it. 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.”

He continued, “And 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.”

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Not much is really known about “Xtreme City.” It would have been made at an interesting time in the career of Schrader. Back in 2011, he was still reeling from the effects of “Dominion,” and he wasn’t really making the most memorable of films. Shortly after this stuff happened with “Xtreme City,” Schrader would go on to make “The Canyons,” “Dying of the Light,” and “Dog Eat Dog.” It wasn’t until we got “First Reformed” in 2017 that we truly were seeing the Schrader renaissance that he’s been on since. 

Schrader’s most recent film is “Oh, Canada.” The film is now available in select theaters.

Charles Barfield

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