With credits for compelling films like Raging Bull, Taxi Driver, The Last Temptation of Christ, American Gigolo and many others, Paul Schrader is considered a master in the world of both screenwriting and direction. He has often been seen as an inspiring figure for many budding scriptwriters around the globe. Those who have seen his many masterclasses know that he is constantly on the prowl for new ideas for film stories. So it wasn't surprising then that when he travelled to New Delhi more than a decade ago, for the national film festival, he was struck with the idea of making a film that brought together elements of the two largest film industries in the world —Hollywood and Bollywood.
“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,” Schrader was quoted telling the podcast handle Pod Casty for Me, as revealed by online publication IndieWire, “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.”
Schrader then set about bringing the best of the two film industries together. That chance came at the Berlin Film Festival in 2011, probably at the time when SRK was also shooting Don 2 in the German capital. “I wanted to do that, yeah. I wanted to do that with Shah Rukh Khan and Leo. In fact, we all met at Berlin. Scorsese was going to produce it. Shah Rukh was in Berlin; Leo was there; we all met about it,” Schrader said in the podcast.
According to IndieWire, the film, called Xtreme City, was conceived to be a crime drama involving Shah Rukh playing a Mumbai gangster, and Leonardo as an American cop whose life was once saved by the SRK character. Schrader was to write the film with Shah Rukh’s frequent collaborator Mushtaq Sheikh, and Scorsese was to provide his expertise as the Executive Producer.
Schrader revealed in the podcast that he travelled to Mumbai several times to develop the script. But as the script reached its finishing point, what once seemed like a winning combination of superstars, fell apart precisely because everyone involved was a superstar. As he told the podcast, “Bit-by-bit, I wrote the script. I went to Mumbai several times to see him (SRK) 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.”
“Shah Rukh is the boss,” Schrader added, “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.”
As Schrader puts it, the script was ready, but SRK was not. “Well, in the end, I don’t think Shah Rukh wanted to make it. 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. You know that everything SRK does, he has total control over? So if he did something like this at an international level, he wouldn’t have that control. I think in the end he wasn’t that comfortable not being a hundred per cent in control. We did have a script, which was a hundred per cent paid for. We also had a meeting with SRK and Leo in Berlin, but neither of them actually ever committed. There was a lot of waiting — maybe they were waiting for each other to commit, but it never quite happened.”
After the project hit a dead end, Schrader revealed that he tried to resurrect it with Salman Khan but that idea didn't fly either. “I was interested in doing it with Salman Khan some years ago. I actually met with him, but I couldn’t really take it very far with Salman — because if SRK found that out, that would have killed it for SRK.” Will Xtreme City ever be revived? One can never tell.
