Paul Schrader: “Shah Rukh Khan was reluctant to play second fiddle to Leonardo DiCaprio” in the scrapped film “Xtreme City”

During a recent podcast appearance on Pod Casty For Me (via The Film Stage), writer/director Paul Schrader (“Taxi Driver”, “First Reformed”, “The Card Counter”) revealed some interesting details on the scrapped crime-thriller “Xtreme City” — which was set to star, probably the two biggest actors of the time - Shah Rukh Khan and Leonardo DiCaprio. The film was conceived during the 2011 Berlin Film Festival, and was to be written by Schrader and Mustaq Shiekh, with Martin Scorsese as an executive producer.

Schrader stated that SRK gradually lost interest in the film, which lead to Leo losing interest and the film was shelved. The film would have seen SRK play a gangster confronted by an American police officer played by DiCaprio, after saving his life in India.

Schrader noted that Khan, had he done the film, would have had to play “second banana” to DiCaprio, something he’s never done. “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 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.”

Years later Schrader tried to recast SRK with another Bollywood celebrity - Salman Khan, however, that also didn’t come to fruition (thank god). Schrader stated that “..I couldn’t take it very far with Salman — because if SRK found that out, that would have killed it for SRK.”