My friends at Pod Casty for Me––a show that began as a look at the films of Clint Eastwood before transitioning to a series on Paul Schrader––spoke to the latter during his Oh, Canada press tour, scoring an extended and enlightening conversation on the political junctures at which his work does (or doesn’t stand), writing process, and a present moment that sees multiple spec scripts in different states of development. Having spoken to Schrader on three separate occasions I can vouch for it as valuable time spent with the man.
This chat also uncovered further detail on arguably the most tantalizing unmade project in Schrader’s career: Xtreme City, which would’ve paired the biggest star in the west (Leonardo DiCaprio) with the biggest star in the east (Shah Rukh Khan), was co-written by the latter’s frequent collaborator Mushtaq Shiekh, and had executive-producing credit from Martin Scorsese. Despite such dizzying pedigree and potential, the film-that-never-was––perhaps for having been initiated in the director’s pre-comeback era––is hardly remembered and rarely remarked-upon. In the New York Times‘ seminal account of making The Canyons Schrader refers to its Hollywood-Bollywood crossover as “the future of filmmaking,” until it’s noted “the Indian money dried up, and DiCaprio lost interest.”
Schrader has occasionally mentioned the project before, but never in such detail, and his story is a frustrating window into actor egos and the house of cards that is assembling any film:
“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 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.
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.”
As the India Times detailed in 2011, Xtreme City concerns “two men from radically different worlds, one an Indian and the other American. Both served in the UN peacekeeping force in Somalia during the 1990s. The American saves the Indian’s life then brings him home, in the aftermath they became indebted to each other.. then go their own separate ways.”
Shiekh elaborated on the narrative he’d constructed with Schrader:
“The American becomes a cop in New York, the Indian a bhai in Mumbai. Many years later, the American has a burdensome family obligation, which compels him to return to India to seek help from the Indian comrade whose life he had saved, but becomes deeper and deeper drawn into an alien world.”
Sadly, the film is almost certainly never to be made––a superstar’s demands can move mountains––but one can dream. Stay tuned for our own interview with Schrader later this week.