'Shah Rukh Khan is the boss, he hires directors, he has never really worked under...,' when this writer revealed why SRK's film with Martin Scorsese-Leonardo DiCaprio got shelved

Shah Rukh Khan is a global icon and one of the biggest movie stars in history. For all those who think it’s only Danny Boyle who came with an offer from Hollywood, there’s another film the Jawan star was offered and that too starring Leonardo DiCaprio and helmed by the great Martin Scorsese. However, the film was ultimately canned.

What happened?

Filmmaker Paul Schrader, best known for penning the screenplay of the classic  _Taxi Driver_  , spoke about how  Shah Rukh Khan  wanted to have control over things the project was pitched to  Salman Khan  as well. The film was reportedly titled Xtreme City and was supposed to be a thriller with one protagonist from the East and the other from the West.

Paul said in an interview recently, “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.”

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He added, “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.”

Also, speaking to Open Magazine in 2013, the filmmaker revealed, “ Well, in the end, I don’t think Shah Rukh wanted to make it. 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 percent in control.”