Leonardo DiCaprio’s brief flirtation with Bollywood: “Scorsese was gonna produce”
With a career dating back over 35 years, most of which have been spent as one of Hollywood’s most famous faces, Leonardo DiCaprio has touched base with almost every genre under the sun.
It’s highly unlikely he’ll ever make an out-and-out horror movie again after Critters 3, but he’s still done it. The Academy Award winner has admitted that sci-fi isn’t exactly his favourite genre, but he ticked that box nonetheless when he headlined Christopher Nolan’s mind-bending Inception.
At various points throughout his decades in the spotlight, DiCaprio has appeared in dramas, thrillers, biopics, westerns, period pieces, romances, comedies, and documentaries, which means there aren’t a lot of boxes on his genre checklist that remain unticked. Of course, several exceptions remain.
For one, he’s never been in a straightforward run-and-gun action flick. Nor has he let sparks fly as the co-lead of a romantic comedy, although he made it sound like he’s never been offered one. Fantasy has been another no-go area, but he doesn’t come across as a swords-and-sorcery kind of actor, so that probably won’t happen.
Apart from that, he’s pretty much seen and done it all, but he almost made the most unexpected career move when he was seriously contemplating reuniting with his muse, Martin Scorsese, and the legendary filmmaker’s Taxi Driver scribe, Paul Schrader, to shoot a Bollywood blockbuster with Shah Rukh Khan.
He may not be particularly well-known in America, but make no mistake about it: Khan is one of cinema’s biggest stars, regardless of nationality. A box office behemoth and an icon who regularly takes home a higher pay packet than DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, and Tom Cruise, it could have been a team-up for the ages.
“I wanted to do that, yeah. I wanted to do that with Shah Rukh Khan and Leo,” Schrader told Filmmaker Magazine. “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 else for the personal/relationship scenes. He can do that.”
Khan and DiCaprio were set to play an Indian and an American who served together as part of a United Nations peacekeeping force in the 1990s in the movie, tentatively titled Xtreme City. Alongside Schrader directing and writing the script and Scorsese producing, Khan’s trusted writer Mushtaq Shiek, producer Anubhav Sinha, and production company Sahara One were all on board, and things were looking rosy for a while.
Unfortunately, Schrader hinted that the Bollywood icon wasn’t too keen on stepping outside his comfort zone. “He has never really worked under the harness of an auteur,” he explained. “And that, I could see, was starting to grate on him. And he had never been a second banana to somebody like Leo before.”
Thanks to Khan’s hesitance, which the filmmaker compared to “the ground slowly eroding underneath him,” Xtreme City came apart at the seams. If he wouldn’t commit, then DiCaprio wouldn’t commit, and after that happened, the whole thing vanished into the ether of development hell forever.
