Key points
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Martin Scorsese nearly made a Cleopatra movie in the early 2010s.
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Angelina Jolie was on board to portray the Egyptian ruler.
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However, the project was canceled after a Seth Rogen project “blew up” the studio.
Martin Scorsese never got to make his Cleopatra movie — and he’s pointing the blame in a hilarious direction.
The Goodfellas filmmaker reflected on his abandoned biopic about the Egyptian ruler during a conversation with his daughter, Francesca, in Tribeca’s new video series Crafty.
“We were gonna do Cleopatra at one point, and then they made fun of [Kim Jong Un], and he got mad and blew up everybody at Columbia,” the Wolf of Wall Street filmmaker said. “Seth Rogen, right? And then he got mad, and [it] ruined Cleopatra.”
Scorsese was referring to Rogen’s controversial film The Interview, which featured a fictional mission to assassinate North Korean leader Kim Jong Un as its central plot conceit. The film prompted a threat from the North Korean government, and later a massive hack of Sony Pictures that leaked private emails and proprietary information about the studio’s inner workings. The FBI ultimately concluded that the North Korean government ordered the hack, which disrupted the studio’s plans.
The Irishman filmmaker indicated that his Cleopatra project was ready to go with Angelina Jolie in the lead role before the Sony hack disrupted his plans.
“We were gonna do it,” he said, noting that screenwriter Eric Roth, with whom he later collaborated on 2023’s Killers of the Flower Moon, was set to pen the screenplay. “Angelina Jolie. We were going. She was gonna be Cleopatra VII. It was gonna be really wild.”
“Seth, you ruined Cleopatra!” The filmmaker’s daughter half-jokingly said. “I’m so mad about it.”
Scorsese responded, “Well, tell Seth, because they ruined everything. Just because Kim Jong Un doesn’t have a sense of humor.”
Entertainment Weekly has reached out to representatives for Rogen for comment.
There doesn’t seem to be too much bad blood between Scorsese and Rogen, as the legendary filmmaker acted as a fictional version of himself in the first episode of Rogen’s acclaimed Apple TV series The Studio. Scorsese’s storyline on the show saw Rogen’s fictional studio head Matt Remick hire the Taxi Driver filmmaker to make a movie about Kool-Aid…until he faces pressure to nix the project in favor of a different Kool-Aid movie from Nicholas Stoller.
Rogen, who co-directed every episode of The Studio, previously told EW about how it felt to work with Scorsese on the project.
“It was very scary working with Martin Scorsese until it happened, and then it was very fun,” the Knocked Upstar said. “I had barely ever met him. We sent him the script and we just heard, ‘He loves it. He’s in.'”
Rogen said that he was worried that Scorsese would disapprove of the show’s visual style, which makes every scene appear to play out in one long unbroken take (a oner, for short).
“I was so petrified he would show up and say, ‘You’re only shooting this with one camera? You’re doing oners?’ that I actually had a second camera crew sequestered away in another room,” Rogen said. “They were actually the camera crew from Killers of the Flower Moon, so if he got cagey with me, I knew I could just bring in these familiar faces.”
However, Rogen said that Scorsese appreciated the ambition of the oners. “It was purely based in my own fear that he would be critical of our directing choices, but he wasn’t,” the Pineapple Express star said. “I was like, ‘We do everything in one shot.’ As soon as he saw it, he’s like, ‘Great. It’s like French New Wave. I love it. It’s perfect.'”
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He added, “He was so funny and great, and honestly, as soon as he came in the room, his energy was just so good that everyone just relaxed.”
Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly
