Just as Seth Rogen’s character Matt Remnick dashed Martin Scorsese’s opportunity to direct his Jonestown Massacre epic, Kool-Aid, on Apple TV’s The Studio, the real Rogen has done his fair share of damage to the auteur’s directorial ambitions. In a new video for the Tribeca Film Festival’s YouTube page, Scorsese reveals he was set to direct Angelina Jolie in Cleopatra before Rogen and his movie The Interview screwed it all up.
In the video, Francesca asks her dad about a movie he wished he made. After searching his mind for an example (offering the very literal answer, “You can’t make what somebody [made], you know?”), someone off-screen suggests Gladiator. “I would’ve done it a little differently,” Scorsese says with a wink, “if I’d come up with a plot.” He rattles off a few ideas, such as Abel Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant, before Francesca says, “I feel like you always wanted to make a big Roman epic. Weren’t you going to do Cleopatra?” Indeed, he was.
Unfortunately, the director explains, his Cleopatra was canceled because “they made fun of Kim Jong Il” in the 2013 Seth Rogen comedy The Interview. It was Kim Jong Un, but he was closer than YouTube’s closed captions, which transcribed Scorsese’s mistake as “Kim John Hill.” Yup, Scorsese’s Cleopatra was a victim of the Sony hack.
For those who don’t remember, in 2014, ahead of the release of The Interview, a comedy about a foolish cable news host looking to land an interview with Kim Jong Un, the North Korean government leaked a trove of emails from Sony executives’ work inboxes. The leaks revealed secret movie information, such as what’s going on with Spider-Man and how sorry George Clooney was about Monuments Men. The hack was a major embarrassment for the studio, which eventually dumped The Interview onto Netflix and set us on a course for the present day. But in Scorsese’s recollection:
“[Kim Jong Un] got mad and he blew up everyone. We were going to do it. Eric Roth was already on the script. It was Angelina Jolie. We were going. She was Cleopatra VII. It was going to be really wild.” Visibly upset by the news, Francesca bemoans the movie that never was. Scorsese continues, “Well, tell Seth because they ruined everything just because Kim Jong Un doesn’t have a sense of humor.”
Since 1963’s Joseph L. Mankiewicz-directed Cleopatra, starring Elizabeth Taylor, became one of the biggest fiascoes in Hollywood history, famous directors have vied for the chance to break the curse. Scorsese won an early 2010s bake-off to direct a Scott Rudin-produced version based on the biography Cleopatra: A Life, with Jolie on the throne. Other names circling the production included David Fincher, Paul Greengrass, Ang Lee, and James Cameron, who wanted to do it in 3-D, natch. More recently, Patty Jenkins was going to make it with Gal Gadot. Ra and the rest of the movie gods clearly don’t want a Cleopatra movie made.
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