MUMBAI: If all goes well, Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan will be seen sharing screen space with Leonardo DiCaprio in a cross-cultural thriller ‘Xtreme City’, a tale about two men from radically different worlds. SRK’s biographer (‘Still Reading Khan’) and screenplay writer Mushtaq Sheikh has penned the script with Hollywood writer-director Paul Schrader, who will direct the movie.
American filmmaker Martin Scorsese has come on board as a producer with David Weisman for the movie, where SRK will essay the role of an underworld gangster while DiCaprio will be playing a New York cop.
Sheikh said “‘Xtreme City’ is not in anyway a traditional gangster movie. It’s a different kind of film, one where both Indian and American protagonists are balanced human beings and the story treats them in their full complexity without either culture being diminished or taken for granted. Its a cross-cultural thriller designed for both Bollywood and Hollywood. And if we get it right this will be an attempt at true global entertainment.”
To a question on the title of the film, he said Paul Schrader titles have always been two-worded that express the script’s metaphor, like ‘Taxi Driver’, ‘Raging Bull’, ‘American Gigolo’ etc. “This should have ideally been ‘Maximum City’ but that was already taken courtesy the book. We needed another name that’s when Paul decided on ‘Xtreme City’ because majority of the film is based in Mumbai and no other word catches the enigma of the city like ‘Xtreme City’,” he said.