It sounds like another classic tale of Hollywood “what could’ve been”: A master filmmaker with a reverence for the great epics of Golden Era Hollywood, directing one of the world’s most recognizable stars as one of history’s most enduring icons. How could that not be good, right?
That’s the impression many were left with when a video of Martin Scorsese chatting with his daughter Francesca about an unrealized Angelina Jolie-starring Cleopatra project went viral this week.
In the video, Scorsese laments the collapse of the film and offers an explanation for what happened, but what’s the real story? Much like the life of Cleopatra, some of the details have been smudged, but the real history is no less intriguing.
The Backstory
The origins of a Cleopatra biopic starring Jolie date back to 2010, when USA Today reported that producer Scott Rudin was developing an adaptation of Stacy Schiff’s then-upcoming book, Cleopatra: A Life, “for and with” Jolie.
That project landed at Sony Pictures, headed at the time by Amy Pascal. The team started developing the project with writers Brian Helgeland and Eric Roth working on the script, and the search began for a director.
The Sony Hack
As Scorsese tells it in the video, the 2014 hack of Sony Pictures (probably) by agents of Kim Jong Un’s North Korean regime as a response to the satirical comedy The Interview, starring Seth Rogen and James Franco, killed the project. “[Kim Jong Un] got mad and he blew up everybody at Columbia,” Scorsese says in the video. “[It] ruined Cleopatra.”
But Cleopatra was having issues long before then. The hack just made it public.
Tensions mounted over who would direct the epic. Jolie reportedly wanted David Fincher and took issue with Rudin bringing the Fight Club director on to direct the Aaron Sorkin-scripted Steve Jobs biopic instead. Conversations continued around the development of the script and a search for the director (presumably this is where Scorsese entered the picture), but friction remained among producers and star.
Perhaps the killing blow for the project came when it was revealed in the hack just what Rudin (famously a chill dude who never misused staplers) thought of Jolie, calling her in an email to Pascal “a minimally talented spoiled brat.”
Naturally, once the comments were made public, the project was effective dead. So was it the Sony hack that killed Cleopatra, or what the Sony hack revealed? It’s a riddle worthy of the sphinx.
