Scorsese Still ‘Mad’ About Lost “Cleopatra”

Filmmaker Martin Scorsese has spoken more about how very close he came to directing the Angelina Jolie-led “Cleopatra” film at Sony Pictures.

For two decades, the studios have been trying to get a Cleopatra biopic off the ground. In 2010, Jolie, filmmaker James Cameron and Sony were all considering a PG-13 3D feature based on Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Stacy Schiff’s book “Cleopatra: A Life”. Brian Helgeland adapted the script and Scott Rudin was to produce.

Cameron exited to work on the “Avatar” sequels, and the project then flirted with Paul Greengrass, David Fincher, and Ang Lee. The project then seemed to vanish for a few years before returning in 2017 when Denis Villeneuve was linked to it as a potential post-“Blade Runner 2049” project.

Now what happened in those missing years has been revealed – and it was all to do with 2014 comedy “The Interview”. It seems Scorsese was keen on doing it and, in a new video episode of “Crafty” with his daughter on YouTube, he says he regrets the project not going forward:

“Seth Rogen made fun of Kim Jong Un [in ‘The Interview’] and he got mad and he blew up everybody at Columbia. And then they ruined Cleopatra. We were going to do it, everything was ready on the script. Angelina Jolie was going to be Cleopatra VII. I’m so mad about it.”

The film became tied to the infamous Sony hack in which e-mail exchanges exposed Rudin trashing Jolie in private exchanges with then-Sony co-chair Amy Pascal. After Fincher’s exit, Jolie was reportedly eager enough to work with Scorsese on the film.

Over a decade on, the project is seemingly dead. No real news of progress on the film has been heard since 2017, and “Wonder Woman” duo Gal Gadot and director Patty Jenkins were planning their own take on Cleopatra in the early 2020s but that appears to have stalled too. Elizbeth Taylor famously played the character in the 1963 film while Lyndsey Marshal played her in HBO’s “Rome” in the mid-2000s.