Perhaps not everyone remembers that among the projects Martin Scorsese never brought to fruition there was Cleopatra, the film about the famous Egyptian queen who died by suicide and would have starred Angelina Jolie. In the first episode of the docuseries Crafty, launched by Tribeca and dedicated to great filmmakers, the director revisited the topic, explaining that if the film was never shot, the blame lies none other than with Seth Rogen. It sounds odd, but the situation is precisely that, even if the director and comic actor is indirectly responsible for the eclipse of a dream of the incomparable Marty. The fault lies in fact with the hacking of a number of Sony emails by a group that hoped the Seth Rogen comedy The Interview, which dealt with the assassination, of course fictional, of the North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, would not see the light. The film was Sony-branded. According to Scorsese, the episode sparked such a uproar that it sent the studio into a spin:
A un certo punto avremmo dovuto fare Cleopatra, ma poi si fecero beffe di Kim Jong Un, che andò su tutte le furie e gettò nel caos la Columbia. Seth Rogen, giusto? (Kim Jong Un) si infuriò e mandò in fumo Cleopatra.
To clarify a bit. Among the hacked emails there was a conversation between producer Scott Rudin and Sony’s co-president Amy Pascal. At the time Angelina Jolie had complained that, due to the Steve Jobs biopic that David Fincher was supposed to direct, based on a screenplay by Aaron Sorkin (the writer of The Social Network), Cleopatra risked not seeing the light, and this was because initially Fincher himself was set to direct it. At that point Amy Pascal asked Rudin to talk to Jolie but he replied that he did not want to waste time on such nonsense. In an email written by the producer to Pascal it read: “You should shut Angelina Jolie up before she tries to prevent David from making the film about Steve Jobs.” In this and other emails the producer criticized the idea of a Cleopatra film starring Angelina, describing the actress as “a spoiled, talentless brat” and adding that the project would ruin her career and that of Amy Pascal. We know that the Jobs biopic moved to Universal and was entrusted to the direction of Danny Boyle, while Cleopatra passed into the hands of Martin Scorsese, who wanted Eric Roth as screenwriter, to whom we owe the script of Killers of the Flower Moon.
Sempre nel primo episodio di Crafty, Martin Scorsese ha detto:
Lo faremo, Angelina Jolie ed io, lo faremo. Sarà Cleopatra VII. Sarà una bomba
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