Martin Scorsese has said a Cleopatra movie he planned to make with Angelina Jolie was ruined by the fallout from Seth Rogen’s film The Interview.
The director spoke in a nearly 40-minute interview with his daughter Francesca, shared by Tribeca on Thursday.
“We were going to do Cleopatra at one point, and then they made fun of Kim Jong [Un],” he said.
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Jolie was to play the lead. “Angelina Jolie, we were going. She was Cleopatra VII. It was going to be really wild,” Scorsese said.
The problem, he explained, was North Korea’s response to The Interview, a satire of the country’s government made by Rogen and Evan Goldberg.
The 2014 hack of Sony Pictures, carried out by a North Korean state-sponsored group, leaked confidential emails, messages and data belonging to Sony employees.
Scorsese said Kim Jong Un “got mad and he blew up everybody at Columbia”, which “ruined Cleopatra.”
He joked that Kim did not have a sense of humour, and told Francesca to “tell Seth.”
No other cast members have been reported for Scorsese’s version, and the studio was not named, though the story implies it was Sony.
After the hack, Sony hired David Scarpa to rewrite the script in 2016, and Denis Villeneuve was reportedly in talks to direct in 2017.
More recently, reports said Villeneuve planned to make the film with Zendaya as Cleopatra, but his commitments, including Dune: Part Three and the next James Bond film, make that unlikely.
David Fincher, James Cameron, Paul Greengrass and Ang Lee have all been reported as attached or considered at different points.
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