Martin Scorsese explains how Seth Rogen ‘ruined’ his ‘Cleopatra’ film

More than a decade after the Sony hack shook Hollywood, Martin Scorsese is still reeling from the aftermath of North Korea’s state-sponsored digital attack.

The Oscar-winning director recalled how this large-scale hack, which was a response to Seth Rogen’s 2014 film, The interview“wasted everything” for Scorsese’s project Cleopatra feature film, which would have starred Angelina Jolie.

“Remember we were going to do Cleopatra at one point and then they made fun of (Kim Jong Un), and he got angry and he blew up everyone at Columbia,” he told his daughter Francesca Scorsese on the Tribeca show. Cunning. “Seth Rogen, right? And then he got angry, and (it) ruined Cleopatra.”

Martin added: “We were going to do it. We were ready on the script. Angelina Jolie – We were going for it. She was going to be Cleopatra VII. It was going to be really wild.”

As Francesca told her father she was “so mad” about the film’s fate, Martin joked: “Well, tell Seth, because they blew it. Just because Kim Jong Un doesn’t have a sense of humor.”

In The interviewCo-written and directed by Rogen and Evan Goldberg, celebrity tabloid show host Dave Skylark (James Franco) and his producer Aaron Rapaport (Rogen) land a rare interview with Kim Jong Un (Randall Park). When the CIA catches wind, they enlist the two men to assassinate the North Korean dictator.

Despite the unexpected consequences of The interviewScorsese and Rogen have moved on, as the former even played himself in last year’s first episode of the latter’s Apple TV series. The Workshop. Since Rogen’s studio lead character, Matt Remick, ends up being responsible for taking down Scorsese’s passion project, could the storyline be another meta-example of life imitating art on the hit series?

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