Scorsese on the Hack: "Kim Jong Un Didn't Have a Sense of Humor"

Martin Scorsese has said that the hack of Sony Pictures in 2014 and the uproar over Seth Rogen's comedy The Interview ruined the Cleopatra film he was going to make with Angelina Jolie.

He is a great director with a real grievance, and he is half right. The hack was a genuine catastrophe for the studio. But Cleopatra at Sony was already a troubled project, and the sharpest lesson in Scorsese's lament is how little it takes to finish off an expensive epic that was never secure.

What Scorsese said

Scorsese was talking with his daughter Francesca in Tribeca's Crafty series. He said he and Jolie were going to make Cleopatra, with Jolie as Cleopatra VII, and called the project "really wild." ^[1][2][6] He said the script was ready. ^[6]

Then he turned to the villain of his story. The Interview, a comedy about a fictional plot to assassinate Kim Jong Un, mocked the North Korean leader, and in Scorsese's telling the leader took it badly. Kim, he said, "got mad and he blew up everybody at Columbia," and that "ruined Cleopatra." ^[1][2][6] Columbia is the Sony studio where the film lived.

He kept his sense of humour. "Well, tell Seth, because they ruined everything," he told his daughter, and then added, "Just because Kim Jong Un didn't have a sense of humor." ^[2][6]

That is the whole of what is on the record. Scorsese has not said, in the remarks made public, when the film was due to start shooting, what his formal status was on the day the hack struck, or which draft of the script he meant by "ready."

The shock was real

Nobody should wave the hack away. It began in November 2014. The FBI said the attack destroyed systems, stole personal and commercial data, and significantly disrupted Sony Pictures Entertainment's business operations. ^[3] On December 19, 2014, the bureau said it had concluded that North Korea's government was responsible, citing technical links between the malware and earlier North Korean activity. It added that it could not disclose all it knew. ^[3] North Korea denied involvement. ^[4]

The Interview was the flashpoint. A group calling itself the Guardians of Peace had threatened the film, and Sony cancelled its December 25 US theatrical release after most exhibitors decided not to show it. ^[4] When Sony pulled the film, the FBI had not yet named North Korea. ^[4]

Put yourself in a studio executive's chair that month. Your systems are down, your data is public, and a comedy on your slate has made cinema chains afraid to open their doors. A costume epic about an Egyptian queen, one Scorsese himself calls "really wild" and one described years earlier as an expensive, large-scale production, is not the project you reach for in that mood. ^[1][7]

That is the strongest version of Scorsese's case, and it needs no villain beyond ordinary corporate fear. A studio in shock stops taking big risks.

A film already in trouble

The trouble is that Cleopatra was a risk long before the hack, or anyone's theory about who was behind it.

In October 2010, four years before the hack, Sony was already exploring a Jolie Cleopatra adapted from Stacy Schiff's biography Cleopatra: A Life. James Cameron was in talks to direct, though no deal was final. ^[7] Even then the film was described as an expensive, large-scale epic, with a hoped-for start in 2011, and the account noted that the 1963 Elizabeth Taylor Cleopatra had become a famously costly production. ^[7]

Directors came and went. David Fincher, Cameron, Paul Greengrass and Ang Lee were each reported at different times as attached to the project or under consideration. ^[2] Scorsese joins that list as another director who wanted to make it. By the time of his account, the film had been circling for 16 years.

The leaked emails of 2014 show the friction inside. Jolie wrote that turning the film into a love story could undermine the female leadership and the epic they had built, and that the script needed work with writer Eric Roth and discussion with directors. ^[5] Producer Scott Rudin, writing privately to Amy Pascal during a tense stretch over the project, called Jolie "seriously out of her mind." ^[5]

That is not a project humming along until a hacker shut off the lights. It is a project where the star, the producer and the studio were arguing about what the film was.

There is an irony here. We know about that argument because of the hack. The same breach Scorsese blames for killing the film is the reason the public can read how shaky its footing was.

The objection, and whether it holds

The best objection to my reading is that a studio's internal arguments are not a death sentence. Big films survive worse. Disputes over script and tone are the ordinary weather of development, and an epic with a director like Scorsese and a star like Jolie might have pushed through them. If the hack had not come, the argument runs, the quarrels would have been settled and the cameras would have rolled.

It might be true. Scorsese was there, and the paper was not. He says the script was ready, and he knows what he and Jolie had agreed on.

But the record does not fit a clean killing in 2014. Sony hired David Scarpa to rewrite Cleopatra in 2016, and in 2017 Denis Villeneuve was reported to be in talks to direct. ^[2] Later reports have floated a Villeneuve version with Zendaya, though his other commitments were described as a significant obstacle. ^[2] A studio that had been frightened off the idea did not behave that way. It kept the property alive and kept shopping it to new directors.

So the hack did not kill Cleopatra. At most it killed Scorsese's Cleopatra, the version with him and Jolie. Whether it did even that, or whether it handed a nervous studio a convenient moment to let an expensive and unresolved project go, is a question only Sony's executives and the people in the room can answer. No response from Jolie, Sony, Pascal, Rudin or Roth to Scorsese's account has been reported so far.

What fear kills

Here is what I think Scorsese's anger really shows. Big films die of accumulated exposure. Cost is one layer, a script without agreement is another, and a director's control is a third. Each is survivable alone. Add a crisis that makes every executive in the building want to look cautious, and the exposed project becomes the easy one to drop.

The hack was that crisis. Its effects on Sony's business were documented by the FBI, and the exhibitors' retreat from The Interview showed how quickly commercial nerve can go. ^[3][4] A film like Cleopatra, which Scorsese himself calls wild, depends on a studio willing to be brave on someone else's behalf. The hack drained that willingness at precisely the wrong moment.

The comedy gets cast as the culprit because it makes a better story. In Scorsese's telling, a stoner comedy about killing a dictator provoked a real dictator, and a masterpiece paid the bill. It has the shape of farce, and he tells it that way, with a joke at the end. But the farce was the trigger. The real weakness was that a studio never settled what its giant, costly, 16-year-old idea was supposed to be.

That is also the uncomfortable point for the industry. Fear is not selective. It does not spare the project that deserves to live, and it rarely takes only the one that deserves to die.

What to watch next is whether anyone who was in the room speaks. Jolie's side of the Cleopatra story, and Sony's, would settle more than another round of Scorsese's jokes. So would a clear answer on whether the Villeneuve version, if it is alive at all, has a script anyone believes in.