Francis Ford Coppola wrote the script in the early 1980s, but the film was kept on the back-burner partially due to his financial debts. Pre-production finally began in 2001 after filming 30 hours of second unit footage and holding table read with
Paul Newman,
Uma Thurman,
Robert De Niro,
James Gandolfini,
Nicolas Cage,
Leonardo DiCaprio,
Russell Crowe,
Edie Falco, and
Kevin Spacey. However, the project was scrapped after the September 11 attacks, since a scene from the script (page 166) "predicted" the attacks. Coppola fully abandoned the project in 2007, and didn't begin developing it again until 2019.