David Fincher Pushed Back When Disney Didn’t Get His ‘20,000 Leagues Under the Sea’ Vision: ‘You’ve Read Jules Verne, Right?’
There have been many potential projects that haven’t come to fruition for David Fincher, from his take on Aaron Sorkin’s “Steve Jobs” starring Christian Bale to his “Black Dahlia” mini-series led by Tom Cruise. But one failed vision people were clamoring for, perhaps above all others, was his adaptation of Jules Verne’s “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.”
Previously brought to life by Disney in 1954 in a beloved film starring James Mason and Kirk Douglas and in 1997 for an ABC mini-series starring Michael Caine and Patrick Dempsey, the story follows a group of scientists and whalers sent out into the open seas to take down a massive sea creature that’s been attacking ships. They soon come to discover that the creature is not a monster at all, but a submarine designed by the emotionally damaged Captain Nemo.
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Fincher intended on working with Disney, who still own the IP, and screenwriter Scott Z. Burns to make a newer, more modern version in the early 2010s, but faced issues after desired lead Brad Pitt (who would have played harpooner Ned Land) passed on the script. Disney wanted Fincher to cast Chris Hemsworth, hot off his starring roles in “Thor” and “The Avengers,” but Fincher wanted Channing Tatum. In a recent interview with Letterboxd, Fincher also pointed to not being able to get on the same page as Disney when it came to the story they were trying to tell.
“You can’t make people be excited about the risks that you’re excited about,” said Fincher. “Disney was in a place where they were saying, ‘We need to know that there’s a thing that we know how to exploit snout to tail, and you’re going to have to check these boxes for us.’ And I was like, ‘You’ve read Jules Verne, right?'”
In the original novel and its follow-up, it is revealed that Captain Nemo is in fact royalty who participated in the real-life Indian Rebellion of 1857, an act which led to the death of his family and him fleeing to the seas. Fincher wanted to center these details and make it a serious film, but Disney didn’t want it to distract from the fun, action/adventure piece they were hoping to produce.
“This is a story about an Indian prince who has real issues with white imperialism, and that’s what we want to do,” Fincher said he told Disney. “And they were like, ‘Yeah, yeah, fine. As long as there’s a lot less of that in it.’ So you get to a point where you go, ‘Look, I can’t fudge this, and I don’t want you to discover at the premiere what it is that you’ve financed. It doesn’t make any sense because it’s just going to be pulling teeth for the next two years.’ And I don’t want to do that. I mean, life’s too short.”
The “Fight Club” director also described the vibe of his interpretation as “really kind of gross and cool and wet and steampunk,” and though he was unable to see this project through, he was able to harness these elements for his episode of Netflix’s “Love, Death & Robots,” called “Bad Travelling.” He also was able to move past the difficulty of dropping the project pretty quickly, as it’s something he’d had to do many times at that point in his career and still has to.
“Movies fall apart for a reason, and I try to stay extremely even-keeled about this stuff,” said Fincher to Letterboxd. “I learned from a great friend — and a lovely and talented man — named Joel Schumacher very early on in my career that you can’t want something more than the people who are going to finance it because then they got you. You want to keep your head above the fray.”
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