David Fincher Discusses His 20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA
Disney is still making their new version of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. It doesn't seem like David Fincher isn't going to be a part of it, though. Apparently the director and the studio couldn't agree on who should star in the film. After Brad Pitt passed on the role, Fincher was looking at Channing Tatum, but the studio wanted Chris Hemsworth, and things just weren't meshing well between the studio and the director, so Fincher dropped out.
It's a shame that Fincher's vision of this movie will never be realized. Fincher is one of the most talented directors working today, and he would have given us something superb. In an interview with Playboy he discussed his plans for the adaptation of Jules Verne's classic novel, saying,
"Dude, it was [frick]ing cool. It was smart and crazy entertaining, with the Nautilus crew fighting every kind of gigantic Ray Harryhausen thing. But it also had this riptide to it. We were doing Osama bin Nemo, a Middle Eastern prince from a wealthy family who has decided that white imperialism is evil and should be resisted. The notion was to put kids in a place where they’d say, 'I agree with everything he espouses. I take issue with his means—or his ends.' I really wanted to do it, but in the end I didn’t have the stomach lining for it. A lot of people flourish at Hollywood studios because they’re fear-based. I have a hard time relating to that, because I feel our biggest responsibility is to give the audience something they haven’t seen."
He makes some good points there at the end about the Hollywood studios being fear based. That's why we keep seeing lots of remakes and sequels these days. The studios are just playing it safe. I am one of those audiences members, though, that love seeing things I haven't seen before on film. There's no doubt the director would have given audiences something they had never seen before with this movie. One of the other interesting things he said in the interview is that he finds superhero movies dull. When asked what he thought about them, he replied,
"I find it dull. I like to anticipate the energy of a movie audience that’s waiting for the curtain to come up and thinking, Well, one thing we don’t know about this guy is that we don’t know how bad it can get."
So I guess we're never going to see Fincher direct a superhero movie either. We may not see him direct 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea or a comic book film, but at least he'll keep making great movies.