David Fincher's 20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA Collaborator Says Film Would've Blown Parents and Kids Away
David Fincher’s scrapped adaptation of Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea is one of those huge missed opportunities that I would have loved to see get made. I always believed that he would have delivered an incredible film adaptation and now Fincher's frequent collaborator Andrew Kevin Walker has offered some insight on the film.
While talking to Entertainment Weekly, Walker explained that the movie was very close to getting made and it would have blown away parents and their kids. He said the movie "was very close to getting made. That would have been the coolest Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea you could imagine. It was going to be a movie where parents would be as blown away as the kids."
Fincher previously talked about his adaptation, 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."
Fincher also worked on the project with writer Scott Z. Burns and he said the film was “really big," and that the movie won’t be the exact same story as Verne's novel. He added that there's "very little" that goes directly from the page to the screen, he said that his job "isn’t to turn a book into a movie, it’s to be inspired by the book and then go write a movie." The inspiration that Burns took largely came from the three main characters: Captain Nemo, French marine biologist Professor Pierre Aronnax, and master harpoonist Ned Land. "David and I had a really cool idea for the relationship between Nemo, and Aronnax and Land. That’s really what we kind of got into. But I think it’s very, very true to the spirit of the book."
I really would have loved to see this movie get made! It’s a shame that the whole thing fell apart.