”Pulling teeth”: David Fincher reveals why his remake of ‘20,000 Leagues Under The Sea’ didn’t work out
David Fincher doesn’t believe in forcing or dwelling over things that don’t work out, no matter how passionate he is about them. And no, I’m not talking about Mindhunter this time, but about his remake of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea for Disney that didn’t pan out.
In a recent interview with Letterboxd around the anniversary release of his Se7en, David Fincher was asked about his cancelled projects and if there were any that he really wished had worked out. Talking about his past work, including a potential reboot of the 1954 Disney-produced adaptation of Jules Verne’s science fiction adventure novel, 20,000 Leagues Under the Seas, the director offered a rather practical outlook that he called “passionate detachment.”
For the story set in set in 19th century colonial era, Fincher’s vision was “really kind of gross and cool and wet and steampunk and all that.” However, he revealed that Disney required him to check certain boxes, indicating that they wanted less of Verne’s commentary on British imperialism in the film. And that’s something Fincher wasn’t sure he could do, which is why the film didn’t work out.
“You can’t make people be excited about the risks that you’re excited about,” Fincher said. “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?’ [Laughs] This is a story about an Indian prince who has real issues with white imperialism, and that’s what we want to do. And they were like, ‘Yeah, yeah, fine. As long as there’s a lot less of that in it’.”
As a filmmaker pitching to a studio, Fincher explains that he never wants to be the guy who wants to make a project more than the studio. He wants the studio that’s putting in the money and him to be on the same page about what they are creating and what it’s worth. And if there’s an imbalance in that equation, like in the case of Disney with his vision for 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, then he’d rather not do 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.”
To Fincher’s credit, it is a rather no-nonsense and healthy way of going about work and tackling any disappointment from things not going your way. And this explanation from him makes me understand better his response to Netflix cancelling Mindhunter because it didn’t attract enough audience to justify the investment required to make a season 3.
I have to admit though, it would’ve been cool to see David Fincher’s version of The Nautilus and Captain Nemo. We did get a teaser of what a fantasy sea adventure directed by him would like in Netflix’s Love, Death & Robots Volume III episode 2 ‘Bad Travelling’. Fincher directed the episode in which a man-eating crustacean (thanapod) takes over a shark-hunting ship. The director is now developing another series for Netflix, an English-language version of the iconic Korean dystopian survival thriller, Squid Game.
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