David Fincher wanted to reunite with his Fight Club star Brad Pitt for 20,000 Leagues Under the Seas, but Pitt turned down the lead role of Ned Land. The role Kirk Douglas played in Disney 1954 film based on Jules Verne's novel. After that, Fincher approached Daniel Craig ("Skyfall") and Matt Damon ("Finding Forrester"), but they too passed on the opportunity. When Fincher finally decided upon Channing Tatum ("22 Jump Street") for the part Disney balked at the choice and urged him to go with Chris Hemsworth ("Avengers: Age of Ultron"). Now, Fincher is doing press for Gone Girl and in an interview with Little White Lies he gives some insight his conflict with Disney that sank the film.
"You get over $200 million — all motion picture companies have corporate culture and corporate anxieties," he explained. "Once we got past the list of people we could cast as the different characters in the film, once we got past one or two names which made them very comfortable, making a movie at that price, it became this bizarre endeavour to find which three names you could rub together to make platinum."
"I wanted Aronnax to be French, God forbid! It got to be a little too confusing to me," Fincher added. "I had this argument with a studio executive one time where he said to me, 'why is it that the actors always side with you and we're paying them?' And I said, 'I think it's because at some level, they know that my only real allegiance is to the movie.' And because that's very clear and it never wavers, they may not agree with the image of the movie I have in my head, but they know that's what I'm after. They've seen me for 100 days take the long way around. I think that when you're trying to put together a handful of people to deliver all those facets of humanity and who work well together, it has to be in service of the narrative and not in service of the balance sheet. It became very hard to appease the anxieties of Disney's corporate culture with the list of names that allowed everyone to sleep at night. I just wanted to make sure I had the skill-sets I could turn the movie over to. Not worrying about whether they're big in Japan."
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954) - Climb aboard the Nautilus ... and into a strange undersea world of spellbinding adventure! Kirk Douglas, Paul Lukas, and Peter Lorre star as shipwrecked survivors taken captive by the mysterious Captain Nemo, brilliantly portrayed by James Mason. Wavering between genius and madness, Nemo has launched a deadly crusade across the seven seas. But can the captive crew expose his evil plan before he destroys the world? Disney's brilliant Academy Award-winning (1955, Best Art Direction and Best Special Effects) adaptation of Jules Verne's gripping tale makes "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" a truly mesmerizing masterpiece!
Actors: Paul Lukas, Peter Lorre, James Mason and Kirk Douglas
Director: Richard Fleischer * Screenwriter: Earl Felton