David Fincher has been chatting about what his takes on Harry Potter and 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea would have looked like.
There’s a new physical media release of Se7en releasing this month and as such, David Fincher is out and about in the world doing press. As reports continue to offer alternative takes on what Fincher’s next film project might be, the filmmaker himself has been reflecting on some of his ideas that never came to be.
When chatting with Variety, FIncher reminisced about his pitch for Harry Potter which would eventually be made by Chris Columbus as a fairly anodyne franchise starter. While the series would eventually successfully tap into darker themes with its third entry, The Prisoner Of Azkaban, Fincher wanted to lean into that direction from the very outset, stating:
“I was asked to come in and talk to them about how I would do Harry Potter. I remember saying, ‘I just don’t want to do the clean Hollywood version of it. I want to do something that looks a lot more like Withnail and I, and I want it to be kind of creepy.”
Unsurprisingly, Warner Bros elected not to go in that direction and Fincher’s involvement would go no further than that initial pitch.
In a separate chat with IndieWire, Fincher also discussed another aborted project that didn’t come to fruition, namely a Disney adaptation of the Jules Verne novel, 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea.
This was back in the early 2010s and saw Fincher have plenty of discussions with the studio about what he envisaged for the underwater adventure tale. Other versions of the film essentially whitewashed the character of Captain Nemo, Fincher wanted instead to lean into the source material’s positioning of the character as an Indian prince railing at British colonialism. Disney though, was less enthused as Fincher recalls.
“You can’t make people be excited about the risks that you’re excited about,” he says. “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?
After enduring his fair share of battles for creative control earlier in his career, it seems like Fincher simply saved himself the headache and walked away from the project.
It’s a shame as that take on the character sounds something like Alan Moore’s take on Nemo in the League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen graphic novels and he’s a fascinating aspect that adds a great deal to the wider story.
We don’t yet know what Fincher’s next directorial outing will be, but there are plenty of stories linking him with projects which you can read about here.
