The 'Gone Girl' director says he and Disney could never get on the same page about the lead actor casting.
- Sep 16, 2014
AceShowbiz - David Fincher opens up about the story behind the cancellation of Disney's "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" remake. In an interview with Little White Lies, the director opens up that he left the project after he and the studio could never agree on who should tackle the lead role played by Kirk Douglas in the original 1954 film.
"You get over $200 million - all motion picture companies have corporate culture and corporate anxieties," he said. "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," he went on. "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."
The helmer added, "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."
The defunct project was initially planned as a starring vehicle for Brad Pitt, but the actor passed on the offer. A number of rumored replacements included Daniel Craig, Matt Damon, Channing Tatum and Chris Hemsworth. It was originally set to be filmed in Australia with Disney getting an incentive package from the government.
After the film sank, the Mouse House requested the funding be re-allocated to "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales". The government finally agreed to give the studio $20.2 million incentives for the "Pirates of the Caribbean 5".
