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David Fincher has been cropping up in various outlets over the past few days as part of the publicity effort around the 4K re-release of Se7en. As part of these interviews, he has talked in some detail about projects he was at least in talks on, and that never made it to the screen with him attached.
Alongside famous near-misses like Rendezvous With Rama and World War Z, many were surprised to learn he was once in the running for Harry Potter, way back when they first started the process of adapting them for the screen.
David Fincher
In an interview with Variety, he said the studio didn’t click with his pitch:
“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.”
The studio went with Chris Columbus and, while the movies do get progressively darker and more creepy (like the books) as the series progressed, Fincher was not involved.
Another project he was working on that didn’t progress was an adaptation of Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. In the original novel, Nemo is an exiled Indian prince seeking vengeance for his family being killed in the Sepoy Rebellion, and having lived under the British East India Company. In many adaptions since then, this version of the character is changed.
Fincher was working with Disney and screenwriter Scott Z. Burns on a new version of the story in the early 2010s, but Brad Pitt passed on the role of Ned Land and then issues began. Disney wanted Fincher to cast Chris Hemsworth. Fincher wanted Channing Tatum, and he also wanted to be faithful to the novel’s version of Nemo.
He tells Indiewire:
“You can’t make people be excited about the risks that you’re excited about. 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?
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.’ 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.’”
He did say his tone would include steampunk elements.
Fincher famously has the final edit on all his movies as long as he brings it in at two hours or less.
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