Nautilus: Behind the scenes of almost-scuttled adaption of Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea

When TV writer James Dormer started working on Nautilus, the ambitious streaming series drawing from Jules Vernes’ Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, his 14-year-old son asked one thing of his dad.

“I got a lecture from him, he was like, ‘Don’t do that thing where if a character is going to die, you give them a big story just before they die’,” Dormer said from Nautilus’ Queensland set.

Not every character will survive the show’s 10 episodes, but Dormer always remembered his kids were partly why he got involved in Nautilus, centred on Captain Nemo, the mysterious seafarer in Verne’s tales.

Nemo may be an iconic literary character but his name translates to “no one”, evoking his enigmatic nature. Who was this man who steered the crew of this wondrous submarine that shouldn’t even exist?

There were hints of a backstory in Twenty Thousand Leagues — a dead wife and children, vengeance in his heart against imperial forces — but his past wasn’t revealed until Verne’s sequel novel, The Mysterious Island.

Nemo was born as an Indian prince who lost everything, including his family, to the British East India Company. It was only a line in the book, but it’s something Nautilus, named after the submarine, has picked up and run with.

To tell the story from Nemo’s perspective had significance to Dormer. “You’re always looking for something that makes it personal, and my children are half-Bangladeshi, so I thought I could tell a story that might mean something to them,” he said.

To embody the character, Nautilus cast British actor Shazad Latif, who has Pakistani heritage. Latif loved Disney’s 1954 movie starring James Mason but said, “Now’s the time to do with from the point of view of someone who looks like me, I think that’s exciting, and it’ll only add to the enjoyment, especially for young people”.

Dormer and Latif were sitting around a table on the observation hole deck of the Nautilus set. Behind him is a window that looks out onto a blue screen but when visual effects are added later, will have, at one point, a giant squid swimming past.

The observation hole is part of the intricately built submarine and, unusually, it connects to other interiors down one long spine including a triple-storey engine room that had industrial-era pistons that actually moved up and down.

There was an emphasis on practical effects so that Nautilus would have texture and groundedness, despite its fantastical source material.

To recreate the Nautilus with an aesthetic that merged steampunk and colonial grandeur, the production did have to build it across two soundstages – it didn’t fit in just one. On one stage were most of the interiors in one continuous swoop, where the production design team had filled the spaces with small details.

It is, of course, movie magic. If you picked up one of the leather-bound books that littered the background, you might find its pages contained writings about 20th-century Soviet politics which is not exactly authentic to Nautilus’s 19th-century setting, unless it somehow met up with Verne’s time-travelling tales.

Another stage held the exteriors of the submarine, which looked more like a mythical sea beast than sleek modern military submersibles.

Nautilus took up several soundstages at the Village Roadshow studios on the Gold Coast, where it filmed for 10 months in 2022. Their neighbours at the time was the production of Godzilla x Kong whose fake palm trees were lined up outside the door.

The show had a massive water tank, so large that hair and make-up artists had to be ferried to the actors by boat while the director sat on his own pontoon. Crews that had worked on Aquaman helped to work out the show’s underwater scenes, already experts in shooting “dry-for-wet”.

Nautilus was one of, if not the most expensive TV series to be made on Australian soil with a reported cost of $300 million. It may have technically been a British production but it was a huge boon for the local industry.

So, it was particularly shocking when in August 2023, months after filming had ended and the series was in post-production, Disney, which had commissioned the show for its streaming platform, scuttled the project.

Nautilus fell victim to the whims of twisty corporate accounting strategies. At the time, it was among many titles, series and movies alike across multiple studios, which were axed so that the parent company could take a tax write-down of its value.

It happened to not-yet-released projects including Nautilus, Batgirl and The Spiderwick Chronicles, and it also happened to existing shows such as The Nevers and Big Shot which were pulled off streaming platforms to go exactly nowhere.

A massive production that was made in Australia risked never being seen because of a line on a profit and loss statement.

American cable channel AMC soon swept in as saviour, buying the rights for the US and Canada. But it would be almost another year before its fate was decided for the two countries that had invested the most. In August, Amazon announced it acquired the rights for the UK and Ireland for Prime Video and a month later, local streamer Stan bought it for Australia.

Almost two years after someone yelled “that’s a wrap” on that Queensland set, Nautilus will be released in Australia this Friday.

When this writer visited the set in November 2022, it was day 190 of the shoot, and spirits were high and optimistic. Executive producer Xavier Marchand said there were plans for multiple seasons while Dormand said that they were “well into the planning for season two”. Little did they know.

It would be tempting to draw parallels between the corporate machinations of Disney with the villain in the show, the British East India Company, but that would be unfair. In truth, the brutalities of the real-life East India Company, acting for the British Crown, were horrific, exploiting local resources, enslaving and killing populations.

Nautilus starts when an enslaved Nemo “steals” the submarine from the BEIC, his captors at the penal colony of Kalpani which was based on real-life counterparts, along with a crew that just happens to be present at the time of his rebellion. They’re a diverse group of people who have been enslaved by the British.

“We’re telling a story about a really diverse group of characters, and we talk about colonialism, but we do it from the perspective of the colonised, which I don’t think was the approach of the book,” series producer Cameron Welsh said.

Dormer said they adjusted some of the characters after the actors had been cast so they could bring in their own backgrounds and feel more ownership over it, “I know they felt a big sense of responsibility in representing the various people that were screwed over by the British Empire over the years”.

Among the characters is a trader from Zanzibar (modern Tanzania), a farmer from Kowloon (Hong Kong), a Maori warrior, a Bengali intellectual, a fisherman from Northern India and a 12-year-old boy from the Caribbean.

The production is full of small details that support this DNA in its storytelling, and not always in obvious ways. If you pause and look closely during an episode in which there’s a fight scene in some archives, you might see boxes of various items that the British have pillaged from around the world.

This act of rebellion from Nemo, taking from his imperial tormentors, represents the untold stories from that imperial era.

Latif said, “We never get told about the revolts or the little hero. I didn’t grow up knowing about South Asian heroes other than Ghandi. But these things did happen, and there were people fighting back. They’re just not taught in our history syllabus.”

The show dives into the injustices of colonial history, reflecting the ongoing discourse of the present, and King Charles’ visit to Australia earlier this week is proof these wounds are not healed, and these arguments are not settled.

But it is also, as executive producer Chris Loveall liked to point out, “first and foremost a bold action-adventure” story. Nautilus is, reliably, a swashbuckler.

The show follows the crew as it seeks to discover a mythical treasure while they’re being pursued by the British East India Company trailing them in the severe-looking ship the Dreadknot. There are also explosions, revolts, leaping from balconies, jungle hideouts, deadly shootouts and Artic treks.

It’s a mix of Verne’s love of discovery and giddy adventure along with the heartbreak of Nemo, who has lost everything except his thirst for vengeance.

“Who doesn’t like a revenge story?” Latif asked. “You’re following this guy, he breaks out of prison, his wife and child have been murdered. There’s enough there already. Add to that, this environmental story, the science, the beauty of the sets, we see whales and eels in every episode.

“It’s just great stuff, which adds to this emotional core. You’d be weird if you didn’t want to follow that story.”

Nautilus is streaming on Stan from October 25.

The writer travelled to the Gold Coast as a guest of production.