‘What matters is we did it’: Captain Nemo’s long journey to the screen
The biggest TV show ever made in Australia, Nautilus appeared to be sunk even before it was launched. But that was just a blip on the sonar, say its makers.
By Karl Quinn
Shazad Latif as Captain Nemo aboard the stolen submarine Nautilus.Credit: Stan
Shazad Latif isn’t the first person to play Captain Nemo, the hero of Jules Verne’s 1870 novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and its sequel Mysterious Island. But he’s the first to portray him as an Indian prince with an overwhelming hatred of the British Empire.
“There’s literally something for everyone,” says Latif of the 10-part series Nautilus, which launches on Stan on Friday. “It’s got the big action, it’s got a lot of comedy, a bit of a Pirates of the Caribbean feel. But at the heart of it, it’s a pure revenge story.”
This Nemo starts the series as a slave working in the shipyards of the British East India Company, quickly emerges as the leader of an ad hoc uprising in which a small band of brown-skinned rebels make off with the high-tech Nautilus submarine, and eventually is revealed as Prince Dakkar, whose wife and child were murdered by the colonisers.
“He’s hellbent on getting back at the British Empire, and specifically the East India Company,” says Latif. “So there’s an emotional core to this that is pretty serious. You’ve really got a show that has 10 brown guys on a ship – so even though we’re doing this fun adventure-action show, it’s still very important for young kids like me to see their heroes on screen like this.”
It is, agrees co-star Georgia Flood, unreservedly an “anti-colonialism” story.
“It’s interrogating that period of time, and it’s kind of an allegory for what still goes on,” she says. “It’s an interesting exploration of culture, class and diversity. It’s a retelling and a reclaiming of all these stories we’ve heard about the British East India Company at that time in history, from the perspective of these prisoners who were unlawfully captured and used as slaves, basically.”
Flood plays Humility Lucas, an upper-class woman and an engineer who finds her allegiances shifting after being taken on board the Nautilus as a hostage of sorts. Concocted for the series by writer James Dormer, but drawn (loosely) from a number of Verne’s characters, she is, says Flood, “a way of modernising and metabolising the story for audiences now”.
Though unapologetically a revisionist take on the source material, Nautilus is very much in keeping with Verne’s intentions, the show’s producer insist.
Richard E. Grant (seated) as The Raja. Credit: Disney
Nemo’s background was nebulous in the first book; though the French writer had wanted to make him Polish (as a way of engaging with debates at the time about nationalism and colonialism), his publisher persuaded him to leave his origins shrouded in mystery. But in the sequel, published in 1876, Nemo reveals his true backstory as he lay dying, surrounded by friends, crew and co-conspirators.
The chapter runs to a few pages, a couple of thousand words at most, but it’s from this that the creators of the show have drawn their inspiration.
“The idea at the core of it,” explains producer Anand Tucker (who is also the director of the film The Critic, which is in cinemas now), “was to take that section from Mysterious Island, in which Nemo reveals that he was, in fact, the Indian Prince Dakkar, and to retell this piece of glorious mythology that has basically been lost in the winds of time, but is part of our cultural heritage.
“It gives us a way to see it that brings in all the cultural and social and historical currents about race and class and time that are relevant to us in our lives today.”
Filmed in Queensland between February and December 2021, Nautilus was a big splash for Disney, a $300 million special-effects heavy adventure bound for its streaming platform, Disney+.
Flood still recalls the first day she walked on set and saw the massive submarine in which so much of the action would take place. “I actually welled up,” she says. “It was like walking into a hangar and we’re on Star Wars, it was just unbelievable.
“They had the submarine on a gimbal so that if we had to do scenes where the ship was being attacked the gimbal let out all this air and moved up and down – I’m talking metres and metres and metres in the air, maybe six of me. It went sideways and forward and sideways, like a ride at Movie World.”
At sea (from left): Shazad Latif as Nemo, Kayden Price as Blaster, Georgia Flood as Humility and Pacharo Mzembe as Boniface.Credit: Disney
But faced with mounting losses in 2023, the entertainment behemoth set out to slash $US5.5 billion from the bottom line – with $US1.8 billion coming from its streaming platforms, including Disney+, Hulu and Star. And in August, it announced it was dumping Nautilus.
The news was devastating, says Latif, who became something of a minor celebrity thanks to his role as Clem Fandango on the cult comedy series Toast of London and its spin-off Toast of Tinseltown. “I tried to be philosophical about it and go, ‘We honed our skills and swam a lot, so that was good, we ate well, lived a healthy lifestyle for a year’. I was trying to take the positives.”
But even when it looked grim, he never lost faith entirely that the submarine drama would resurface elsewhere.
“I knew that the work we’d done was so good, I knew we’d made a great show,” he says. “Now we’re back, and it’s great that people are going to see it. I’m very, very happy.”
For Tucker, that upset is now nothing more than a blip on the sonar of the greater Nautilus journey.
The water tank at the Village Roadshow studio on the Gold Coast, where Nautilus was filmed.Credit: Village Roadshow
“It’s an extraordinary thing to have got this show made,” he says. “The film and television business is a complicated, crazy place where nothing makes any sense. The triumph and the victory is that you actually get to make something. I think the rest of it’s not a story because most things don’t get made at all.
“I’m being serious,” he continues. “I’m 61 years old, I’ve been in this business a long time, and most of my life has been chasing dreams that never happen.
“Of course it was sad [when Disney dropped it], but actually, it’s irrelevant. What’s relevant is we made this beautiful, brilliant, massive feat of the imagination that spoke to the inner child in all of us. What matters is we did it.”
Nautilus is on Stan from October 25. Stan and this masthead are owned by Nine.
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