Nautilus, which premieres on AMC on June 29, tells the origin story of Captain Nemo from Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas, portraying him as an Indian prince seeking to use the eponymous submarine to get vengeance against the British East India Company. While the series has elements of the fantastical, it’s rooted in history that showrunner James Dormer (Medici, Beowulf: Return to the Shadowlands) got to experience firsthand while working as a low-ranking British diplomat in New Delhi at the time India was celebrating 50 years of independence.
“We brought out the royal yacht and the Queen came and I organized a small film festival and the headline in the newspapers at the time was ‘The Empire Strikes Back’ which wasn’t what we were looking for,” he told Polygon in a Zoom interview. “Quite often people from the high commission would be pulled into Bollywood movies to play nasty East India Company villains.”
That same villainy is on display in Nautilus, which opens with Nemo (Shazad Latif), French engineer Gustave Benoit (Thierry Frémont), and many other captives from around the world forced to work on the Nautilus, which the East India Company hopes to use against China. Nemo, Gustave, and their allies steal the vessel and are pursued by the company’s most advanced battleship over the course of the 10-episode season.
“[Executive producer Xaviier Marchand] brought [Nautilus] to me as a pitch, and I just fell in love with the idea,” Dormer said. “My kids are half Bangladeshi, so it was a kind of a story that wasn’t too dark that they couldn’t watch it. It was really interesting to be able to look at that world through the eyes of an Indian hero.”
Dormer admits it was tricky to produce a family-friendly story about the British Raj, combining scenes of child labor and displays of racism with classic pulp antics like a little dog and a kid who are constantly getting in trouble.
“We do go to some quite dark places looking at what the British did,” Dormer said. “It’s not like you’re doing Indiana Jones where there’s a white hero running around stealing people’s relics. You’re telling a story from the point of view of people who have been oppressed. You have to feel the weight of that on them sometimes.”
While Dormer had watched Disney’s 1954 adaptation of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, he hadn’t read Verne’s novel until he was tapped for the show. He was surprised by how topical it was, dealing with oppression and environmentalism – a subject Dormer brings to Nautilus in the second episode when the crew saves a pod of whales. He tried to keep to the spirit of Verne’s work while adding more action.
“There was also a lot about mollusks, which isn’t inherently dramatic, so we had some license to pimp it up,” Dormer said. “With Nemo, I wanted to hold on to the darkness of his character, which is obviously harder when you’re telling a long-form story because you can’t have a character that’s just bitter the whole way through. You have to take him on a journey. Shazad was amazing. No matter how bad the lines I threw at him were, he was able to make them resonate and feel real.”
Dormer was thrilled to have the budget to live up to his ambitions for the series, which is packed with sea monsters and naval battles.
“There was a scene we wrote where Nemo jumps onto a whale, and then there’s another ship that gets broken in half,” he said. “I write that stuff assuming that it’s then going to get cut back and they’re going to end up in a little rowing boat or something. But with this show, it was like, ‘let’s do that, and can we actually do it bigger.’ It was really liberating. I feel we just sneaked in at the end of peak TV. 700-odd people worked to build huge sets and there was a manual for how the Nautilus worked that someone put together. I feel very privileged to have been a part of it.”
The first two episodes of Nautilus premiere on AMC and AMC Plus on June 29. New episodes will be released weekly on Sundays.
Source：https://www.polygon.com/tv/609476/nautilus-show-amc-interview-james-dormer
