riter Gavin Scott, creator of The SCI FI Channel's upcoming series The
Secret Adventures of Jules Verne, has mixed fact and fiction before.
The former journalist became a full-time screenwriter with The Young
Indiana Jones Chronicles, in which he worked with George Lucas on
stories that combined fictional adventure with historical figures and
events.
The new series similarly takes off from Verne's science fiction tales and
reworks them with real-life historical characters from Napoleon III to
Jesse James.
Scott is also working on a television miniseries adapted from Marion Zimmer
Bradley's novel The Mists of Avalon, a distaff retelling of the
Arthurian saga, which will be broadcast on TNT in the spring.
Scott recently took a few minutes to speak with Science Fiction
Weekly about Jules Verne.
Where did this strange idea come from?
Scott: It is strange, isn't it? There's something quite eerie about bringing Jules
Verne back to life 170 years after he was born and having
him walk the streets of Paris as an impoverished young Bohemian, which he
was before he invented science fiction. The idea came to me in a blinding
flash one day when I read that Verne had altered 20,000 Leagues Under the
Sea to disguise the true facts behind it.
Really? What were the true facts behind 20,000 Leagues?
Scott: That it was originally about a submarine war between Russia and Poland.
Jules' original idea for Captain Nemo was a Polish nobleman whose family had
been killed when Russian troops suppressed a rebellion in Poland. He'd built
the Nautilus to revenge himself on the tsar. Verne's publisher, Hetzel, read
the manuscript and said they'd both go to jail if it was published.
Why would anyone go to jail for writing 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea?
Scott: Because the French emperor, Napoleon III, had just concluded a treaty with
the Russian tsar and wouldn't put up with any criticism of his new ally.
Jules had to choose between sticking to his guns and having a bestseller.
After about five minutes' hard thinking he took out all references to the
Russians and the Poles and got the bestseller. The ships flying the Russian
flag became "the ships that fly no flag" and so on.
And that made you ask yourself ... ?
Scott: What if there'd been a lot more reality behind Jules Verne's fictions than
we'd thought? What if he'd actually experienced a lot of the amazing things
he described in his books and then disguised them as fiction to avoid
getting into trouble with powerful people?
What if he'd actually ridden on flying battleships and gone to the center of
the earth and tried to fire a giant gun at the moon?
Scott: Exactly. I went over the history of the period--we're talking about the
1860s--and tried to see where all these things might have happened and
been kept secret. For example--what if Verne's giant gun from The Earth to
the Moon had been built in the Urals Mountains by a group of Russian
aristocrats who wanted to prevent the tsar from emancipating the serfs?
So the series is full of real people from the 1860s?
Scott: They're all there--Queen Victoria, Jesse James, George Custer, Thomas
Edison. The more I reread the history of the time and Jules Verne's novels,
the more I could see how all those people were in there, hiding behind
noms de plume.
What about Phileas Fogg? Who was he?
Scott: Phileas Fogg was Jules Verne's mentor--an English gambler who had won the
world's first dirigible airship in a high-stakes game of blackjack. He then
used it to travel round the world in search of more high-stakes games, to
say nothing of beautiful women, with his manservant Passepartout and his
cousin Rebecca Fogg, who was the world's first female secret agent.
Is this true?
Scott: If it isn't, it should be, don't you think? Rebecca Fogg is a bit like Mrs.
Peel in the Avengers. She has the Victorian equivalent of a leather fighting
suit and she's very sexy. Jules is attracted to her, Fogg is attracted to
her, and most of the villains they tend to come across get pretty turned on,
too. There are times when you could cut the sexual tension inside the
airship with a knife.
The airship's your "Starship Enterprise," isn't it?
Scott: Absolutely: a steampunk Enterprise. It's incredibly luxurious inside, like
a flying London club full of leather armchairs and Turkish rugs and more
gadgets than Q gave James Bond. Passepartout has a laboratory hidden on the
upper deck. In Around the World in 80 Days Verne never let on that
Passepartout was also a mechanical genius. He mangles every word in the
English language but he can build anything Verne can dream up--they're a
great team.
This is starting to remind me of the Wild Wild West.
Scott: That's because there's a lot of Jules Verne in the original series. People
have also said the Secret Adventures also reminds them of The Young
Sherlock Holmes.
You've worked with Spielberg, haven't you?
Scott: Yes, but not on that: he bought my script for Small Soldiers, and we worked on that together. And of course he had a strong interest in the TV series
Young Indiana Jones Chronicles.
Which you worked on with George Lucas. Is that similar to The Secret
Adventures of Jules Verne?
Scott: Secret Adventures is much darker than Young Indy, much more scary; more
sex and violence, I'm afraid. But I learned a huge amount from George Lucas
in working on Young Indy--it was one of the formative experiences for me as
a writer.
Where did you shoot the series?
Scott: In a huge engine repair shed on the outskirts of Montreal. It was empty when
we found it, covered in snow; train tracks running right through it--an
immense space. I'm embarrassed to say we got rather carried away by having
all that space. Within six months it was absolutely full of sets: a complete
19th-century Paris street, most of Fogg's airship, castle battlements,
the sewers of Paris, dungeons, laboratories, a giant moon-gun, several
full-scale 19th-century rocket ships and one of the biggest
green-screen stages in North America.
Were there a lot of special effects?
Scott: Huge numbers; it was only possible because we shot on HDTV and sent the
digital signal straight into a bank of computers we assembled up in the
roof. There were teams of people working on it night and day to bring
together Jules Verne machines and actual footage. At one point we had
Rebecca Fogg tied to a rocket and fired from behind Niagara Falls down the
Hudson Valley, aimed at West Point.
Didn't you build a Giant Mole for one episode?
Scott: Yes--the League of Darkness had created this kind of land submarine to
tunnel under Paris, pop up in the Palais de Justice and kidnap Queen
Victoria, thus plunging Europe into war. Jules had actually sketched this
idea--he's always sketching strange vehicles--and the League of Darkness
had got hold of the design and built it.
What's The League of Darkness?
Scott: It's a conspiracy of aristocrats under the control of the sinister Count
Gregory who have been secretly guiding the destiny of Europe for centuries
to make sure power stays in the hands of the rich and nobly born. The time
when Verne was writing was a period of maximum danger for them because
education and democracy were spreading among the ordinary people. They
wanted to stop that--to halt progress in its tracks. If they'd succeeded,
the world would have stayed frozen in the grip of powerful aristocrats--possibly even to the present day.
And Jules Verne prevented that?
Scott: Yes: we owe him a lot. He stood for progress and technology against the
forces of reaction. The problem with the League of Darkness was that it was
smart enough to use technology against progress. For example, they used the
treasure of Solomon, stolen by the Visigoths from Rome, to build the world's
first flying battleship, and got it across the Atlantic to intervene on
behalf of the South in the Civil War. If the South had had air superiority
they could have won at Gettysburg--but Jules Verne and Phileas Fogg
prevented that.
How much of this is actually based on what Verne wrote?
Scott: It's all inspired by what he wrote, but once you accept the idea that he
disguised adventures he had actually had, you can take elements from any of
his books and put them together in new ways. He produced nearly a hundred
novels, many of them completely forgotten. A few years ago they even found a
new one hidden in a safe in an abandoned building. He never loses the power
to surprise us. That's what the series celebrates. I like to think that
Jules Verne is somewhere out there in the universe receiving the signal on
some machine he's invented and saying, "Yes, that's exactly what I wanted to
say. Thank you!"
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