20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1916 film) 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1916 film) 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea is a 1916 American silent film directed by Stuart Paton. The film's storyline is based on the novel "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea" by Jules Verne. It also incorporates elements from Verne's "The Mysterious Island". This was the first motion picture filmed underwater. Actual underwater cameras were not used, but a system of watertight tubes and mirrors allowed the camera to shoot reflected images of underwater scenes staged in shallow sunlit waters. The film was made by The Universal Film Manufacturing Company (now Universal Pictures), not then
Captain Nemo the January Uprising; but Verne's editor Pierre-Jules Hetzel feared a book ban in the Russian market and offending a French ally, the Russian Empire, and had Verne obscure Nemo's motivation in the first book. In the second book of "Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea", Nemo comes close to revealing his Indian ancestry, though this is not obvious except in retrospect, where he saves a Ceylonese pearl-fisher in the Gulf of Mannar. "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea" was written between 1869 and 1870 and records the voyages of the "Nautilus" between 1866 and 1868. "The Mysterious Island" was written