20,000 Leagues Under the Sea is an American
silent film directed by
Stuart Paton and released on December 24, 1916. Based primarily on the 1870 novel
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas by
Jules Verne, the film also incorporates elements from Verne's 1875 novel
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 in the Bahamas. For the scene featuring a battle with an octopus, cinematographer
John Ernest Williamson devised a viewing chamber called the "photosphere", a 6-by-10-foot (1.8-by-3.0-metre) steel globe in which a cameraman could be placed. The film was made by the Universal Film Manufacturing Company (now
Universal Pictures), not then known as a major motion picture studio, and took two years to make, at the cost of $500,000.
Film credit: Stuart Paton
