The Spirit Of Nemo Is The Wildest Car You’ve Ever Seen

Attention, Hollywood: the premier builder of movie cars is not in Burbank or El Segundo or Vancouver. He’s in West End, North Carolina, and he can create anything you want. The proof is in his garage. It’s 24 feet long, wide as a Kenworth, with six wheels. It’s called the Spirit of Nemo, and it’s a doppelganger for Captain Nemo’s car from the 2003 Sean Connery film “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.”

In the annals of fan-built movie cars, nobody else has ever attempted a Nemo car. “And now,” says builder Ken Freeman, “I know why.”

On the scale of movie-car degree of difficulty, we have the General Lee at one end and Nemo’s car way, way out on the other side, bookending all the Batmobiles and Tumblers and Mad Max Interceptors that have rolled out of fans’ garages over the years. The Nemo machine poses both engineering challenges—it’s a 7,000-pound four-door convertible with two steering axles—and artistic ones. It’s covered in ornate sculptures and trim, and hardly anything is symmetrical left to right. If you need a part, you’ve got to make it.

While Freeman started with two Cadillac limousines, the finished product is a long way from anything that ever rolled out of Detroit. It’s got a Caddy 425 V-8 under that 10-foot hood, and Freeman figured out how to link both cars’ steering gear to create the quad-steer front end. But Freeman wasn’t out to build a prop car or a low-speed parade float. He wanted Nemo to become roadgoing reality, a real car. So the Caddy frames got junked, replaced by a custom frame that would provide the rigidity necessary for an eight-yard-long roadster. “Normally, convertibles are reinforced with X-bracing under the floor,” Freeman says. “This car is too low for that, so the frame itself had to be stronger. I used steel I-beams.” They came from a dismantled bridge. There is no cowl shake in the Nemo-mobile.

There’s no sloppiness anywhere, actually. Even that colossal hood, which you’d expect to quiver like a hacksaw blade, is reinforced with carbon fiber and remains serene and motionless on its gas struts when you pop it open to check out the engine bay (which is spacious enough to stand up in while working on the motor).