A director aims to make peace with the both the past and one of the most legendary actors of all time.
One of my favorite Peter Sellers movies has always been George Roy Hill’s 1964 comedy The World of Henry Orient, in which the legendary actor plays a well-renowned concert pianist famous for his ego. The film is notable for a few reasons, not least of all the ever-changing accent Sellers uses throughout. In one scene, Sellers speaks in a thick Russian accent before boasting an Italian-American one in the next. No explanation is ever given for this as the iconic actor continues to alternate between the two from scene to scene. In a lot of people’s eyes, the choice was just another among many which made Sellers being a complicated comedy genius according to the film world. However as the new documentary The Ghost of Peter Sellers suggests, there was more to it than that. In it, the doc’s director Peter Medak partially looks to discover how much more there was to the great actor as he reflects on his experience of directing Sellers in the unreleased 17th century pirate comedy catastrophe, 1973’s Ghosts in the Noonday Sun.
These days, documentaries chronicling the disastrous making of a film and the influential names that were partly to blame have become fairly commonplace. For many cinephiles, these kinds of retrospective behind-the-scenes docs will always prove to be entertaining for their tales of moviemaking gone awry and the various incidents which led to such a sad, yet highly-publicized state of affairs. Which stars fought with each other, what the director was thinking, how much interference the producers were inflicting are all usual factors in efforts such as these. While The Ghost of Peter Sellers has plenty of these elements thanks to the actor himself, there’s more of a sensitivity to the documentary as opposed to mere juicy gossip that accompanies most titles of this sort. Sure, movie historians may find it fun to hear how Sellers was ridiculously late to set virtually every day and how he alienated co-star Anthony Franciosa to the point where they couldn’t even be shot together in the same scene. But The Ghost of Peter Sellers aims to do more than just revel in such details. In fact, as far as Ghosts in the Noonday Sun is concerned, Medak’s goal is to honestly decipher just what happened to the project he hoped would propel his career to greater heights. With a curious eye, the director revisits shot footage and returns to the movie’s Mediterranean locations as he tries to piece together why, when and how the project fell apart. Producers, co-stars and various other names associated with the project take turns giving their takes on the runaway production with the only point of agreement among all of them being that it shouldn’t have been made in the first place.
What The Ghost of Peter Sellers does best of all perhaps, is present a portrait of two artists struggling to create. On the one hand is Medak and hopes of what being able to pull off such a tall feat with one of the screen’s most complex actors would be able to do for his career. The audience gets a sense of this in the filmmaker’s recollections and the vintage behind-the-scenes footage, which recount how much Ghost in the Noonday Sun meant to proving himself as an artist who could create on such a grand scale. Beyond that, we also bear witness in a way to Medak pondering just how different his life may have been had he indeed been able to bring the project to life in the way he intended. Where Medak’s frustrations during the shoot were rooted in the madness around him, Seller’s was due to the madness within him. The actor has always been considered complicated or troubled. But here we get a glimpse into exactly what made him so. Episodes of wild unpredictability and acute loneliness suggest the actor might have suffered from bi-polar disorder. It’s a bit hard not to feel some sympathy for Sellers; an actor with a mental condition not diagnosed at that time that was being dismissed as just juvenile behavior by both admirers and detractors. It’s no wonder he sought refuge in such larger-than-life characters and how even they weren’t enough to totally save him from himself.
It’s hard to single out just one favorite Sellers performance. Aside from the aforementioned Henry Orient, plenty of the actor’s turns on screen remain high points for me. His standout work as Sydney Wang in 1976’s Murder by Death was my first introduction to the comic legend and is now required viewing for any individual willing to call themselves a fan. Likewise, Chauncey Gardener in 1979’s Being There is still sublime and remains one of the best male performances ever put to film by any actor. But The Ghost of Peter Sellers is mostly Medak’s story and his attempts to put the past to bed. A solid director who has enjoyed a long-lasting career following the Sellers debacle with titles such as 1980’s The Changeling and 1994’s underrated Pontiac Moon, this film shows Medak as alive a filmmaker as ever on a search for clarity and closure on not only one of the most challenging periods of his life, but also on the man at the center of it all.
