Genius Sellers’ ‘total disaster’
The 1973 movie Ghost in the Noonday Sun, with Spike Milligan, never reached the big screen. Its director, Peter Medak, tells The Observer’s Dalya Alberge why.
IN 1973, Peter Sellers persuaded his friend Peter Medak to direct a pirate comedy that he had developed with fellow comic genius Spike Milligan — only to then sabotage the production. Sellers’ tantrums and cancelled shoots were among the disasters that ensured that the film was never seen in cinemas.
Now Medak has made a feature documentary that lifts the lid on the comedy’s collapse, and of goingson behind the scenes that were ‘‘more outrageous and funnier than the movie itself’’.
The Ghost of Peter Sellers, to be premiered at the Venice Film Festival this week, tells how the Columbia Pictures production, a zany comedy set in the 17th century called Ghost in the Noonday Sun, became ‘‘a total disaster’’ during its shoot in Cyprus.
Medak had been excited about making a film with Sellers and Milligan, who with Harry Secombe and Michael Bentine made up the cast of radio comedy The Goon Show, but the filming went from bad to worse.
‘‘The film should have been one of the best comedy movies,’’ he said. ‘‘It bothered me for so many years, the way I didn’t succeed with it.’’
Things got off to a difficult start. When Medak went, as arranged, to Sellers’ London home to work on the script, he was kept waiting so long that he eventually went looking for the actor. He found Sellers in his bedroom. ‘‘There was Peter, standing on his head, naked, in a yoga position,’’ he said.
On a later occasion, filming was abandoned when Sellers appeared to suffer a heart attack and was rushed to hospital. Two days later, Medak spotted a photograph in a newspaper of him dining with Princess Margaret in a London restaurant.
Many days of filming were lost and scenes deleted.
When Sellers was around, Medak’s film notes record daily frustrations: ‘‘Peter is indisposed, Peter is three hours late, Peter refused to work.’’
‘‘One minute he loved the film and he loved you, and the next minute he hated the movie and you . . . Absolute lunacy,’’ Medak said.
It was not all the actor’s fault. Bad weather dogged the shoot, while a Greek captain delivering the pirate ship proved to be so drunk that he crashed it. The film, it seemed, was cursed from beginning to end. It was eventually released on video. Medak had attended a private screening with Sellers and Milligan. They left in total silence: ‘‘We all just wanted to kill ourselves.’’
Sellers subsequently tried to make amends. Medak recalls: ‘‘Peter said, ‘I want to buy back the film from Columbia, and I want you and Spike to redo the narration and reedit whatever you want, and I’ll get it released.’
‘‘That never happened. Peter called up a couple of days later and said, ‘I can’t buy back the film because it’s been written up for twice as much as it cost.’ Soon after, Peter passed away.’’
Sellers’ death came in 1980, and since then, Medak had told friends about the ‘‘hysterically funny’’ episodes from the shoot of Ghost in the Noonday Sun and was finally persuaded to make a documentary recounting them.
He says he is ‘‘really fortunate’’ to have worked on the film: ‘‘There were genius moments when [Sellers] was 200% on, completely . . . He was a genius. No question. And so was Spike.’’ — Guardian News and Media