The director who never wants to work with Sacha Baron Cohen again: “Issues arose”
Sacha Baron Cohen has excelled at pushing the boundaries of comedy, but there was one director who had had enough of his shenanigans.
It wouldn’t be unfair to call Sacha Baron Cohen the “black liquorice of comedy.” While his style is very appealing to many people, there’s an equal number who find it completely repulsive.
Baron Cohen’s mix of mockumentary footage, embarrassing publicity stunts, social satire, and old-fashioned raunchiness certainly made him stand out amidst the other wannabe comedy stars of the early 21st century. If there were any lines to be crossed, Baron Cohen was guaranteed to step over them.
Although the performative creativity of Baron Cohen’s projects is undoubtedly deserving of praise, he has a vital collaborator who helped inspire some of his best work. Director Larry Charles had served as a staff writer on classic sitcoms like Seinfeld and Mad About You, but he stepped behind the camera to direct Baron Cohen in the comedy blockbusters Borat and Bruno.
Given the acclaim that both of those films received, it seemed only natural that Baron Cohen and Charles would want to work together again. The Dictator was perhaps their most ambitious film to date, as it starred Baron Cohen as a fictional politician from the Middle East who travelled to New York. However, the different approaches that the two collaborators had ended up making for a problematic production.
Charles told The Daily Beast that it was his “own failures as a human” that led to issues on The Dictator, which he stated was “a very problematic project from the beginning.” In Charles’ eyes, The Dictator “could really be brilliant,” even if was not going to “be as funny as Brüno and Borat.”
“It started off being what I thought was going to be a classic political satire on the level of a Dr. Strangelove,” Charles said. “The original script was very layered, greatly plotted, almost like a Billy Wilder-plotted sort of screenplay.”
Although reigning in a temperamental star like Baron Cohen could’ve been an issue for many filmmakers, Charles actually faced a different issue. He increasingly found that Baron Cohen was unfocused on didn’t trust his own instincts, leading him to seek creative input from other people.
“Sacha didn’t focus on the work the way he had in the other two movies and got distracted and also started to take on a lot of input from outside people, and I felt like he was groping and flailing, trying to find the answers when the answers were within him,” Charles said. “I would try to get him to trust himself, trust his instincts, which I’ve learned is the only thing you have, and instead, he was trusting so many different people with so many different contradictory thoughts that it started to just unravel.”
The Dictator is a funny film that takes some hilarious shots at real-life dictators, but it also clearly lacked the focus and precision that were present in the previous films that Baron Cohen and Charles made together. However, Charles said that he didn’t want “to point a finger” at Baron Cohen, The Dictator effectively marked the end of their collaborative relationship.
Baron Cohen certainly didn’t slow down in the aftermath of the creative fissure, as he was able to make the sequel Borat Subsequent Moviefilm into a massive streaming success at the height of the pandemic, and even earned a few significant award season nominations. However, Baron Cohen’s public success has been marred by misconduct allegations that pointed to a pattern of intolerable behavior, so Charles can’t be blamed for wanting to strike out on his own.
