The director who made six movies with Peter Sellers, despite hating his guts: “He was just too crazy”
Common sense would dictate that if a filmmaker makes one movie with an actor and quickly realises they’re never going to get along, that’ll be the end of it. However, despite getting off on the wrong foot with Peter Sellers and seldom getting back on the right one, one director still made another five with him.
Of course, it was an open secret in Hollywood that Sellers could be a difficult customer, with the legendary comedic performer constantly skirting the line between genius and madness. The tales of his oddball and eccentric behaviour both on and off set are legion, so anyone with an ounce of industry knowledge should have been prepared to deal with both sides of his mercurial nature.
They don’t call it the movie business for nothing, though, and the only reason why Blake Edwards tore down and mended so many faces with his recurring collaborator was for the single most influential reason in the industry: money. Their partnership dissolved several times, but they always found their way back to each other, a mutual decision driven entirely by financial gain.
“Sellers was nuts, really nuts,” Edwards informed The Wall Street Journal. “He used to talk to his dead mother and carried her shrine around with him. He was all over the place emotionally. Once, he had a priest with him, or so he claimed, and they used to have early morning religious ceremonies. He had a genius quality to him, but then, so did Svengali.”
After joining forces for The Pink Panther and A Shot in the Dark in consecutive years, the tension between them became too much to bear, leading to a four-year separation before they were reunited for 1968’s The Party. Once again, though, Edwards had reached the end of his tether, and he had no qualms admitting why he agreed to direct Sellers again in three more Pink Panther sequels between 1975 and 1978.
“I guess it was greed that brought us back together,” he confessed. “We said we were never going to work together again, but then we both fell on hard times, he in particular. I also have to say that the good times, as few and far between as they were, were unique and so much fun. But it never got any better with us, only worse. He was just too crazy.”
Edwards revealed that because Sellers “had a big emotional investment in me” as the steward of the Pink Panther franchise, his resentment towards the director only increased, even though by the end of their fourth Inspector Closeau picture, he called the star “bored with the part, angry, sullen, unprofessional,” succinctly summing him up as “a monster.”
Herbert Lom, who played Charles Dreyfus in three Panther flicks, recalled that “they could go for weeks without speaking,” with things becoming so fraught that “they sent their assistants to speak to the other person.” The most damning indictment from Edwards came when he suggested that “if you went to an insane asylum and you described the first inmate you saw, that’s what Peter had become.”
Saying they weren’t the best of friends would be putting it lightly, but as always, money always talks loudest.
