Tantrums and tears: how Peter Sellers turned a pirate film into a shipwreck

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’s tantrums and cancelled shoots were among the disasters that took their toll, ensuring that the film was never seen in cinemas.

Now Medak has made a feature documentary that lifts the lid on the “nightmare” of the comedy’s collapse, and of goings-on 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 on 30 August, tells how the $2m production for Columbia Pictures – 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 the famed 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’s 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, to his great surprise, Medak spotted a photograph in a newspaper of his lead actor dining with Princess Margaret in a swanky 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.

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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 re-edit 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’s death came in 1980, and in the years since then, Medak had told friends about the “hysterically funny” episodes from the shoot of Ghost in the Noonday Sun, and he was finally persuaded to make a documentary recounting them.

Medak, whose 1972 black comedy The Ruling Class earned Peter O’Toole an Oscar nomination, said he had good memories as well as bad of working with “the most incredible comedy couple”.

He said Sellers and Milligan adored each other. Recalling a restaurant meal when they were telling a joke, he said: “It got to the punchline, they just looked at each other, and tears started pouring down their faces … Laughing so much, they couldn’t speak at all. They sank under the table.”

Medak 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.”