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’t gruesome enough, Kubrick brought in as a technical consultant the photographer Weegee, who was known for having taken stark, emotionally charged photographs of an estimated five thousand murder scenes over the course of his grim career. Named Usher Fellig at birth, Weegee moved with his family to New York at the age of ten; officials at Ellis Island changed his name to Arthur. As a photographer, he seemed to be clairvoyant in terms of knowing where crimes had been committed; Weegee often arrived on the scene before the police. Hence his nickname (inspired by the Ouija board). Officially, Weegee’s technical consultations involved Dr. Strangelove’s periodically harsh, crime-scene–like black-and-white cinematography, but because he had an unusual accent—German overlaid with New York, all with a nasal, slightly strangled, back-of-the-throat quality—he inadvertently provided technical assistance for the film’s star as well.

“I vas psychic!,” Weegee told Peter on the set one day—a conversation Peter was taping for research purposes. “I vould go to a moidah before it vas committed!” Peter’s vocal model for Strangelove was Weegee, whom Sellers pushed further into parody.

(Contemporary audiences sometimes assume that Strangelove’s accent was based at least in part on Henry Kissinger’s, but although Kissinger was one of Kennedy’s security advisors, he was not a public figure when Dr. Strangelove was made. Kubrick himself denied the association: “I think this is slightly unfair to Kissinger. . . . It was certainly unintentional. Neither Peter nor I had ever seen Kissinger before the film was shot.”)

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Principal photography began in January 1963.

“He was harder to reach,” Kubrick said of Peter, comparing his friend’s demeanor on the set of Dr. Strangelove to the already unusual actor with whom he’d made Lolita. Sellers would arrive in the morning in what one of Kubrick’s biographers, John Baxter, calls a “near-torpor, saying very little, looking depressed, tired, and ill. Only when Kubrick began to set up the cameras—of which he always used at least three for any Sellers scene—did he begin to revive. By the afternoon, coaxed by Kubrick, he would have hit his stride.”

“Kubrick is a god as far as I am concerned,” Sellers said later.

As with Lolita, Kubrick began the making of Dr. Strangelove by giving Peter free rein to improvise. Kubrick would then pick out what he liked and build the film accordingly. During one take of a scene with Strangelove, for example, Sellers, without warning, shot his arm in the air and shouted “Heil Hitler!” Sellers recalled the moment: “One day Stanley suggested that I should wear a black glove, which would look rather sinister on a man in a wheelchair. ‘Maybe he had some injury in a nuclear experiment of some sort,’ Kubrick said. So I put on the black glove and looked at the arm and I suddenly thought, ‘Hey, that’s a storm-trooper’s arm.’ So instead of leaving it there looking malignant I gave the arm a life of its own. That arm hated the rest of the body for having made a compromise. That arm was a Nazi.”

“I don’t think he made up a whole scene that didn’t already exist,” Kubrick reported, “but he did a bit of embroidery. In the famous phone call to the Russian premier, for instance, he may have added the rueful line, ‘Well, how do you think I feel, Dimitri?’ ”

Some of Peter’s inventions didn’t work, and Kubrick nipped them in the bud. For instance, Peter originally played the obscenely named Merkin Muffley as a limp-wristed clown with a nasal inhaler. That was Peter’s inspiration; Kubrick’s was to have Muffley rise into place in the War Room on a hydraulic lift. But between the lift and the nasal spray, the cast and crew laughed so hard that Kubrick couldn’t get a usable take. Apart from the fact that this single bit wasted an entire afternoon, Kubrick didn’t like the broadness of Sellers’s performance in it. In the director’s vision of the character, Muffley should have been the only sane person in the room, and so the lift and the inhaler were cut and the scene reworked. This time,