Mr. Strangelove_ A Biography of Peter Sellers - Ed Sikov [127]
Shooting began on November 2. During the production, Peter and Britt stayed in a suite at the Plaza-Athenée. “I mustn’t get into any arguments while filming,” Peter told the columnist Roderick Mann. “It’ll make me too nervous. I just have to shut up and walk away.” But, he added, referring jocularly to his fellow filmmakers, “In six months’ time I can tell them all what I think of them, the swine!”
He was still discussing matters of the spirit with Cannon John Hester and, at least from Hester’s perspective, preparing to convert to Christianity. They met once a week at the Plaza-Athenée and talked about God. Ursula Andress, clad in leopardskin or cheetah, sometimes joined in. According to Hester, Peter was especially intrigued by the story of Jesus walking on water.
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Woody Allen remains a great admirer of Peter Sellers’s talent: “Sellers goes to the deep core of what’s funny,” he said fairly recently. “His funniness was the funniness of genius. What he had to offer was clearly gold.”
But Peter’s genius came at price. Allen found the task of actually working with Peter to be strenuous. Peter O’Toole was no help, either. With What’s New, Pussycat?, the first-time actor and screenwriter found himself rudely belittled by the great Dr. Strangelove and his good friend Lawrence of Arabia.
“Woody,” Siân Phillips sighs. “They upset Woody Allen on the set—they were not nice to him. They used to rewrite the script every day, and Sellers was very supercilious with him. ‘We are way beyond rehearsing, you know. I’ll be in my dressing room.’ There was a lot of pulling rank. Woody got so neurotic he wouldn’t even come out of his bedroom.”
“Met the cast in person today,” Allen wrote in his diary, which he later published as publicity for the film. “Sellers and I eyed one another carefully. I think he senses in me a threat to his current position as cinema’s leading funnyman. I tried to make him feel at ease and I think I succeeded. He seemed more preoccupied with his wife than with my ideas.”
Sellers and O’Toole indeed began to tinker with Allen’s script. Tinkering soon turned into wholesale reworking. “Scenes have been taken away from Woody and . . . reworked and repolished by Sellers and O’Toole,” Charles Feldman reported on December 2. “I spent the last three days with Woody getting a new Bateau Mouche scene, then I spent endless time with Sellers getting him to approve it.” In addition, Sellers thoroughly rewrote the scene in which Dr. Fassbender and Michael muse drunkenly in a lonely bar:
MICHAEL: (drunk) I need help.
FRITZ: (drunk) Don’t mention dat verd to me—“help.” Dat is vat I need—dat help, oh God, how I need dat ting! (Confidingly:) You know I am in love vit a patient? (Broadcasting:) I am in love vit a patient! (Casually:) Ya got a minute?
Then Peter wrote—and Donner shot—three entirely new scenes that weren’t in Allen’s original script at all. This was no longer on the level of spontaneous improvisation.
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“You’ll like zis group analyzis,” Dr. Fassbender tells Michael early in the film. “It’s a real frrreak show! If it gets dull ve sing songs!”
Clive Donner, asked how Fassbender’s character was developed, responded that “it evolved a little from discussions we had, but that was Peter’s idea. He would keep coming up with ideas, and I’d say, ‘Are you sure, Peter?’ And he’d say, ‘Don’t worry, it’ll be all right. . . .’ The character was trying to be young again—trying to be a mod to keep up with it all. It’s a search for youth.”
At Michael’s first group session, Peter as Fassbender slaps his hands together and rubs them expectantly as the camera tracks back from a close-up. “And now, group! Whose e-mo-zhen’l problems shall we discuss today?