Mr. Strangelove_ A Biography of Peter Sellers - Ed Sikov [88]
Despite its Hollywood-based director and producer and New York financiers, Lolita’s production took place in England. Harris explains: “We wanted to keep a very low profile during the shooting of that film. Everybody seemed to be interested in how we were going to do Lolita, and what was going to be in terms of censorship, and what did the girl look like . . . We felt that if we just got away from Hollywood and got to England, a place where we spoke the language, we could keep a much lower profile.” But it was financial considerations that actually drove the decision. To attract foreign film productions, the United Kingdom was offering filmmakers the ability to write off substantial expenses if four out of five of the cast and crew were subjects of the queen.
Peter counted. “The word was that this guy was just terrific,” Harris later said. “It caused us to feel lucky if we could get him. It turned out that Peter had an availability—but not much, because he was so busy going from one picture to another. If we could shoot his part in the picture on fourteen consecutive days, he could work us in.” Shooting began in late November 1960, at Elstree.
For the role of Lolita’s mother, Kubrick cast Shelley Winters, the undisputed queen of poignant tawdriness. In 1951, for instance, she invited audiences to cheer Montgomery Clift on in his goal of killing her in A Place in the Sun. (It requires extraordinary skill to achieve that degree of contempt.) For Lolita herself, Kubrick signed an unknown, Sue Lyon, after Nabokov nixed Tuesday Weld. Peter was necessarily captivated by the girl, but even he knew she was off limits. Still, at a party at James Mason’s house during the production, Mason’s wife was fascinated to see Peter spending most of the evening lying on his back, Michelangelo-like but on the floor, snapping photos of the sexy fifteen-year-old.
Like the making of so many great films, the construction of Lolita was a matter of methodically creating nuanced art among gargantuan egos. Mason, the star of the picture (not to mention the star of Max Ophuls’s Caught, 1949; George Cukor’s A Star Is Born, 1954; Nicholas Ray’s Bigger than Life, 1956; and many other films) was not at all happy at the way Kubrick fawned over him—meaning Peter. According to Mason, Kubrick “was so besotted with the genius of Peter Sellers that he seemed never to have enough of him.” Mason was right. Sellers and Kubrick harmonized in a way that rarely occurred between Peter and his directors. They shared the same macabre sensibility. They bonded.
At the time, as James B. Harris recalls, Peter was particularly social as far as Kubrick and Harris were concerned: “Every Sunday we used to go out to Chipperfield and visit with Peter and Annie and all his friends. The Boulting brothers were there, and Graham Stark, and David Lodge. It became sort of a ritual.” It also seems to have helped drive a wedge between Peter and the rest of the cast.
During rehearsals, Kubrick suggested that his actors pretend to have forgotten the lines they had just meticulously memorized—except for Peter, who’d been told not to worry about his scripted dialogue at all. Instead, Kubrick announced, Peter should do what Peter did best: Make things up on the spur of the moment. Cues be damned—let it fly! Mason was annoyed, but he didn’t blame his costar: “You could not fault Peter Sellers. He was the only one allowed, or rather encouraged, to improvise his entire performance. The rest of us improvised only during rehearsals, then incorporated any departures from the original script that had seemed particularly effective.” Kubrick’s artistic instinct was right on target. With Sellers given free rein, Quilty became even more unpredictable and terrifying.
But ironically, and comically, they were all speaking dialogue that was written by Harris but continued to be credited to Nabokov, an extraordinarily pedantic author who, when he turned in his