Director of ‘Borat’ on the reasons why he stopped talking to Sacha Baron Cohen

The director of “Borat”, Larry Charles, lost contact with his formerly frequent collaborator, Sacha Baron Cohen.

In a recent interview with The Daily Beast, Charles said that he once considered Cohen as a “comic genius”, comparing him to Charlie Chaplin and Peter Sellers. However, when they started production on their 2012 film “The Dictator”, their relationship deteriorated while Cohen began to “move away” from the humor of the subversive character who made him famous. Charles suspected that it was because “he wanted to be more a traditional film star”.

“He surrounded himself with more traditional business people and obtained advice on their part, which, I do not think, was a good advice for the kind of rebellious sensitivity that Sacha had had until that time,” said Charles. “And so, for various reasons, it started to fragment and fracture and collapse. And the film is not bad. It’s good. It’s funny. There are actually a lot of funny things, but that simply did not reach the potential he had.”

According to Charles, “the dictator” was a “very problematic project from the start”. At first, he imagined the film as a “classic political satire” closer to “Dr Strangelove” than “Borat” or “Brüno”. However, the film collapsed because of too much “contribution of external people” as well as a lack of “concentration” of Cohen.

“I would try to get [Cohen] To trust, trust his instincts, what I learned is the only thing you have, “said Charles.” And instead, he trusted so many different people with so many different contradictory thoughts that she started to take place and problems that should never have been problems. »»