Out soon: The film Peter Sellers tried to scupper

Ghost In The Noonday Sun was 'a living nightmare'

A Peter Sellers film that its own star tried to sabotage is to be released on DVD for the first time.

Producer Antony Rufus Isaacs called Ghost In The Noonday Sun an 'absolute living nightmare' to make, and director Peter Medak called it 'the biggest disaster of my life' because of the comedian's impossible behaviour.

The comedy, about 17th Century pirates and co-starring Spike Milligan, was blighted with problems from the moment filming started in 1973.

Sellers quickly lost confidence in the $2million project and did all he could to stop it being made, putting nothing into his performance and locking himself away for days at a time. He would say he was ill, only to be spotted water-skiing later. He even faked a heart attack before secretly leaving the island to have lunch with Princess Margaret in London.

Problems were exacerbated as the comedian had just split from Liza Minelli, with whom he was said to be infatuated, on top of his usual unreasonable behaviour. Crew recall him trying to work through the 'deepest catatonic depression'.

Ghost In The Noonday Sun was filmed in Cyprus as Russian and American warships circled, amid rising tensions that would lead to the Arab-Israel war. There was even a conspiracy theory that the film was a 'research front' for the Turkish invasion of Cyprus a few months after production wrapped.

Earlier this year, director Peter Medak launched a crowdfunding campaign to make a documentary, The Ghost of Peter Sellers, to tell the nightmare story of the film that nearly cost him career.

He recalled: 'We shot on the Mediterranean on real boats which was a complete insanity. Everything started going wrong days before shooting began - the Greek captain delivering the pirate ship to Kyrenia's magnificent 7th Century harbour was so drunk that he crashed the ship into the quay.'

He said Sellers 'became completely impossible… and he did everything to try to make sure that the film would never be finished.'

Sellers even fired the producers and tried to have Medak thrown off the production.

Noonday Sun

To add to the farce, the comedian broke off from the shoot to film a Benson & Hedges cigarette commercial – only to suddenly refuse to touch the product, realising that he was the President of the Anti-Smoking League.

Ghost In The Noonday Sun was never released at the cinema, although the semi-completed movie did later emerge on VHS only after his death, revealing some of the huge flaws in the project.

Sellers' character even changes his name midway through the film, from Scratch to Scratcher, because during filming a soothsayer told the troubled comedian that Scratch was an ancient name for the devil.

In his definitive biography of Sellers, writer Roger Lewis describes how relations between Sellers and co-star Tony Franciosa were so fraught that the two actors refused to be in the same frame for most of the filming.

Sellers is said to have acted the diva from the very start, bringing 200 suitcases to the villa he was renting for the shoot, then immediately rearranging the furniture to get the right vibes.

Based on a novel, Ghost In The Noonday Sun revolves around a bumbling pirate, played by Sellers, who kills his captain after learning where he has buried treasure. However as he begins to lose his memory, he relies more and more on the ghost of the man he's murdered to help him find the treasure.

Sellers immediately took a dislike to the script, and called in Milligan, who agreed with the diagnosis that the film was a flop. The Goon rewrote it as a zany comedy but, Medak recalls 'the script never worked'.

Fabulous Films – which are optimistically billing the movie as a 'missing Peter Sellers classic' – are now releasing in on December 12, the first time it has ever been available on DVD. Preorder here.

Here is some footage from the film: