Larry Charles’ filmography includes collaborations with some of the biggest names in comedy: Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David, Sacha Baron Cohen, and, most recently, the cast and creators of his silly and provocative Dicks: The Musical. (Also the Dilbert guy, but hey, nobody’s perfect.) Charles has just published a new memoir, Comedy Samurai, about his long experience in the world of making funny films, which means he’s currently out on the promotional tour. Which means, in turn, that he’s getting pretty candid about old friends and collaborators he no longer speaks with—notably Cohen and David, both of whom he’s become estranged from after projects with the two men failed to meet lofty expectations.
This is per a new Daily Beast interview Charles gave this week, in which he talked about falling out with Cohen, specifically, during the course of the filming of their third movie together, 2012’s The Dictator. Charles—who makes it clear that he holds himself just as responsible for any ill feeling as anybody else—suggests that, by that point in his Hollywood ascent, Cohen had lost some of the renegade spirit that had powered the pair’s earlier Borat and Brüno. The director notes he entered their latest (and first traditionally scripted) project with high hopes, saying he envisioned it as “a classic political satire on the level of a Dr. Strangelove.” But, “I think that for a variety of reasons, Sacha didn’t focus on the work the way he had in the other two movies and got distracted. And also started to take on a lot of input from outside people. And I felt like he was groping and flailing, trying to find the answers when the answers were within him. And I would try to get him to trust himself, trust his instincts, which I’ve learned is the only thing you have. And instead, he was trusting so many different people with so many different contradictory thoughts that it started to just unravel and issues arose that should never have been issues.”
Speaking about how genuinely scary making Cohen’s earlier films could be—especially Brüno, where the creators faced “an America that was really hateful”—Charles says he considered Cohen “a comedy genius” at the time.
I would have done anything for him. But by the time we got to The Dictator he was pulling away from that whole style of work and he wanted to be more of a traditional movie star. And he was surrounding himself with more traditional show business people and getting advice from them, which I don’t think was good advice for the kind of rebel sensibility that Sacha had had up until that time. And so, for a variety of reasons, it started to kind of fragment and fracture and fall apart. And the movie’s not bad. It’s good. It’s funny. There’s actually a lot of funny stuff in it, but it just didn’t reach the potential that it had.
Charles speaks with similar candidness about David, noting that their falling out came after Charles filmed a 2022 documentary about his long-time friend, the core of which was a four-hour interview between the two men. David supposedly loved the interview at the time, but Charles says the comedian became increasingly worried about being too serious in his answers, and ultimately threatened, a day before it was set to come out, to withhold a new season of Curb Your Enthusiasm from HBO if the network went forward with airing it. “There was something about him not being funny, not having witty answers, thinking about answers, thinking about these deeper questions and themes in his life that started to trouble him almost from the very beginning,” Charles notes. “And I sensed it. But I thought, well, maybe he’ll get over it. And I would show him the cuts, and I would even take his notes in the hopes that we would get to the broadcast in one piece. And we almost made it. But we got to that last day, the day before it was supposed to premiere, and he couldn’t take it anymore. And he did what he had to do to get the show pulled from HBO.”
You can read the full interview—in which Charles also touches on friendships with Bill Maher and Cheryl Hines, and is very polite about Borat 2—here.
