‘Borat’ Director Stopped Talking to Sacha Baron Cohen After He Started ‘Surrounding Himself’ With ‘Show Business People’ and ‘Pulling Away’ From Subversive Humor: ‘He Wanted to Be More of a Traditional Movie Star’

“Borat” director Larry Charles has lost touch with his once-frequent collaborator, Sacha Baron Cohen.

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

“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,” Charles explained. “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.”

According to Charles, “The Dictator” was a “very problematic project from the beginning.” At first, he imagined the film as a “classic political satire” more akin to “Dr. Strangelove” than “Borat” or “Brüno.” However, the movie fell apart because of too much “input from outside people” as well as a lack of “focus” from Cohen.

“I would try to get to trust himself, trust his instincts, which I’ve learned is the only thing you have,” Charles said. “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.”