The title comes from an interview with director Stanley Kubrick who worked with Sellers on Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), and noted that the comedian would always be slow to get into character at the start of filming, but got increasingly better with every successive take, as long as he had the opportunity to improvise. Kubrick stated that Sellers would eventually reach "a state of comic ecstasy" where no less than three cameras were directed at him, to capture his spontaneous ideas from every conceivable angle.