Sacha Baron Cohen quotes
Dictators are ludicrous characters, and, you know, in my career and in my life, I've always enjoyed sort of inhabiting these ludicrous, larger-than-life characters that somehow exist in the real world. And just looking around, you know, over the last 10 years in particular, I kind of became obsessed [with] Colonel Gadhafi, amongst others, but Gadhafi in particular because he was so over the top. His dress style was so flamboyant, so ridiculous. In fact it could only really get to that level of absurdity by the fact that he was somebody who was unquestioned.
Sacha Baron Cohen
I had always found Colonel Qaddafi hilarious. I wanted to do a character that was inspired by him. And you had all these other ludicrous characters, like Turkmenbashi, who was the President and dictator of Turkmenistan, who renamed, I think, the day Thursday and the word for "bread” after his mother. And when his doctor told him to give up smoking, he banned smoking from the whole country, because he didn't want to be reminded of cigarettes. And then you have someone like Kim Jong-il, you know, who claimed to have hit nine holes-in-one in his first-ever game of golf, and also Colonel Qaddafi, who had these sort of thirty virgin guards, dressed unintentionally like a sixty-year-old women, and who would break wind when being interviewed by the BBC, as you know.
Sacha Baron Cohen