Sellers went absent for days or weeks at a time, refused to appear in his scenes with Welles and left the production before all of his scenes had been shot. As a result, Sellers was unavailable for the filming of an ending and other interlinking scenes, leaving the filmmakers to devise a way to make the existing footage work without him. The framing device of a beginning and ending with David Niven was created to salvage the material. Val Guest, who had been given the task of creating a narrative thread which would link all segments of the film, chose to use the original Bond and Vesper Lynd as linking characters.