"Barry's Back in Black"

Barry Sonnenfeld’s list of films include The Addams Family films, Get Shorty, the Men In Black films, Wild Wild West, and RV. Now the 59 year-old returns to the helm of the movies that have made him arguably the most successful with Men In Black 3.

Unlike the previous films, the third Men In Black was filmed in 3D. Sonnenfeld was asked if it was more difficult making this outing versus previous films.

“No, the technology made it easier,” Barry believes, “It’s always the story. On any movie, the hard part is, until you have your story, it’s really hard for you to finish propping the movie, it’s hard for you to figure out who to cast, there are comedy runners, when you have the whole movie, you can introduce in the first act that you can call back in the third act. So I kept saying to Sony because it took us a long while to get the script right. And I kept saying to Sony, ‘What a director needs is a script.’ And one day, Will, who really is partner and my best friend and an ally on these movies, Will said, ‘Hey, Baz, they know what a director needs. They know you need a script. We just don’t have one yet. You don’t have to tell them that.’ And I get off the phone with my wife and she would say, ‘Barry, if you tell one more people that what you need is a script, I’m going to throttle you.’”

“But what you need is a script and the challenge of this movie was, the good news is I think you can look at the movie that we made and not say, ‘Wow, it sure does look like they didn’t know what they were doing,’” he adds. “We got along great, Will, Brolin, Tommy, myself, so we have a situation where actors totally trust a director, the director loves the actors, we had

"Barry's Back in Black"

a fantastic first act, and we knew what our ending was supposed to be. We had a great ending. And most movies run into trouble in the second and third act, when you’re writing a script. A lot of reason that happens is you keep rewriting, fixing the first act and you don’t get time to get the second and third act right because you keep going, ‘Before we go to the second act, we still have a few notes on the first act,’ and then, you’re dead.” So our biggest challenge on this movie was story and our least challenge was casting, shooting, or technology. I loved what we were going to with the 3D, I knew how we were going to shoot the 3D, I feel our 3D is unique to any movie that you’ll see in 3D, so I was very confident about all that.”

Barry was asked if he felt there was a film that he didn’t worry was going to fall apart.

“When we did Get Shorty, we were ready to go, everything was set, and this was seven years after trying to get someone to let us make Get Shorty because no one wanted to make Get Shorty,” he recalls, “And right before we began shooting, the studio said we had to lose $250,000, which was a lot of money on that movie, or we’re not making it, and there was a few days of horror on that. And so, I volunteered to take out what I knew was their favorite scene. I said, ‘You know what, guys, we’re back on budget, we’re taking out the scene with Ben Stiller, Gene Hackman, and [John] Travolta.’ ‘We love that scene. You can’t take that out.’ We said, ‘You can’t have it.’ They said, ‘We have to have it.’ ‘That scene is too much money.’ I’m the president of the studio, what’s it going to take to have that scene? ‘$250,000′ ‘You got

"Barry's Back in Black"

it, fine.’ But, by the way, the scene’s not in the movie. It is the best scene, but it came after several other scenes that were similar and the audience, I think, was getting bored, so I took it out, and you can see it on the DVD on the end. But my point is there were, on this movie, because it’s time travel, really big challenges. You would think you would have worked it out, then you go home, someone would wake up at 3:00 in the morning and go, ‘Wait, if she already knew…Oh, damn!’ And then, you’re back to the beginning. And then, what happened is we started the movie on a certain date because (a), we wanted this to be Will Smith’s next movie and he was circling some other movies, and (b), we didn’t know if the tax investment credit in New York state was going to continue. And if we lost that, we were going to lose tens of millions of dollars making this movie, not able to get this movie to be made for the right budget. I knew we were going to have a great first act, I knew we were going to have a fantastic ending, and we shot that stuff and went along on hiatus and now you’re in panic mode because you’ve got to start up again. But I remember reading nothing but horrible stories about Titanic and I remember people, including me, going to see Titanic, just to see how bad it could be.”

“So all these movies are hard,” Sonenfeld continues, “This one was harder than a lot of them because there was a lot of pressure because we’re reinventing the franchise, we’re doing time travel, what if we screw up and Josh Brolin is no good and the audience hates us for breaking up a fantastic, iconic duo, which is Tommy and Will. That was Will Smith’s and my single biggest concern.

"Barry's Back in Black"

We never felt this was a one-hander. We felt Will was only as funny as Tommy allows him to be, Gracie Allen, George Burns. We’re now taking Tommy out of the middle two-thirds of the movie. We’re both replacing him with somebody that feels equally perfect as Tommy, but on the other hand, isn’t Tommy, and it was my suggestion to hire Brolin. And he may have told you this, but when I saw him, I said, ‘I can’t wait to see what your head looks like in 3D,’ because he’s got the largest head only to Tommy Lee Jones of any actor in America. So it was hard, they were hard. For me, the only one that wasn’t hard was Big Trouble, 59 great nights of shooting, but it didn’t make any money, and eleven days before it happened, the towers went down and we had two guys that had stolen a suitcase with a nuclear bomb, so that wasn’t going to go anywhere. This one was hard, but not harder than others.”

Sonnenfeld was asked if it was true of Tommy Lee Jones’s claim that the director’s only order to him was ‘faster and funnier.’

“It was never ‘faster and funnier’,” he says, “It was faster and flatter. You never want to tell anyone to be funny and you never want anyone on your comedy to know that you’re working on the comedy. You don’t want the director of photography to know you’re shooting a comedy because it will look ugly and bright.”

“You don’t want the composer to know because it will be like Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure,” Barry adds, “Although the same composer did our movie and he did a great job on that. But my point is you don’t want anybody to know that they’re working on a comedy when you’re shooting a comedy, so I would never say faster and funnier. I would say faster and flatter, but on this one, Will asked

"Barry's Back in Black"

me not to say faster, because it’s not a direction. I can’t remember, but there’s like a technical thing, so I said, ‘More urgency,’ So there was a lot of, ‘Hey, Will, way more urgency,’ and he’s like, ‘Got it, Baz!’ And then, week twenty, it’s like, ‘Hey, Will, faster!’ But so I did say, ‘More urgency,’ to replace, ‘Faster!’ Yes, I did.”

The plot of Men In Black 3 deals with agent J, played by Will Smith, travels back in time and encounters a younger version of his partner K, played by newcomer Josh Brolin. Barry was asked why he decided against simply having Tommy Lee Jones look younger with makeup and digital effects.

“Never,” Sonnenfeld answers, “I felt the joy of going back in time was to make it feel like a different movie, and if we had Tommy doing that, Men In Black 3 would start to feel like the other Men In Blacks, in that it was just another caper story. I think that going back in time and seeing a young K and not being played by Tommy Lee Jones, I never thought it would be anybody but another actor.”

It was brought up how uncannily similar Josh Brolin’s performance is in the film to Tommy Lee Jones.

“Well, I direct all the actors the same way, which is basically saying, ‘Flatter and faster,’ except for Will, where I would go, ‘Flatter, but more urgency,’” Barry says, “But a lot of the Josh Brolin direction happened before we started. Josh and I spent a great deal of time saying this can’t be an impression. It has to be an interpretation and what is amazing about Josh’s performance is that is he looks like Tommy, he’s wearing prosthetic ears and a prosthetic nose to look like Tommy, but they look very similar, if you look at Tommy when he was in his late twenties. And Brolin can sound a great deal like Tommy. Tommy, everyone

"Barry's Back in Black"

thinks he has this flat voice, but it’s kind of musical and there’s a real lilt and beauty to Tommy that you’ve never ever experienced, but except when you watch him in movies.”

“But the challenge for Josh and myself was to what extent is he a different guy,” he continues, “He’s forty years younger and the event that changed him hasn’t happened yet. Josh and I felt it should be a little bit. It should be like old Tommy, but a little more optimistic, but not all of a sudden like he’s Jerry Lewis. i think that some people, before we started, thought that the whole joy was to see a very different guy, and I was very fearful that if we did that, the audience is immediately going to say, ‘I miss Tommy Lee Jones.’ So Brolin and I were in total agreement that there was more optimism, but it’s the same guy, and once the studio saw the dailies, they’ll realize that Josh and I made the right decision. But on the set, I do very little directing. On-the-set directing is much more about pace, syntax, urgency, but not figuring out…sometimes, I’ll say just doing when you’re less mean and more amused like that, but I don’t go back to the chair and talk about your childhood.”

Barry was asked how he had to break the news to Tommy Lee Jones that his screen time in Men In Black 3 is less than in previous films in order for the plot to advance.

“I was not the one to tell him,” he says, “But I was the one to fly down with the producers to Palm Beach and talk to him about being in the movie, because Tommy’s initial reaction was that he wasn’t in the movie enough and he loved working with Will and myself, and he said, ‘We have a great time together.’ And I said, ‘We absolutely do, but the truth is,

"Barry's Back in Black"

we need to make a different movie.’ We don’t want to make Men In Black 3 and it’s just another sort of caper. We need to add something to make it very different.”

“It’s not about you, Tommy,” Sonnenfeld continues, “It’s about what would work best for, especially after ten years, we really felt we needed to sort of re-engineer it a little bit. So I was not the one to tell him, but I think Tommy is extraordinary. I love spending every single minute with him. I remember I was a producer on Ladykillers and I was going to direct it, but when Joel and Ethan [Cohen] directed it, I said to them, ‘You got to hire Tommy for that role. He’d be perfect,’ and they were too afraid to. But I love Tommy and Tommy loves me and loves Will and I have pictures of me and Tommy smiling happily together.”

Sonnenfeld was asked about the idea of a sequel with Will Smith’s son Jaden Smith as J’s dad.

“I said to Will that we should do one when we go back, way back and get Jaden,” Barry replies, “Just so I wouldn’t have to work with Will.”