By After getting his start as a cinematographer on multiple early Coen Brothers works along with films like “Big” and “Misery,” Barry Sonnenfeld branched out to directing.
The results have mostly been pretty good. On the one hand, he had two highly successful franchises under his belt – the acclaimed 1990s “The Addams Family” films, and the highly successful “Men in Black” trilogy. He also had some duds, most notably the box-office disaster “Wild Wild West”.
Recently the filmmaker published a new memoir, “Best Possible Place, Worst Possible Time” where he discussed his various films and revealed some stories from the set.
Promoting the book on the Let’s Talk Off Camera With Kelly Ripa podcast, he revealed that the set of 1997’s “Men in Black” was evacuated at one point for “about three hours”. The reason? A bad case of intestinal gas.
According to Sonnenfeld, the scene in question is the one with the transforming car which travels at hyper speed and flips over. To film the sequence, Smith and Tommy Lee Jones were “hermetically sealed” in the pod being used for the car. Sonnenfeld explains:
“There are locks to prevent it from opening and falling. I say, ‘Roll camera.’ And I hear Will Smith go, ‘Oh Jesus, so sorry. Tommy, so sorry. Baz, get the ladder.’ And you hear Tommy saying, ‘That’s fine, Will. No worries, Will. Don’t worry, Will.’ Anyway, I don’t know what’s gone on, right?
So we race the ladder over. Yeah, Tommy reaches his leg out as the ladder is coming over, races down the stairs. And what happened was, Will Smith is a farter. It’s just some people are. And you really don’t want to be inside a very small hermetically sealed space with a Will Smith fart. You don’t even want to be sitting next to him at the Disney ranch.
We evacuated the stage for about three hours. And that’s incredible. No, he’s, you know, a lovely guy. Just, he farts. Some do, some don’t.”
Sonnenfeld and Smith had a good working relationship through from that, the pair would go on to work on two further “Men in Black” films, and the infamous flop “Wild Wild West”.
Talking about the latter in his book (via Slashfilm), he reportedly says he thinks it was personality conflicts that tanked the film and it all began when Smith’s original co-star George Clooney dropped out as he felt Smith had more funny lines than he did.
They then brought in Kevin Kline who Sonnenfeld felt was a “lovely, talented guy” but allegedly there was a rivalry with the film’s villain Kenneth Branagh which led to Kline overdoing it to show him up. To put it simply, Kline couldn’t play the straight man.
The report indicates Sonnenfeld took Smith aside and had to convince Smith to play the straight man as “we don’t want two funny people in our comedy and we’ll never get Kevin to be the ‘not funny’ one.” Sonnenfeld adds another issue was that “there was zero chemistry between our two leads”.
The book itself, which covers other topics like Gene Hackman’s issues with John Travolta on the “Get Shorty” set, to the failed pilot for the “Beverly Hills Cop” TV series, is in stores now.
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