Barry Sonnenfeld is recent Hollywood history in human form. An hour on the phone with him is worth three decades of anecdotes about bad casting decisions, tiffs with bullheaded studio executives, celebrity egos and success thatâs never guaranteed from one project to the next.
Now an Emmy-winning director who has worked squarely inside the system, Sonnenfeld, 64, began as a cinematographer. Wanting to be a still photographer like Robert Frank and Garry Winogrand, Sonnenfeld pivoted to filmmaking after meeting Joel Coen at a party in the early 1980s. He then shot the Coen brothersâ first three movies (including âBlood Simpleâ and âRaising Arizonaâ), as well as âThrow Momma from the Train,â âBig,â âWhen Harry Met Sally...â and âMisery.â
Sonnenfeldâs directorial debut, 1991âČs âThe Addams Family,â was a stylistically assured inauguration that gave him blockbuster bona fides, even though heâs seen his share of misfires along the way (âFor Love or Money,â âBig Trouble,â âNine Livesâ).
His crown jewel, âMen in Black,â celebrates its 20th anniversary on July 2, and his Netflix series, âA Series of Unfortunate Events,â could rack up Emmy nominations this month. In honor of both, we chatted with Sonnenfeld about his career, yielding juicy tales from the Hollywood front lines. Our favorites: manipulating Chris OâDonnell into turning down âMen in Blackâ and fielding Kevin Klineâs âWild Wild Westâ grievances.
Here are Sonnenfeldâs spiciest tidbits.
Cher was considered for Morticia Addams.
After Sonnenfeld showed a knack for working with first-time filmmakers, power producer Scott Rudin recruited him to helm âThe Addams Family.â Tim Burton and Terry Gilliam had turned Rudin down, but Sonnenfeld was game, even though he swears he didnât aspire to become a director.
Sonnenfeld envisioned the movie less as a reboot of the 1960s sitcom and more as an offshoot of the âmacabreâ Charles Addams drawings that appeared in The New Yorker. âMy original material was not the TV show at all, which I thought winked at itself and didnât take itself seriously,â he said. Thus began Sonnenfeldâs penchant for oddball characters trying to thrive in environments where they are misunderstood.
Executives overseeing the project at the now-defunct Orion Pictures wanted Cher, who won her Oscar for âMoonstruckâ a few years prior, to play family matriarch Morticia. Sonnenfeld and Rudin did not â they wanted someone who wasnât such a personality. And then along came Anjelica Huston, who also sported jet-black hair and won an Oscar in the mid-â80s, for âPrizziâs Honor.â
âWhat was great about RaĂșl JuliĂĄ and Anjelica Huston and Christina Ricci is theyâre not trying to be funny; theyâre trying to be real to who those characters are, which allows the audience to find the comedy instead of us telling you where to find it,â Sonnenfeld said.
Clint Eastwood and Chris OâDonnell were in the running for âMen in Black.â
Facing creative disputes with Walter Parkes, the president of Steven Spielbergâs production company, Sonnenfeld said he dropped out of âMen in Blackâ to direct âGet Shortyâ and later re-joined the project. After tweaking âBill and Tedâ writer Ed Solomonâs script â a more dutiful adaptation of the âMen in Blackâ comic-book series â Sonnenfeld had to persuade Spielberg against his one request: casting Chris OâDonnell to play Agent J. (At the time, OâDonnell was a top-tier hunk thanks to âScent of a Woman,â âThe Three Musketeersâ and âBatman Forever.â)
âł[Spielberg] told me I had to go to dinner with Chris and convince Chris to be in the movie,â Sonnenfeld recalled. âBut I knew I wanted Will Smith, so I told Chris that I wasnât a very good director and I didnât think the script was very good and if he had any other options he shouldnât do âMen in Black.â He let it be known the next day that he was not interested.â
Back to the Will Smith push. Sonnenfeld, who lived year-round in East Hampton, where Spielberg spends his summers, arranged for a helicopter to take Smith from a wedding in Philadelphia to New York. âWill and Steven hit it off, so thatâs how I got Will Smith to be in the show,â Sonnenfeld said.
For the second headlining role, the executives quaterbacking the film wanted Clint Eastwood. Sonnenfeld thought Tommy Lee Jones, âwho was very intimidating,â would be better.
âTommy and I got along great, especially after the first movie and he saw how funny he could be by trusting me,â Sonnenfeld said. âHe didnât like my direction while we were working because he thought I was trying to make him not be funny.â
Sonnenfeld compared Smith and Jonesâ interplay to that of Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn, or George Burns and Gracie Allen, or Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin. âYou want the funny guy and the flat guy,â he said. âCary Grant is the most brilliant comedy actor there is because heâs never trying to be funny.â
Kevin Kline was the wrong choice for âWild Wild West.â
Sonnenfeld ignored his Grant-Hepburn instinct on âWild Wild West,â the 1999 steampunk spectacle that updated the 1960s series of the same name. Recasting Smith after their lucrative âMen in Blackâ collaboration, Sonnenfeld went to Kevin Kline for the role of Artemus Gordon. (George Clooney was cast first, but he dropped out.) The problem? Kline âdidnât want to be the straight manâ opposite Smithâs zany showmanship.
âWill should have been the funny one, and Artemis Gordon should have been the serious one whoâs sort of reacting,â Sonnenfeld said. âWe had to reverse that. [...] I shouldnât have cast Kevin in that role.â
That wasnât his only problem, though. Sonnenfeld blanched at the âscale and scope and toneâ of the movie, an expensive exercise in bombast. Sonnenfeld especially regrets the sequence in which Smith, playing Captain James T. West, pops up in drag to seduce Kenneth Branaghâs overblown Confederate villain. Sonnenfeld said that regretful scene, and Branaghâs colossal mechanical spider, stemmed from âfundamentalâ disagreements with producer John Peters. âTonally, that show was a bit a mess,â he said.
âWild Wild Westâ became an expensive gamble. Its $170 million budget was especially costly at the time. (For comparisonâs sake, âStar Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menaceâ and âThe Matrixâ â two of 1999âČs highest grossers â cost a reported $115 million and $63 million, respectively.) To profit comfortably, a movie needs to earn about twice its budget at the box office. âWild Wild West,â already a critical failure, became a commercial disappointment, too, stalling at $222 million worldwide.
âI had said if I ever was in the film business it would be directing movies like âLocal Heroâ or âGet Shorty,ââ Sonnenfeld said (he did direct the latter, in 1995). âThat was much more my aesthetic, or the Coen brothers stuff. And I found myself directing these large blockbusters, and that can be problematic. If they work, youâre everyoneâs hero, and if they donât work, youâre an expensive director. I think that was not helpful for my career.â
Sonnenfeld made two fruitful âMen in Blackâ follow-ups, but âdoors closed after âWild Wild Westââ and he has yet to helm a big-screen blockbuster of the same caliber that isnât a sequel.
Robin Williams had a comedic brain like no other.
Sonnenfeldâs career persisted despite his âWild Wild Westâ setback. He produced and directed the pilot of the celebrated but short-lived Fox sitcom âThe Tick.â He then made the Tim Allen comedy âBig Trouble,â which bombed when Disney postponed its release one week after 9/11 due to its plot about a nuclear device being smuggled onto a plane. âTroubleâ opened in April 2002, and Sonnenfeld recalls seeing television segments asking âIs America ready for a comedy about terrorism?â The movie made a paltry $8.5 million worldwide on a $40 million budget.
In 2006, Sonnenfeld found a modest hit in âRV,â a broad comedy about a dysfunctional family road-tripping to the Rockies. Working with Robin Williams was a mixed blessing. Sonnenfeld is a âcontrol freakâ who carefully designs his camera shots and sticks to the script, while Williams is âlike a jazz musician of comedy.â
âYou could give him two words or a stick or a leaf from the ground, and he could do 20 minutes of pure comedy riffing,â Sonnenfeld said. âHe was such a good impersonator that you couldnât just say, âGive me Donald Trump.â Youâd have to say, âEthel Merman imitating Donald Trump.â And then if you said, âNow do Donald Trump imitating Ethel Merman,â it would be slightly different. His comedic aesthetic is different than mine. Heâs all about jazz â heâs all about the freedom of trying things and riffing and never doing the same thing twice and ad-libbing. [...] The two of us had different ways of approaching the same thing. But he was a lovely guy and he was really funny, and his brain was almost unlike anyoneâs Iâve ever met in terms of how fast he was in finding 20 minutes of comedy with nothing. He was amazing.â
âPushing Daisiesâ was âtoo cute.â
Because of the 2007â08 Writers Guild of America strike that halted production on many television shows, weâll never know if âPushing Daisiesâ could have been a bigger hit. Mixing the aesthetics of Tim Burton and the rapid-fire charm of âGilmore Girls,â the wacky detective dramedy about a pie-maker (Lee Pace) whose touch could bring people to life was a critical sensation. Despite multiple Emmy nominations, including a win for Sonnenfeldâs pilot, the gap imposed by the writersâ strike between Seasons 1 and 2 led to a ratings dip.
âWe were delayed almost a year, so we were never on long enough and consistently enough to build a word-of-mouth,â Sonnenfeld said. âAnd then the second issue is, I blame our scripts, in that I think they were slightly too cute. I wish theyâd had a little bit more plot. I remember saying to Bryan Fuller, who was the showrunner and the creator and a good friend of mine who I adore, âHey, Bryan, shouldnât we have better plots so we can lean forward in trying to figure out who did the murder, for instance?â He was afraid if we had a little bit more of a procedural that we would lose the quirkiness.â
Sonnenfeld sees âPushing Daisiesâ as something that would thrive in the Netflix era, gathering momentum by dropping 10-episode batches. âWe would probably be in our 11th season now, but thatâs just not he way it worked out,â he said.
âDaisiesâ has become something of a cult favorite thanks to DVD sales and streaming services, but Sonnenfeld said thereâs been no talk of a reboot or revival.
Sonnenfeld had a distinct vision for âA Series of Unfortunate Events.â
After âThe Addams Familyâ and âPushing Daisies,â Sonnenfeldâs aesthetics were perfect for the Netflix series based on Daniel Handlerâs âLemony Snicketâ series. Beyond the desaturated palette and busy landscape inspired by Terry Gilliamâs sci-fi satire âBrazil,â he had one aim: making the central kids, Violet and Klaus Baudelaire, more âheroic.â
âIn the books, theyâre stoics â theyâre slightly more victims,â Sonnenfeld said. âAnd in the show, they have to take a little bit more control of where they are. I did not want to fall into the trap of having the kids be too passive or the plots of the episodes not be strong enough to carry two hours per book. We worked hard, being faithful but adding other characters and other complications.â
Sonnenfeld, who dropped out of the 2004 âSeries of Unfortunate Eventsâ movie due to budget constraints, also wanted to give Lemony Snicket a more active presence. âThe very first thing I ever said, at the meeting to get the job, was that I thought Lemony Snicket should be an on-camera narrator and be there on the set, not just off somewhere typing.â
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