Spring 2019


Never Leave the Shot

During an alien birth on Men in Black, Barry Sonnenfeld keeps the frame mostly fixed, allowing the audience to find the comedy

By Rob Feld

Barry Sonnenfeld has highly defined views about the craft of comedic filmmaking, all of which he brought to bear when conceiving what became his favorite scene in Men in Black (1997). The film sees Agent Jay (Will Smith) and Agent Kay (Tommy Lee Jones) unlocking the mystery of why all the aliens living secretly disguised as humans on Earth are suddenly fleeing. On Agent Jay's first day on the job, he and Agent Kay track an alien (Patrick Breen) to New Jersey to discover that his wife is about to give birth in the backseat of a car.

Sonnenfeld's concept for the scene was to augment the comedy of the situation by accomplishing two things in one frame: In the foreground, a deadpan Jones would interrogate Breen while, in the background, Smith would be flung around by the alien tentacle. Sonnenfeld wanted to do it all in one shot without ever cutting to coverage angles or close-ups of Smith reacting, or to what's happening in the car.

"What I loved about designing the shot was that it allowed the audience to find the comedy," he says. "It's a very specific style: self-conscious and proscenium, flat to the camera even though Tommy and Breen are in the foreground and the car is further back. Because there are no cuts [and] the camera is locked down, it's like a stage play, and slightly storybook. It's a very specific style that you see throughout the movie—every frame sort of square to the lens.

While he was preparing to shoot, Sonnenfeld showed storyboards to executive producer Steven Spielberg. The only difference from one panel to the next was the tentacle throttling Smith in the background.

"Steven starts turning the pages, and the only thing that's changing is the guy up in the air hitting the hood," recalls Sonnenfeld. "I assumed Steven would say, 'You've gotta cut to this, and then I wanna see this, and then you gotta have a low angle.' But he kept laughing and laughing, and then put them down and said, 'Perfect.' And that was when I knew it was going work."

We're shooting in New Jersey because I wanted to see Manhattan in the background so that we understood we are no longer in New York. Will is in the background because he's the rookie. What I like about this shot is that it plays out the scene in different depths, with Tommy in the foreground and Will in the background. I find that wide-angle lenses are funny and long lenses are handsome, but not funny. The challenge here is you want a wide lens that doesn't make New York so distant and small that it becomes unrecognizable. This feels like a 35mm to me, maybe a 27mm, which is an unusual choice for me (I'm usually on 17mm or 21mm). Comedy plays out best in a master shot or in a two shot because you see action and reaction in the same shot.

They've stopped Redgick, an alien who's traveled outside of his jurisdiction. I personally feel that wide-angle lenses, which require the camera to be close to the actors, let the audience feel they are right there with them, whereas long-lens movies can be emotionally distancing. The wide-angle Panavision Primo lenses curve straight lines a bit, and the distortion is funny. I love Redgick's outfit—this suburban shirt—and Mrs. Redgick is dressed like an out-of-town yokel. Redgick says: "It's my wife. She's, well, look," and we track to reveal his wife in labor in the back.

So, by tracking it turns from a subjective shot (Tommy Lee Jones' point of view) into an objective shot: a perfectly framed image with the window centered and Mrs. Redgick's legs up, like in stirrups. One of my other many rules is: Never pan. I think panning is the laziest thing a director can do. Tracking is great; panning is messy. The camera is a character in the movie. Tracking here to the reveal is a self-conscious thing, telling the audience, "I'm making fun of this." If I'd panned, it would be reportage as opposed to filmmaking. I love that we gave her all that sweat, red hair, that she looks like a normal human about to give birth.

Will sees the woman giving birth. We're shooting over her legs. I didn't intend to shoot this but when I cut the movie together and showed it to Spielberg, he felt we were missing a shot of Will reacting and of his comic fear that he was going to have to help this woman give birth. It's shot on stage maybe six months later. Will is really funny in it and it adds to the scene. Sound also played an incredibly important part here because you hear the swishing of the amniotic fluids and other gooey sounds. Later, you have the hilarious banging of Will hitting the top of the car roof, so even when Will is not in frame, he's still funny because you're hearing all sorts of things going on inside the car.

What makes this scene so funny is in the foreground, you're learning important information—flatly delivered, total New York detective—but in the background, the most insane, surreal thing is happening; Will Smith being thrown around by an alien. We shot Tommy and Patrick Breen live in New Jersey and Will on a blue-screen stage in New York. The challenge of doing it in a single shot with no cutaways is that you can't control the pace or timing through editing. My theory is always faster and flatter is better, so I didn't let Tommy and Breen spend a lot of time leaving holes for Will's comments. I felt it would be better to try to fit in Will's, even overlapping, so I wouldn't be forced to change the pacing in post.

Here are the requirements: Agent Kay and Redgick have to be on the left side of frame, leaving enough room in the middle for Will to be thrown around by the tentacle. I want to see the World Trade Center because I want to know where we are in relation to New York City. The camera is slightly low, which doesn't crop the actors in the foreground and gives us plenty of room for Will to be thrown around. I love that since Will is in deep background we have true depth of field, slightly out of focus, which helped our blue-screen blend.

I'm a stickler for depth of field, which allowed Will to be slightly soft. Because he's moving around so much, ILM was able to morph different takes of Will on the wire seamlessly. It took weeks of cutting. Tommy turns toward the background and says, "You're doing great, Ace," which was hard to time. I'm also having to watch performance and make sure that Tommy is flat enough and not trying to be funny; that Patrick Breen has the right amount of nervousness without mugging. And I'm watching the car in the background to say, "Okay, I'm going to guess after this number of seconds that Will will pop out." Other directors would have used coverage, but I find editing is the enemy of comedy and that nothing kills comedy more than close-ups.

When Will is slammed into the roof of the car, he's on wires being dropped, pulled up, and dropped onto blue-painted stunt pads with a slightly thicker foamy surface. If the stunt pad was too soft, he would go into it and you would miss his face, and you wouldn't believe he's hitting a hard surface. This way he could react. Another rule I have about comedies: you only want one funny person in the scene. Every day, for 108 days of shooting, I had to stop Tommy from being funny. He would stare at me like he wanted to kill me. I had to tell his agent, "Only Will should be 'funny.' But I promise that Tommy will be funnier than Will because the actor reacting is always funnier than the actor doing the action."

There are rules [for] depth of field. If Tommy and Patrick Breen are six feet away from the camera and Will is 40 feet away, we had to make him a certain amount of out of focus. So many visual effects shows these days look like video games because they don't obey the laws of physics. His rigging was different depending on which direction he was being pulled—one rigging for lifting him up and down and smashing into the roof of the car, another to pull him left, another to pull him right, etc. So, this is probably eight or 12 different takes of different shots.

It never feels animated except in the moment where Will is dragged by one of the tentacles into the car; the morph is about two frames too fast and on the verge of not being believable. Then you see the car bouncing up and down because you can only imagine what's going on inside—and because the whole foreground play was live and there was going to be no cutting—we had to decide how long to let it bounce and imagine how long it would be funny. I didn't shoot a safety angle. I felt it had to work as one shot, and I might as well not shoot any coverage because if I have to use it, I've failed.

When Will is thrown into frame, he's holding a rubber version of the alien baby that has no electronics, and there's KY Jelly to give it that glistening newborn baby look. But it was designed to be jelly-enough-like so that it would have natural movement. I was lucky enough to hire Rick Baker to be the special makeup and creature designer, and Rick said to me, "As much as you can do practically, you want to. Puppeteers are really funny. They're real actors. They can give your actors stuff to react to. They can respond and ad-lib. You want puppeteers, not CGI.

The other babies had RC motors in them and a guy off camera with a remote to move the tentacles, but I believe this version connected via wires because it allowed for more motors and more independent movement. This one also had a tube so it could vomit and hit Will.

This is real, not CG, so Will had to angle the baby's head just right. You can't see it, but the wire is hidden around the back of Will and it actually vomited that stuff. Here's the thing about Will: Will hates to be dirty. He hates to have slime on him so Will is not acting here. He's being Will Smith being disgusted. Will, also, is one of the greatest spit-take guys ever.

This is the work of a great puppeteer who can get the squid baby's thumb into its mouth, and why you don't want to use CGI if you can do it for real. If we had animated Will instead of putting him on wires, it would never have looked as real or as funny—it's very, very hard to get animators to get physical comedy. Normally you would let him drop out of frame and cut to his face hitting the roof in the foreground; he would react and be lifted out of frame again. But for me, that wasn't the joke. The joke is never leave the shot.

(Photos: (Top) Getty; Screenpulls: Columbia Pictures)