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director's chair Barry Sonnenfeld — Men in Black 3 C By IAIN BLAIR ULVER CITY — Black suits and shades. Aliens. Neuralyzers. Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones. Yep, the men of Men in Black are back for the third installment of director Barry Sonnenfeld's sci-fi comedy franchise, and this time agents J (Smith) and K (Jones) travel back in time — to the '60s — to save the agency and the future of humankind. Here, Sonnenfeld, whose credits include The Addams Family, Get Shorty and Wild Wild West, talks about making MIB3, which is being released in 3D, posting the film, dealing with a ton of visual effects, and why — even though he began his career as the Coen brothers' DP — he'd always choose a theater with good sound over one with good projection. POST: It's been 10 years since the last MIB This former DP and well-respected director takes on aliens in New York. film. Did you feel a lot of pressure with this one? BARRY SONNENFELD: "Yes, but in a good way. I feel this is the most emotional of the three and gives the audience some under- standing about where these characters came from. I wanted to make a film that was remi- niscent of the first two, in terms of its charac- ter-based relationships, but different." POST: How tough was the shoot? SONNENFELD: "It was long — about Men in Black 3 got its DI at Efilm with colorist Steve Scott. 106 days in the end, and we shot entirely in New York. We did a lot of locations, but it was mainly on stages. By the end I was quite happy to start post." POST: Do you like the post process? SONNENFELD: "It's my favorite part of the entire filmmaking process, because it's where you get to make the movie better. Truf- faut said that the worst your movie will ever be is the day you're done shooting, and that's so true. My two favorite parts of the process are post and the prep, because there's not the same amount of pressure, and in prep you get to spend time thinking about all your shots and storyboarding them, location scouting, and all the fun stuff. Then when you get on set and start shooting, and every idea you had, every hope you had for a nice sunny day or a beautiful sunset, or the actor you cast for that tiny part you didn't think was at all important but who now turns out to be so bad you have to get rid of them — all that stuff comes crashing down on you, for weeks and months at a time, so it's very stressful. "So there's the anticipation and relaxed concentration of prep, then there's the awful disappointment of shooting, although I'll admit that sometimes a scene will go better than you thought it would while you were shooting. 14 Post • May 2012 But finally you get to the six months of post where you start to fix all the mistakes, and I'm incredibly un-precious about my work." POST: Your editor was veteran Don Zim- merman, ACE, whose long list of credits includes two Night at the Museum films, Liar Liar, Prince of Tides, Indecent Proposal, Ace: Ven- tura: Pet Detective and Rocky III. This was your first time working together. Tell us about the col- laboration and the editing process. SONNENFELD: "I love Don. He reminds me very much of my first movie as a director, The Addams Family back in 1991, when I worked with editor Dede Allen. Don is like moved out to LA to the Sony lot, because Sony Imageworks was doing all the visual effects work. It's about a mile from here to their campus, so every day I'd just walk over there to deal with all that. So it just made sense to be based here on the West Coast for most of the post." POST: I hear you can be quite ruthless when it comes to cutting material. Is that true? SONNENFELD: "Absolutely! If there's a great scene, but it doesn't help tell the story and just slows it all down, I get rid of it. The single funniest thing in Get Shorty isn't even in the final film. It was a scene with Gene Hack- Barry Sonnenfeld (with scarf and hat) on the importance of audio in film: "I actually believe that comedy lives or dies by the subwoofer," he laughs. "I'm a big subwoofer fan and I love using it for comic effects, and also to give manliness to a movie." Dede in that he's very buttoned-up and old- school, and very brave in the way he cuts, which is like a young, fearless kid. He's always full of ideas and youthful enthusiasm, and I just love working with him. We cut on Avid, and he didn't really come on the set that much. "The reason is that Don came onto the project very late. There was another editor that started the film, who I also had never worked with before, and he just cut in a very different cutting pattern to the one I'm used to. Don came in just a couple of weeks before we were done shooting, so he had no time to come on the set. And he was also starting to recut all the stuff that had been shot and cut by the first editor." POST: Where did you do the edit? SONNENFELD: "My 10-week DGA cut was all done at offices where I live, in East Hampton, New York. Then after that, we all www.postmagazine.com man, John Travolta and Ben Stiller, and it was so funny. I loved it! I fought hard for it, and I got the extra money to shoot the scene but the first time I saw it in the cut, I realized it had to go because it stopped the momen- tum. So post is great — as you make the film better, you discover shots and reactions you never expected, you lose all the crap, and the stuff that during the shoot you felt you abso- lutely needed you now realize you don't need it at all. Then there's all the visual effects, this film has a ton of them, and all those add so much since they come in during post." POST: How many visual effects shots were there? SONNENFELD: "Over 1,200 of them, a huge number, all done by Sony Pictures Imageworks. Until you see the movie with them in, no matter how much as a director you know it's going to look good, you're still