Barry Sonnenfeld: The trouble with Barry

Barry Sonnenfeld says he loves making comedies, and we believe him, because he made 'Get Shorty'. But what do we think when the director of 'Men in Black II' tells Ryan Gilbey he dislikes special effects?

When the filmmaker Barry Sonnenfeld drops a confession into our conversation, it is delivered so blithely and briskly that he is already sizing up another topic by the time it has registered in my mind. I ask him to repeat his last sentence. "Sure," he smiles, mentally rewinding. "I don't like making visual effects movies." That's what I thought he said.

The director whose latest film, Men in Black II, cost close to $100 million, and features around 600 special effects, and whose CV is peppered with elaborate fantasies such as the two Addams Family comedies, the original Men in Black, and the reviled science-fiction western Wild Wild West – this is the guy who doesn't like making visual effects movies. Might it be that he's in the wrong business? "I know," he giggles, "but they're forcing me to do it." He really is quite a giggler. He's a lively chatterbox, too. He's always either talking or giggling. When it's silent, chances are that he has left the room.

This unnamed entity that is forcing Sonnenfeld against his will to direct flamboyant blockbusters is, on a superficial level, the studio – in this case, Sony, which had not planned Men in Black as a franchise until that 1997 comedy, about two intelligence agents (Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones) policing extra-terrestrials on earth, did business that was out of this world (approaching $600 million at the last tally, placing it snugly inside the all-time top 20 box-office chart).

The idea of cheerful coercion is something of a theme with Sonnenfeld. He can pull out all the stops when the mood takes him – it was his persistence that persuaded Danny DeVito to snap up the rights to Get Shorty, and to let him direct it. And Sonnenfeld did a bang-up job on that footloose comic thriller: it's easily his most assured picture.

Still, he seems much happier with the idea that other people are steering him onto paths that he would not otherwise have chosen – an odd trait, perhaps, for a director. But never underestimate the power of withdrawal. One of the most effective ways of getting what you want is to retreat from the game, or to play it by appearing not to. If you don't make a choice, then you can never make the wrong one.

Many things in Sonnenfeld's professional life conform to this pattern. When he discusses Wild Wild West, he'll take a lot of the blame, admitting that he fumbled the tone, and acknowledging that you should never make a comedy with two funny men ("Will and I realised in pre-production that Kevin [Kline] wasn't willing to play straight-man"). But he also throws in an allegation of wilful industry sabotage that would never make it past The Independent's lawyers: it's as though he can't concede the movie's flaws without pointing out that it was also stymied by external interference. Another choice that wasn't his to make.

He claims, too, that he never wanted to be a director in the first place. He was doing very nicely as a cinematographer. For Rob Reiner, he had conjured the claustrophobic chill of Misery, where the colour scheme ran from weeping-sore pink to cadaver blue, and he brought a wry crispness to When Harry Met Sally. His most inventive work, though, was with the Coen Brothers, for whom he shot three movies – Blood Simple, Raising Arizona and Miller's Crossing.

The last of these, an archly stylish noir thriller, he calls "the best-looking film I shot". I suggest that it must be in his thoughts more than ever now that Sam Mendes's Road to Perdition has just opened. Regardless of the merits of Mendes's film, it is, visually at least, Miller's Crossing in all but name. He squeezes out another giggle. "The Coens' film made about $5 million," observes Sonnenfeld, "and now the same movie, only with Tom Hanks, is going to do $100 million."

Sonnenfeld would have collaborated again with the Coen Brothers had he not been nudged into directing The Addams Family in 1991. "I was already incredibly happy," he says. "I had no intention of directing. Scott Rudin [producer of The Addams Family] made me do it."

Ten years down the line, he finds himself up to his neck in Men in Black II, protesting that he never meant to get involved with visual effects. Yet this is what pays the mortgage, and could pay the mortgages of each of Sonnenfeld's East Hampton neighbours, which must make it doubly difficult to forsake. When he did make a departure from blockbuster territory, to direct the character-based comedy Big Trouble, the movie was blighted – first by the events of 11 September, which convinced the distributor that demand would be limited for a comedy in which two schmucks with a bomb inadvertently hijack a plane; and then by US journalists, who treated the film as though it had somehow been implicated in the attack on New York. "One TV station intercut the trailer for Big Trouble with shots of the planes hitting the World Trade Center," he sighs. "The movie wasn't about terrorism. It was about a bunch of stupid people in Miami."

Men in Black II, which was hastily rewritten to excise a showdown on top of the Twin Towers, must by comparison seem like returning home to Mama. Sonnenfeld had been initially resistant to the idea of a follow-up. "I just didn't know how to do a sequel to this movie at first." Having seen Men in Black II, I'm not entirely convinced that he found out. He argues that he had no intention of mounting a rehash. "I would be disappointed if I saw a James Bond movie that didn't feature a spectacular pre-credit action sequence. Repetition works well for those films, and it's exactly what audiences want. But it wouldn't have suited Men in Black II."

And, indeed, it doesn't. The charm of Men in Black was in the freshness of its ingredients, which were all straight off the tree: the sparky playing between ice-cool Smith and tombstone-cold Jones; the buoyancy of the notion that, contrary to Independence Day, extra-terrestrials are just like the rest of us, only with a set of tentacles, or the ability to grow a fresh head in the event of decapitation; and the practised nonchalance with which Smith and Jones greeted each bizarre manifestation of alien life, no matter how gooey or unsavoury.

But prolonged nonchalance can begin to resemble inertia. And so it is that the new movie is a weirdly flat experience, in fact the first of its kind from Sonnenfeld, whose gently gaga sensibility gave even Wild Wild West the occasional burst of inspired loopiness. But, as the man says, effects movies just don't float his boat.

"I like making comedies, and visual effects are the enemy of comedy because you rely on cuts, which can destroy the timing. On smaller movies, when you're done shooting, you're done shooting. With the Men in Black pictures or Wild Wild West, I've still got another year of directing effects after I've finished directing the actors. But instead of working with Will or Tommy, who understand when you say: 'Flatter. Faster. Don't let him know you're angry at him', you're with computer technicians who don't know what you're talking about. 'How much faster?' 'Er, 18 per cent.' 'Won't we need motion blur?' 'Yeah, I guess.'" He mimes someone dying of boredom. "All that pressure. It was one of my worst movie experiences."

I notice that the giggling has halted, and wonder aloud if he might not be better off making more intimate, personal pictures like Get Shorty. "They're all personal," he says quickly, showing his first signs of irritation that afternoon. He paces over to the table to fetch a coffee, talking as he goes. "The Men in Black films are all about my ultimate philosophy in life, which is that no one has a clue what's going on in the universe, so we all need to be more tolerant of one another. It's as personal a statement about my feelings as The Addams Family, which is about how true parental love is utterly unconditional, or Get Shorty, which is consistent with my personal belief that self-confidence is freedom. Every one of my movies is a personal statement. I can't tell you that I make personal movies and not-personal movies because I just don't see things that way."

'Men in Black II' is now on general release. 'Big Trouble' still awaits a UK release date