In what is probably the least surprising news ever, Men in Black III was all Will Smith’s idea. Men in Black III director Barry Sonnenfeld was recently interviewed by UK entertainment magazine Contactmusic, in which he confirmed that the story and plot of Men in Black III was completely thought up by Will Smith.
”Will calls me Baz. When we were shooting ‘Men In Black II’ [in 2002], one night he said ‘Hey Baz, I think I have an idea for number three’. The basic idea was that Will’s character, Agent J, would have to go back into the past to save his partner,” said Sonnenfeld.”It allowed the movie to take place in another era, and us to learn more about Tommy Lee Jones’ character. But it turned out to be a very long process of development, mainly because of the knotting issues of time travel, the time travel thing was really hard”
When asked about the thought process of shooting the film with out having a competed script, Sonnenfeld was fairly glib about the fact that they had no second or third act prepared for the multimillion dollar film . Sonnenfeld stated,”Was it responsible? The answer is, if the movie does as well as I think it will, it was genius. If it’s a total failure, then it was a really stupid idea.”
Even with ten years to work on the script, the difficulty of sussing out the time travel aspects forced them to continually update and make changes. This could be a good thing or bad thing, depending on if they needed that time to ensure there were no plot holes or if they kept realizing that the plot made no sense and they kept starting from scratch. We can only hope it is the former.
