Wild Wild West | Director Barry Sonnenfeld on what went wrong

Wild Wild West
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Director Barry Sonnenfeld has been chatting about 1999’s Wild Wild West, and how the hugely expensive movie failed to click.


Barry Sonnenfeld has just released a new memoir, titled Best Possible Place, Worst Possible Time, and the filmmaker has been promoting it by dropping a few brilliant stories here and there.

While one tale about the noxious toxicity of Will Smith’s farts on the set of Men In Black has already picked up plenty of traction online, it’s his take on the conflict at the heart of 1999’s Wild Wild West that is particularly interesting.

Despire earning $220m at the global box office, Wild Wild West has always been viewed as something of a miss for all involved (apart from producer Jon Peters, who finally got a giant spider into one of is films following the death of Tim Burton’s Superman Lives and the dashing of Peters’ mega-spider hopes for that film).

In his memoir (via SlashFilm), Sonnenfeld gives his take on the action comedy that featured Will Smith and Kevin Kline as the two leads, with Kenneth Branagh in the villain role. Happily, Sonnenfeld has now offered his thoughts on why it didn’t land with audiences in the way he’d intended.

According to Sonnenfeld, it was ‘personality conflicts’ that caused the problems with the film, and things really kicked off when Smith’s slated co-star George Clooney dropped out of the project as he believed Smith ‘had more funny lines than he did.’

Podcast: Batman Returns (1992) and Wild Wild West (1999)

Kevin Kline was duly drafted in, an actor who Sonnenfeld argues was a “lovely, talented guy” but allegedly there was some kind of rivalry between him and Branagh. That in turn (says Sonnenfeld) led to Kline overcooking his performance to outdo Branagh. This process is also known as ‘doing a Tommy Lee Jones in Batman Forever.'

The story continues that Sonnenfeld chose to ask Smith to play the film’s straight man as “we don’t want two funny people in our comedy and we’ll never get Kevin to be the ‘not funny’ one.”

Casting one of the late 90s’ red hot stars and then plucking away one of the key elements in their arsenal? Well, you can see why Sonnenfield believes the direction things took had a detrimental impact on the film’s impact upon audiences.

Best Possible Place, Worst Possible Time is available for purchase now and if all of Sonnenfeld’s reflections are that good, it might just be the page turner of the year. Should you need more Wild Wild West in your life after that brilliant anecdote, check out Simon’s podcast episode on the film.

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