Barry Sonnenfeld on .... Movies (1 Viewer)

[rich_d]

Today's Wall Street Journal (6/19) had an interview with Barry Sonnenfeld concerning his thoughts on movies and movie distribution.

The stuff that came out of his mouth ...

Discussing digital distribution of movies:

"Let's say we were doing Men in Black. I would probably shoot additional scenes for the movie. Let's say the ... first week you have $100 million opening. The second week you're at 60, the third week you're at 30, the next week you're at 22. So the fourth week, you announce 'Coming next week to your theatre, Men in Black' with an additional eight minutes of stuff.' "

On his films:

"If you told me that Men in Black would do $600 million world-wide, I would have told you there's no way. If you told me that Addams Family was going to do what it was going to do, I'd be amazed. But, on the other hand, if you told me that Big Trouble was gong to do as badly as it did, I would tell you you're nuts, it's one of my best movies."

On the Internet:

Somehow links the evils of the Internet to a cringe-worthy story about his 4 year old daughter knowing the name of his film agent.

Earth to Barry:

You are a good cinematographer who now directs films like RV.

 

[Nicholas Vargo]

Actually I agree with his assessment of Big Trouble. It is in fact one of his best and most underrated films, and I'd like to thank you for posting that snippet from that interview. It's a movie that Sonnenfeld got right and he has every right to be proud of it. The biggest crime of them all was that nobody went to see it

 

[MatthewLouwrens]

Count me as another fan of Big Trouble.

Okay, I did go to it a little biased - I was a big fan of the Dave Barry book. But I was really impressed at how well he managed to get the book to work on-screen - retaining all the small jokes and the running gags - in such a short running time while stopping the film from ever feeling overly rushed.

I've shown it to a few people who have never heard of the book or Dave Barry (he's not very well known in NZ), and they've all loved it.

But yeah, other than that - I liked The Addams Family films, and thought MIB was mildly entertaining, but other than that, he's not going to go down in history as one of the greats.

 

[Lew Crippen]

It sounds like Barry is using a lot of words to come to William Goldman’s view on the movie business and making films:

“Nobody knows anything.”