Printable Biography of Barry Sonnenfeld

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 "We had to bring back Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones, because so much of what made that first movie work was the relationship between them," he explains. "They're like Abbott and Costello. You can't have one without the other . . . there's a karmic thing between these two. The audience likes to see them bicker. The first movie takes place over three days and MIIB over two, so they only know each other for five days—but it looks like they've been together for 30 years!"

In MIIB, J and K's rapport undergoes a sea change. "The role reversal that casts my character, Agent J, as the hardened veteran, and Agent K as the rookie," says Will Smith, "is classic comedy. This harks back to Aristotle: Contrast creates conflict, which creates comedy. You are not going to see two more different people on the screen than Tommy and myself. We incorporated some of our real-life differences into our characters. It's wonderful food for comedy."

While Smith, who had to start filming immediately after wrapping his Academy Award-nominated lead role in Ali, found it hard to shed that characterization, Jones had the comfort of knowing he could be funny without really trying—no mean feat for a performer who had had few comedic screen roles and had doubted his ability to elicit laughter from the audience.

"I learned a lot from Barry on the first one," says Jones. "Now I know that you can't make people laugh. All you can do is create and present irresistible opportunities to laugh."

Sonnenfeld agrees. "The comedy in movies that I like the most doesn't involve jokes. Instead, I put the actors in strange or comic situations but don't let them react to those situations in a comedic way. I like to let the audience discover the jokes on their own.

"In MIB there's the scene where, in the foreground, Tommy is interviewing an alien named Redgick, and in the background you see Will being grabbed by the tentacles of a pregnant squid lady and thrown up and around. It all plays out in the wide shot—there is no close-up of Will. We allow the audience to find the joke."

In MIIB, the villain, Serleena (Lara Flynn Boyle), is, according to Sonnenfeld, "an alien who shape-shifts into the first human form it sees—a magazine photograph of a Victoria's Secret ad. So she becomes this babe in black leather . . . and she looks really sexy, with a sardonic, sarcastic attitude. Basically, she's just made up of thousands of slimy eel-like creatures that are wound so tight that she's able to keep them in the form of a human—but she also has the ability to send these eels out of her body and strangle, attack, and otherwise cause mayhem. I think she makes a pretty cool villain.