“I left the project”: the only director who’d rather quit a movie than work with Clint Eastwood
As one of cinema’s pre-eminent living legends, plenty of actors would sell their own mothers for the chance to work with Clint Eastwood, and some directors might even go further, since he hardly ever collaborates with any filmmakers who aren’t Clint Eastwood.
Since 1993, the four-time Academy Award winner has only made one movie for another director, and he only did that because Trouble with the Curve‘s first-timer, Robert Lorenz, had served a two-decade apprenticeship as a Malpaso Productions regular before taking his maiden seat on the director’s chair.
With that in mind, if the studio fancied moving heaven and earth to convince the icon to break his rule and step in front of the cameras for somebody other than himself, you’d think they’d be thrilled to hear it. However, in this case, the opposite was true, because the man wielding the megaphone wanted someone else for the part.
While he only had three features under his belt, and two of them were The Addams Family and its sequel, Barry Sonnenfeld had been around the business long enough to know how these things work. For his fourth effort, Men in Black, he had the ideal central pairing in his mind after reading the script with his wife, but his paymasters disagreed.
“It’s funny, I turned to her and said, ‘Tommy Lee Jones’, and she turned to me and said, ‘Will Smith,'” Sonnenfeld recalled. “It was all based on her really liking The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. But that’s not what the producers wanted. Steven Spielberg and Walter [F Parkes] and Laurie [MacDonald] wanted, for some reason, Chris O’Donnell and Clint Eastwood.”
O’Donnell, Matt Damon’s arch-nemesis at the time, wasn’t a particularly inspired choice, but he was the flavour of the month in the mid-1990s. Eastwood, though, could have been inspired. As fantastic as Jones was in the first Men in Black, it isn’t too much of a stretch to imagine Eastwood’s persona, baggage, and thousand-yard stare making an incredible foil for Smith’s fast-talking charisma.
He’d have been very unlikely to return for sequels, right enough, but what a sight it could have been. “Both are great,” Sonnenfeld acknowledged. “But I left the project because the producers and I disagreed about the direction Men in Black should go.” After he delivered another hit with Get Shorty, he came back aboard with some much-needed cache, at which point the producers were a lot more amenable to his requests.
Not entirely, since the director admitted that he did his best to intentionally sabotage O’Donnell out of the picture so that he could cast Smith in his place, but he eventually got his wish. Jones, meanwhile, had directorial approval when he agreed to co-star, which meant that Sonnenfeld’s rehiring lay entirely in the weathered veteran’s hands. Fortunately, he agreed.
The chemistry between Smith and Jones is what helped make Men in Black one of the most purely entertaining blockbusters of the 1990s, but you can’t help but wonder how the former would have gotten on had he been paired with Eastwood, one of the very few actors in Hollywood who’s even more grizzled than the latter.
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