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Barry Sonnenfeld

Barry Sonnenfeld–A Life in Movies, Pt. 3

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Barry Sonnenfeld–A Life in Movies

part 3

The series concludes with the legendary comedy director sharing his thoughts on the art of the movies and what it takes to master the craft

by Michael Gaughn
August 3, 2023

above | Barry Sonnenfeld setting up a shot on the set of Netflix’ A Series of Unfortunate Events

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Julie Christie in Heaven Can Wait (1978)

While Parts 1 and 2 did touch on shooting and directing, this final installment focuses mainly on Barry Sonnenfeld’s unique take on the art and craft of making films. Because he’s known mainly for comedies, critics and commentators have never given him all the credit he deserves. But Barry’s influence on the cinematography for and direction of the comedy genre has been tremendous, helping to pivot it away from the static, stagebound approach that has dominated the form ever since the inception of film to a more dynamic, adventurous style that helps put the camera on an equal footing with the actors.

And, just to tidy things up, you’ll find some digressions here on film school, his favorite cinematographer, and tangling with a troublesome future President.

Your work has always had a very distinctive style, even when you were shooting for others, but it never seemed to just be style for style’s sake.

What I think I brought to a lot of the movies I shot in the ‘80s and that I directed from the ‘90s on was that I used the camera as a storytelling device and not just a recording device. Many directors set up the camera to just record the story but they don’t use lens selection or camera movement as part of the story tone. And what I did, with Throw Momma from the Train and Raising Arizona—I did it also with Three O’Clock High, which I actually shot but was credited as the lighting consultant because I wasn’t in the west coast union—was make the camera part of the storytelling, make it almost a character in the movie.

And that was at its most insane with both Raising Arizona and Throw Momma—well, even in Blood Simple, when the camera tracks along the bar, booms up because there’s a drunk in the way, booms back down and continues on. I was at the New York Film Festival when Blood Simple was shown and the fact that a shot could get a laugh—there’s no dialogue, there’s nothing—that’s thrilling to me. As a cameraman, to be able to create comedy just through a camera move is perfection.

And you said the Coens originally cut that out of the film.

I went to their editing room one morning, and the shot was out. And I said, “Why did you cut it out?” and Ethan said, “I don’t know, it seemed a little self-conscious.” And I said, “Have you seen the rest of the movie? Why just pick on that shot?”

You know, there are shots where the camera’s mounted on the same rig with Fran [McDormand], and you think she’s in Marty’s bar and then the camera and her tilt 90 degrees, and we find out we’re—we put a pillow and sheets on the floor, so she falls through space, and now is in her bedroom as it transitions. So there was nothing but self-conscious film-school stuff in that movie.

Even today, most comedies are shot pretty conservatively. The Judd Apatow/Adam McKay camp and its offshoots are mainly about getting straight recordings of the performances.

There aren’t that many cinematographers who know how to stylize comedies. I mean, Bill Fraker, one of the most famous cinematographers there are, was a brilliant comedy DP. He shot Heaven Can Wait for Warren Beatty; he shot 1941 for Spielberg—not a particularly great movie but a beautiful comedy. Fraker didn’t use a camera to tell the story, but he was a great lighter.

Where does Gordon Willis fit into all this, since he shot all those comedies for Woody Allen? I know that when Diane Keaton found out Willis was going to shoot Annie Hall, it was like, “Why did you hire him?” because she couldn’t imagine him doing a comedy.

It’s so funny you say that because Gordon Willis was by far my favorite cinematographer. And his stuff looks nothing like mine. But it’s so beautifully, beautifully lit and photographed. And you’re right, Gordon Willis is another guy who knew how to shoot comedies. He didn’t like to move the camera much at all.

I was just going to say that you’re never aware of when he’s moving it.

Right. But I was honored when I was being interviewed by a reporter from Variety about two years ago and she told me she had asked Gordon Willis who his favorite cinematographer was working in his era, and he said it was me. And that is thrilling to me because we have such different styles. The closest, I would say is, Miller’s Crossing, which could have looked like Gordon shot it—very contrasty, the strong sidelight, stuff like that.

Manhattan (1979)

virtuoso comedy: Gordon Willis’s four-character long-take tracking shot through Soho in Woody Allen’s Manhattan (1979)

aliens in broad daylight on the streets of New York—Men in Black (1997)

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Do you think of yourself as a New York filmmaker? Until I read your book, I never really thought of you that way. You’re usually associated with Hollywood-type films but everything about you is New York.

That’s really good. I never thought of it that way either but, yes, I do consider myself a New York filmmaker. I worked very hard to get Men in Black rewritten so it took place in New York. When I came on, it was in Las Vegas and Washington, DC, and Lawrence, Kansas. And I kept saying, “If there are aliens, they’re in New York.” Because in New York, you can pass without any disguise, you know.

I recently talked to somebody who entered the NYU graduate film program the year before you did, and he said his experiences were very similar to yours, that he had to deal with a lot of bitter faculty members with one credit to their name and was fighting the faculty and administration all the way through just to get anything decent done.

Things might have changed, but when I was in the program, most of the teachers—who were actually good—were all kind of disgruntled and were no longer in the industry because they, for various reasons, couldn’t hack it. But the truth is none of them could teach anything until we started to shoot stuff. Sitting there watching The Sound of Music in directing class didn’t really help me, you know.

When you started to shoot, that’s when you realized, “O, that’s why you can’t shoot one over-the-shoulder with a 21mm lens and do the reverse with a 75. It looks wrong.” “O, that’s why you need coverage.” “O, I’m shooting everything too tight and I don’t know where I am.” By doing, that’s where you learn. And that’s also where the teachers can help you once they’re sitting with you, in the editing room or whatever. But until then, waste of time, waste of money—just insanely expensive.

Film was so expensive, we had to design all the shots ahead of time. You couldn’t just show up and shoot endless masters and then do an over-the-shoulder of the whole scene. So we always were thinking as we were shooting, “How are we going to edit this?” So, if I was shooting a master, I would shoot the first 20 seconds of it and say, “OK, guys, now we’ll go to the last half of the page where you say, ‘I hate you,’ and leave,” because I knew that the whole middle, I would never be in that master. I’ve got to be tighter because of the emotion of the scene, or whatever.

Now that everyone shoots video, what do they do when they go to film school? Does the school give you a 16-gig SD card on the camera and say, “And you’re not allowed to buy your own SD cards. You can only use these 30 minutes”? I think it would create a different theory of how these students learn to make movies.

The other thing that’s changed is everybody on the planet seems to have filmmaking in their DNA now. Everybody knows how to make a movie. So what are you going to film school for? They all know how to shoot, they all know how to cut, and they know all the ins and outs of the industry.

That’s right. When we were going to film school, you couldn’t cut unless you were cutting with either a Moviola or a Steenbeck, which you had to rent, which meant you would rent it with two other students and work it 24 hours a day. Now you can cut anything you want on your Mac. You can shoot on an iPhone, which looks fantastic. And you can stabilize and move the camera through space, and there are gimbals and drones, and there’s LCD lighting—all these things that are so much easier.

You look at all those black & white movies, like Casablanca or His Girl Friday. They shot them with lenses that opened up to like f/4.5, and the ASA was probably 25 or 32. Since green and red look the same in black & white—gray—you couldn’t use color to separate people. You had to do it with lighting. And they shot them at most in like 20 or 30 days. It’s just amazing. And there was very little coverage. Things played out in master, and when you went in for coverage, you popped in. You didn’t change angles so much.

I wouldn’t go to film school now. You don’t need it for cameras, you don’t need it for editing, you can find other friends that want to act the same way we did. So I don’t know why anyone would go there.

This is neither here nor there, but did you actually boot Donald Trump from a Macy’s commercial?

Yeah. We did this big Technocrane shot that starts on all these people who had a branding thing at Macy’s—Martha Stewart, Emeril, Queen Latifah, Usher—we pulled back, back, back—and across to the other side of Macy’s—we built a Macy’s lobby at Steiner Studios in Brooklyn—there’s Donald Trump and three little kids at another table, like at the children’s table. And Trump says, “How did I end up here?” So we did that in the master. And now I was going to go in for a tighter shot of Trump. And he said, “You’re not shooting me from that side. That’s my bad side.” I said, “Well, I have to. I can’t shoot from the other side. It won’t cut.” He went, “Find another angle or I’m leaving.” And I said, “OK, see you. Thanks for coming.” He said, “You’re letting Donald Trump leave without getting a closeup?” And I said, “Yeah, it’ll be fine. You don’t want me to shoot from here, and I can’t shoot from where you want me to, so we’re good. It’s going to be great. Go home.” He said, “I’m leaving.” I said, “Yeah, you’re leaving. Goodbye.” So I went to do a two-shot of Martha Stewart and Queen Latifah, and everyone was a little freaked out—you know, the clients and the agency—because I let Donald Trump leave without his closeup. I’m setting up the shot, and there’s a tap on my shoulder, and Trump says, “Alright, you can shoot me on my bad side.” I said, “We’ve moved on, Don. Go home. We’re done. We don’t need you anymore.”

Barry’s Gordon Willis-like cinematography in the Coen brothers’ Miller’s Crossing (1990)

creating brilliant cinematography within the limitations of black & white—Casablanca (1942)

Michael Gaughn—The Absolute Sound, The Perfect Vision, Wideband, Stereo Review, Sound & Vision, The Rayva Roundtablemarketing, product design, some theater designs, a couple TV shows, some commercials, and now this.

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Barry Sonnenfeld, A Life in Movies, Pt. 2

Barry Sonnenfeld–A Life in Movies

part 2

How shooting major films like Blood Simple, Raising Arizona, Big, and Throw Momma from the Train led to Barry being asked to direct his first feature

by Michael Gaughn
July 24, 2023

above | Danny DeVito and Barry Sonnenfeld on the set of Throw Momma from the Train (1987)

After firmly establishing in Part 1 of this interview that Barry Sonnenfeld was never a big movie fan but found his way into the movies anyway by attending NYU film school for want of anything better to do, we here talk about how he became  a first-rank cinematographer, by way of his innovative camera work on Joel and Ethan Coen’s low-budget first feature, Blood Simple, and then instantly leapt into the first rank of directors, thanks to Terry Gilliam and Tim Burton both taking a pass on The Addams Family.

It seems like the making of Blood Simple pretty much falls in line with the rest of the arc of your career. You and the Coens had never done a feature film before but you all decided to jump in with both feet without a ton of experience.

We had no experience at all. Joel and Ethan did love films and had shot their own Super 8 stuff, but mainly what we had is pre-production. What we lacked in experience, we made up by controlling every single thing so we would never be on the set standing with our arms crossed, wondering where we should put the camera. Everything was designed.

To this day, both as a cinematographer and as a director, I publish all the shots for the whole movie so everyone has them. That way, the grips can come to me in pre-production and say, “Hey, Barry, on Day 12 where it says ‘boom up,’ is that a dolly boom up or do we need a crane for that?” And, “Or, do we need a cheap crane or do we need a Technocrane, or can we lay track, or are we gonna—“

I do that because I’m so nervous. It’s the same reason why I get to the airport four hours before boarding time—not even departure time. Boarding time. I want to be prepared. And Joel and Ethan and I learned that if you’re prepared, you just get that many more setups in a day and it looks that much better.

Also, Blood Simple was a perfect first movie because it’s very claustrophobic, doesn’t have a lot of extras, doesn’t have big stunts, doesn’t have crazy squibs and shootouts and stuff like that. It’s a very contained, small movie, which was perfect for our budget and schedule—although people are amazed that, as first-time moviemakers, we had 42 days to shoot that in, which is a lot for a low-budget film. We alternated six- and five-day weeks.

But the bigger thing we learned, by accident, is decide what you want to be and declare yourself that. You know, I never worked my way up through union positions—from loader to clapper to focus puller to operator to second-unit DP to DP. That would have been 15 years. I just said, “I’m a DP,” Joel said, “I’m a director,” Ethan said he’s a producer.

We talked about how you’d really wanted to be a photographer/writer and kind of stumbled into film school and cinematography. It seems like your path to directing was pretty similar.

I wanted to be an architect but there’s too much math—or a DJ, but my voice is not good for radio. Maybe an astronomer—but, again, too much math.

Yeah, I really was not one of those guys that loved films. When I was at film school, there were certain films I did really love, like Scorsese’s Mean Streets and Taxi Driver. Not much of a fan of Raging Bull, actually. Although the boxing stuff was phenomenal, some of the scenes between Joe Pesci and De Niro felt like improv exercises no one had edited properly.

So I think the reason I was hired to direct Addams Family—because again, as you point out, I was not looking to be a director. I had a very successful career as a cinematographer. I felt I was in control of my profession. I felt if I wanted something to look a certain way, I could achieve that goal. So I was in a really good place.

Barry Sonnenfeld--A Life in Movies, Part 2
Barry Sonnenfeld--A Life in Movies, Part 2

But Scott Rudin realized he wanted Addams Family to both be a funny comedy and to have a visual style, and 95 percent of most comedies meant bounce a light into the ceiling so you get an exposure, start shooting, and have the actors be funny. But Scott wanted a really stylized, visually stunning movie, so he tried to hire Tim Burton and Terry Gilliam. Both good choices. But they both turned it down.

In any case, Scott was the president of production at Fox when I shot Big and Raising Arizona. So what Scott knew when he saw Raising Arizona is that, along with the Coens, I really knew how to stylize a comedy. I mean, Raising Arizona looks unlike almost any other comedy I’ve ever seen. And then, because he was the head of the studio when I shot Big, he had heard all the stories of how helpful I was to Penny Marshall in designing all the shots, in helping her understand where the camera should be to help make the edit work—

Which she didn’t really appreciate, it seems.

She didn’t appreciate it, but, you know, that’s OK. But she didn’t appreciate Tom Hanks’ acting either. “I never thought you were a good cinematographer but you picked a good film stock,” was her compliment to me. And hers to Tom—in the LA Times, no less—was, “I never thought Tom was a particularly good actor so I surrounded him with other good actors to make him look better.” Thank you, Penny.

Anyway, Scott thought he would take a chance and felt I might make a good movie for him because of the way I stylized comedies.

You talked in the book about how, when you were pitching Get Shorty to Elmore Leonard, you had to make sure he knew you weren’t going to make a “wacky” comedy.

That’s right.

The Addams Family (1991)
left | Christopher Lloyd
right | Barry and producer Scott Rudin watching playback with Jimmy Workman and Christina Ricci

Big (1988)

Barry Sonnenfeld--A Life in Movies, Part 2

Get Shorty (1995)Barry with Dennis Farina 

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You basically told him the same thing you said to me about Dr. Strangelove—all of the comedy has to spring from the premise.

Well, you know, Elmore, before he gave Danny DeVito and me the rights, was nervous because no one had successfully transformed one of his books into a movie because they never understood either the comedy, the surrealness, or the violence, and how you combine those things. And then here’s Danny DeVito, a comedy guy, and there’s me, a comedy DP on Raising Arizona and Throw Momma from the Train, and Elmore just wanted to make sure I was not going to turn it into some sort of wacky comedy. And I remember, on that phone call with him, me, Danny DeVito, and Elmore’s agent, I had to really let Elmore know that what makes his work so funny is that he’s not trying to be funny. People say stupid things, but not because they’re trying to be funny. It’s just because they’re idiots. But they play the idiocy as reality.

In the final part of the interview, Barry gives his insights into the art of cinematography and talks about a particularly momentous Macy’s commercial.

Michael Gaughn—The Absolute Sound, The Perfect Vision, Wideband, Stereo Review, Sound & Vision, The Rayva Roundtablemarketing, product design, some theater designs, a couple TV shows, some commercials, and now this.

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Barry Sonnenfeld, A Life in Movies, Pt. 1

Barry Sonnenfeld–A Life in Movies

part 1

The Men in Black and Get Shorty director on how he wandered into film school, the filmmakers who’ve influenced his work, the dos & don’ts of comedy directing, and more

by Michael Gaughn
July 17, 2023

above | a very young Barry Sonnenfeld shooting Raising Arizona for the Coen brothers

Barry Sonnenfeld says he was never a movie fan growing up, and it’s clear from the interview that follows that he took a very non-traditional, almost reluctant, path to becoming a director. It’s not that he’s not keenly aware of or doesn’t appreciate movies—he put me on to Parasite a full year before it was released and his current favorite film is the hyper-stylized Indian production RRR. He just never felt the need to retreat into movies and movie lore the way wave after wave of filmmakers have since the 1970s.

Barry is actually a bit of a throwback. Until the emergence of the movie brats, movies tended to be made by people who had come from just about anywhere but the film industry. And they tended to be made by people who had already been out in the world and were able to draw on a depth and variety of experience that they were then able to convey through their work. It’s a considerable loss that we’re now saddled with directors—usually from the womblike world of the more affluent suburbs—whose experiences are at best limited and who only really know how to regurgitate the movies they’ve lost themselves in as an alternative to reality.

Given how much of his work is based in fantasy, and that his Men in Black helped pave the way for the current profusion of cheeky action-driven sci-fi fare, it’s easy to mistake Barry for one of the film-obsessed. So it’s surprising to read his autobiography, Barry Sonnenfeld, Call Your Mother, and realize how much his early experiences—especially his less than privileged and highly dysfunctional home life—have informed his films. (It’s hard not to see a link between his having had to disperse cockroach hordes every time he entered his parents’ kitchen and the alien infestation in Men in Black, and a surprising number of childhood memories permeate the third installment of that series.)

The interview below is basically a riff on his autobiography—not a repetition of its anecdotes but a kind of parallel commentary that further develops the story of how he came to be a hugely successful and influential director, highlights the movies and filmmakers that have inspired his work, and shows the insight and skill that led him to become a master of his craft.

The common perception is that film directors are all rabid film fans who’ll do whatever they have to to be able to make movies. But it’s clear from your book that you were never a big movie fan and that you kind of wandered into the industry.

That’s right. I didn’t grow up a movie buff the way the Coen brothers did, who shot their own Super 8 movies and did remakes of things like The Naked and the Dead. I ended up going to the NYU graduate film program only for lack of anything better to do. I really wanted to be a still photographer like Elliot Erwitt, Gary Winogrand, or Lee Friedlander, but my parents said they would pay for me to go to graduate film school—which turned out to be a lie. I ended up having to take out student loans and credit card debt at 18%. But I went to NYU and discovered that, along with my ability as a still photographer, I had some talent as a cinematographer. And those two things are very different since so much of movies is about moving the camera.

I will say that, in both my stills and my work as a cinematographer and then as a director, I’ve always gravitated to wide-angle lenses. I shot 95 percent of all my work in stills either with a 21mm or 35mm lens. And in my work as a cinematographer—especially with the Coens and Danny DeVito and some of the stuff I did as a director—my key lens was also a 21mm.

Wide-angle lenses force you to be closer to the action because they see so much. And by being closer, the audience subconsciously feels that the camera is near the actors. You feel a certain energy in the actor’s performance, especially with a wider lens closer—unlike, say, Michael Mann or Ridley and Tony Scott, who tend to use telephoto lenses.

Will Smith told me that when he did Enemy of the State with Tony Scott, he could never even see the camera. It was so far away with a 200mm or 300mm lens, he didn’t even know they were shooting. And there I am two feet away from him with a lens practically in his nostrils. So it’s a very different way of working.

Did Kubrick have any influence on your use of wide-angle in movies or is that more about the two of you being sympathetic in your approach to filmmaking?

You know, Kubrick is my favorite director. My favorite movie is Dr. Strangelove. I also love 2001: A Space Odyssey. I hired Vincent D’Onofrio to be Edgar, the villain in the first Men in Black, in part because of his work in Full Metal Jacket.

What I love about Strangelove—which I think is also the best comedy ever—is everyone is playing the comedy as reality. No one’s trying to be funny. And because the reality is so surreal, stupid, and off the charts, that’s what makes it funny. It’s a perfect movie for expressing my kind of movie acting. The other thing Kubrick did so well is that he played 

Barry Sonnenfeld--A Life in Movies, Part 1
Barry Sonnenfeld--A Life in Movies, Part 1

John C. Reilly and Will Farrell in the Baby Jesus dinner scene from Talladega Nights

scenes out in masters, so you see action and reaction. You see Sterling Hayden and Peter Sellers next to each other while Hayden is talking about Purity of Essence and how he couldn’t get an erection after fluoridation of our water and all that; and in the same shot, you see Peter Sellers—it’s a raking two-shot—reacting.

The worst thing to do in a comedy is keep cutting around to tell people what’s funny. Let the reaction play within the scene. Let the audience decide what’s funny.

So, yes, Kubrick had a great influence on me, especially with how he designed the shots in Strangelove. Early on, there’s the scene with George C. Scott and Miss Foreign Affairs in a bedroom full of mirrors, and Scott is in the bathroom for half the scene off camera. There are no cuts—it all plays in this probably four-minute master—and it’s just thrilling how brilliant and daring it is not to have any cutaways to the other side of the conversation, not to cut to Scott in the bathroom. For me, that’s perfection.

That would seem to be a million miles away from somebody like Adam McKay, who has a very loose approach to directing comedy.

A movie I thought was very funny but is so not the way I make movies was his Talledega Nights. He is all about comedy improv. He writes stuff but then the cast just riffs and goes on forever. There’s the Baby Jesus dinner scene, where you can see that they’re shooting with two or three cameras. You see part of someone’s nose in this shot and someone’s ear over the shoulder in that, because in those kind of comedies, it’s not so much about the stylization or the visualization of the movie but funny dialogue.

It’s an equally valid way of doing it—just I couldn’t do it. I could not go on the set without a shot list, without a plan. I mean, I have seen directors rehearse a scene on set and then say to the DP, “So where do you think we should put the camera?” That’s crazy. It also allows

Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove
left | Tracy Reed and George C. Scott, 
right | Peter Sellers and Sterling Hayden 

making the comedy happen in the master shot—the delivery-room scene from Preston Sturges’ The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek

a publicity still from Howard Hawks’ Bringing Up Baby

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the actors to sit or stand wherever they feel like without telling them, “You’re going to come through the door here, you gonna . . .” It seems like such an inefficient way of spending your 12 hours a day on the set. You don’t want to spend any of that time figuring stuff out. You want to spend it filming—lighting, setting up shots, and acting.

Few directors—especially comedy directors—pace their movies on the set. They try to pace them in the cutting room instead. So they’re never saying to the actors, “Let’s just do one more where everyone talks faster” or “Do one more—pick up the cues between when he says this and you say that.” But then if you feel it’s too boring and you need to pace it up, the only way you can do that is through editing. And the more you edit, the more you cut around, unconsciously, the more the audience finds it less funny.

Again, what’s really funny are master shots, like Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant in the same frame [in Bringing Up Baby], with Cary Grant in her aunt’s bathrobe and Katharine Hepburn calling Grant “Mr. Bones,” which isn’t his name, while he’s trying get in a word edgewise with her aunt. And because it plays out in a master, it lets the audience find where the comedy is.

When I was the cameraman on When Harry Met Sally . . . and we shot the orgasm scene at Katz’s with Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal, in every preview we had, as big a laugh as Meg Ryan gets acting out her orgasm, when you see Billy doing nothing except staring at her, the laughs go from 40 dB to 60 dB—just because his reaction is the audience’s point of view.

You want to make the actors talk fast so you can stay on the master shot. Look at any Preston Sturges or Howard Hawks comedy—those actors are not even listening to what the other actors are saying. They’re coming right in with it. There’s no reaction. They’re just right on top of it. They’ve overlapping. It’s thrilling to watch. You don’t get directors controlling the pace on set these days. You have them trying to control it in the cutting room, which is wrong.

In Part 2, Barry talks about making Blood Simple with the Coens, his transition from cinematographer to director, and making The Addams Family and Get Shorty.

Billy Crystal reacting—or not—in When Harry Met Sally . . .

Michael Gaughn—The Absolute Sound, The Perfect Vision, Wideband, Stereo Review, Sound & Vision, The Rayva Roundtablemarketing, product design, some theater designs, a couple TV shows, some commercials, and now this.

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When Barry Met Sally

When Barry Met Sally

when barry met sally…

Always irreverent, filmmaker Barry Sonnenfeld offers his thoughts on the 4K release of the classic 1989 romantic comedy he shot for director Rob Reiner

by Michael Gaughn
October 20, 2022

Before he was the director of such iconic movies as Men in Black, The Addams Family, and Get Shorty and of groundbreaking series like Pushing Daisies, The Tick, and A Series of Unfortunate Events, Barry Sonnenfeld was a much sought after cinematographer whose credits include the early Coen Brothers movies and such hits as Big, Throw Momma from the Train, Misery, and the film considered here, When Harry Met Sally… .  After watching the recent 4K release of the classic Rob Reiner romantic comedy, I was curious to see what Barry thought of the new transfer. As always, he was beyond generous with both his time and his comments, and not shy about saying exactly what was on his mind.

Barry on 4K and HDR

“The problem with some of the new tools available to electronic cinematography is that they’re more marketing than necessarily aesthetic choices. For instance, 4K doesn’t necessarily give the viewer a better experience. All the major streamers insist on shooting with 4K equipment but truthfully every pore on an actress’s face or every line of makeup is visible in 4K. So what what we often do is soften or reduce the resolution of the 4K camera by using old non-coated lenses or by putting filtration in front of the lens. So, yes, in theory you’re filming in 4K but we are doing everything in our power to make the image look like HD, or 2K.

“It’s the same problem with HDR. On A Series of Unfortunate Events, we were asked to release the last two seasons in HDR. But HDR took our beautiful muted, low-contrast, low-saturation image and—as per its name, ‘high dynamic range’—would increase our perfect and designed low dynamic range and brighten the image, adding saturation to the colors, doing what it was designed to do—add dynamic range—which unfortunately made the show less soulful and dreary.” 

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MGM decided to do When Harry Met Sally… as a straight 4K transfer, sans HDR. How true is it to what you shot?

I was very pleased with how muted the colors were and how unelectronic the 4K transfer looked. I’m thankful that it was not released in HDR. Just because you have that tool doesn’t mean you have to use it. If it had been in HDR, all those colors would have been video-game colors. The reds would have been super saturated, the yellows would have been super saturated. So I liked that there was a soft, non-saturated look to it. 

The transfer was very true to the original color timing. There were a couple of interior scenes I would have timed slightly different, though. At that period in my life as a DP, for some reason I had a problem with the color yellow, so a lot of the scenes are slightly—like a point more—magenta than I would have timed them now. When Harry Met Sally… , Big, and Throw Momma all tended slightly on the cooler side.

There’s something else I would have done in retrospect. Some of the closeups are too tight. They felt slightly claustrophobic. If I were shooting it now, I would have asked Rob [Reiner] to widen out just a little bit on the dolly to have more breathing room around faces.

Some HDR versions of classic films, like 2001, look amazing but sometimes an HDR release seems like an opportunity to scrub away grain, screw around with the color palette, etc.—à la The Godfatherand basically create a new version of the film.

I totally agree. I think there should be only one version of a movie. I don’t like special director’s cuts because every time you see one, whether it’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind or the 42 different cuts of Apocalypse Now, they always add stuff. You look at it and go, “I see why the theatrical cut was the way it was.” It was actually the best version. I don’t think there should be seven versions of Picasso’s Guernica, like, “Hey, look—we have acrylics now. Let’s repaint it without oils.” Just because you can improve something—and “improve” is a relative word—doesn’t mean you should.

Joel Coen and I recently worked on rereleasing Miller’s Crossing in 4K for Criterion. During the title sequence, a hat lands in the foreground and then the wind picks it up and the hat flips and flips and goes into the distance and up into the trees, and then the title says “Miller’s Crossing.” Joel and I joked that if we were doing that today, we would have just shot a plate of the background and the hat would have been totally CG. Instead, we had a piece of monofilament tied to the hat that went a hundred yards down into the distance and 80 feet up in the air, where we had it tied to a motor in a cherry picker that pulled the hat. 

The problem was, during every take, the hat just got dragged across the ground, got to the base of the tree, and then went up like an “L”. What we ended up doing is—and you can see it if you frame-by-frame that shot—we had three little sticks in the foreground so that when we threw the hat in, it landed in front of the sticks, so that when it then got pulled by the monofilament, the twigs forced the hat to immediately flip instead of being dragged. And that flip gave it aerodynamics, and then it went up into the air.

So I said to Joel, “Now that we’re doing this remastering, should we get rid of the sticks?”— because now it would just be a two-minute electronic thing to remove them. Joel said that he had the same idea but realized we shouldn’t do it, that it’s fun to see if anyone notices the three sticks. I think that these remasterings, it’s great if you can remove dolly tracks—with the Coens, there were always dolly tracks, lights, all sorts of stuff, since I was a terrible camera operator—and it’s OK to remove a microphone that had always been sticking into the top of the frame, but to change the look of the whole show is nuts.

I was wondering if seeing Harry Met Sally again triggered any memories about shooting the film.

There’s that scene where Sally drops Harry off outside of Washington Square Park, with that mini Arc de Triomphe. And on that shot, we pulled up into the air. I got really uncomfortable when I watched that because Rob and I almost died on that crane. We were riding it together to see what the shot was going to look like, and the crane came off the track and teetered. The weights were balancing us and the back of the bucket, and if the crane had completely come off the track, we would have been launched to Asbury Park, New Jersey. Luckily, the crew caught it just as it was going to flip over. 

Nowadays, that would have been a Technocrane—no one is riding cranes anymore. Or, it would have been a drone, and we would have gone 10 times further back. I’m not saying it would have been better but we would have shot it differently. 

Joel and Ethan and I always joke that if we were reshooting Blood Simple or Raising Arizona today, they would be 10 ten times the cost and wouldn’t be as good. You know that shot in Raising Arizona where we go over a fountain, over a car, up a ladder, though a window, into Florence Arizona’s mouth? We would have shot that totally on a drone in one continuous shot and it would have had a different energy. The fact that Joel and I were running on either side holding a 2 x 12 carrying an Arriflex 2C camera with a 9.8mm Century Optics lens gives it a different feel than if we had shot it on a drone.

Directors feel obligated to work in drone shots now and the shots feel so similar that it’s always obvious they were done with a drone.

I don’t want to sound like an old guy but you don’t want to fix what ain’t broken. And I really feel that these new techniques are fixing what ain’t broken. For instance, in terms of sound—and some people disagree with me—just because you can put certain sounds in the surrounds doesn’t mean you should. I work with Paul Ottosson—three-time Academy Award winner, four-time nominee, for Hurt Locker and other things. He’s done several movies for me and he did all three seasons of A Series of Unfortunate Events. Occasionally he’ll put a knock on a door in back of the room because the person’s going to come in from off camera, and it drives me crazy because it literally takes you out of the movie because the screen is in front of you. That is an affect and a “look what I can do,” but it doesn’t help me tell the story. In fact, it takes me out of the story because I’m looking back to see what that was. My point is, just because you can put sound everywhere doesn’t mean you should. Just because you can use HDR doesn’t mean you should. Because I think it’s hurting the experience of watching a movie.

Miller’s Crossing

Michael Gaughn—The Absolute Sound, The Perfect Vision, Wideband, Stereo Review, Sound & Vision, The Rayva Roundtablemarketing, product design, some theater designs, a couple TV shows, some commercials, and now this.

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Review: Get Shorty (1995)

Get Shorty (1995)

review | Get Shorty

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Barry Sonnenfeld’s deft little gem might be the best Hollywood satire ever

by Michael Gaughn
January 10, 2021

UHD has put anybody who reviews home releases in a really odd position. Most catalog titles are still in HD, with many having Blu-ray-quality transfers. But it’s become impossible to watch any of these films without speculating on what they’d look like in 4K HDR—which is something of a gamble because some older titles haven’t survived the process well, looking decidedly uneven. But then there are unquestionably stunning gems like Vertigo, The Shining, and the other titles gathered in “4K HDR Essentials” that have you salivating for more.

Barry Sonnenfeld’s note-perfect Hollywood satire Get Shorty is one of those films that has me shamelessly drooling. You can definitely appreciate its deft, droll visual style in its current HD incarnation, but you can also sense how much more delicious it would be with a 4K HDR buff and shine.

As I’ve said before, Sonnenfeld is the master of the puckish fairy tale, and here he gets to graft his bone-dry style of humor onto Elmore Leonard’s Damon Runyon-meets-Goodfellas mobster yarn, resulting in a film that plays as well 25 years on as it did on the day of its release.

Shorty is worth watching for its flawless casting alone. I’m not a Travolta fan but he doesn’t miss a beat here, giving his small-time hood a boyish innocence and enthusiasm that never feels forced. Hackman is miles from Lex Luthor, turning in a nuanced comic performance that gets big laughs while presenting a fully realized character. This has to be DeVito’s best star turn. And Delroy Lindo is both menacing and charming and Dennis Farina is flat-out funny as the mobsters who just can’t get a break.

This continues all the way down the cast line to the smallest roles. Nobody is here just to be the butt of a joke. Every bit part is fleshed out and compelling. Special kudos go to David Paymer for his story-within-the-story turn as the dry cleaner who fakes his death in a plane crash and flees to L.A. with 300 grand in mob money, sweating all the way. 

Sonnenfeld doesn’t get enough credit as an actor’s director, but the scene where Travolta shows DeVito how to play a shylock is so perfectly modulated it deserves to be ranked with the best. It’s almost impossible to convincingly portray an actor acting, let alone actor/director interaction, but all involved are so perfectly in sync here that you’re laughing not just at the jokes and the situation but the sheer virtuosity of the execution. 

What Shorty gets right, above everything else, though, is LA and the many ways the movie business overlaps with LA life. It unerringly and evocatively captures the feel of Beverly Hills, the Sunset Strip, the Hollywood Hills, and all the trendy little West Hollywood restaurants that sit practically in the middle of traffic. Maybe the film’s second-best scene—although this might just come from having suffered through this too many times myself—is DeVito going way off-menu to order an elaborate omelet for the table then leaving before it arrives, forcing the other guests to figure out what to do with it.

Shorty works as a satire because it doesn’t come from the often hypocritical vitriol that drives most similar efforts, instead using the quiet accumulation of spot-on touches to make its point, making it far more akin to Raymond Chandler’s The Little Sister than to more overwrought works like The Day of the Locust and SOB. (And don’t even bring up Tarantino, who’s way too much of a raging Neanderthal to even begin to grasp anything as subtle as irony.)

This approach is seamlessly translated into the movie’s visual plan, where the camera moves are restrained (for a Sonnenfeld film) and the lighting is for the most part true to the locales—which I suspect was in part a deliberate strategy to heighten the impact of the film’s stylized, proscenium-warping finale. And it’s exactly because Shorty dances right up to the edge of caricature and exaggeration without crossing over that I think it would benefit immensely from a tasteful application of 4K HDR. Some judicious enhancement would make it that much more engaging without turning it into gratuitous eye candy. (The operative word here, of course, is “judicious.”)

No problems with the sound. This is a dialogue-driven film only occasionally punctuated by bursts of action, and the lines (“E.g., i.e., f— you,” “You think we go to see your movies, Harry? I’ve seen better film on teeth.” “My favorite color—putty”) are all crisp and clear, as are the gunshots. It’s usually a little too obvious when temp tracks make their way into the final film but Sonnenfeld does such a great job of deploying Booker T. & the M.Gs that it’s hard to make much of a stink. The cues are nicely placed in the foreground without ever being in your face.

It’s one thing to call Get Shorty the best film in the very circumscribed mobsters-come-to-Hollywood genre, it’s another to say nobody’s ever done a better job of skewering Hollywood—a windmill many have tried to tilt only to wind up on their asses. Shorty never tries to be bigger than it needs to be, which is why it continues to shine as a compact, quietly dazzling gem. 

Michael Gaughn—The Absolute Sound, The Perfect Vision, Wideband, Stereo Review, Sound & Vision, The Rayva Roundtablemarketing, product design, some theater designs, a couple TV shows, some commercials, and now this.

PICTURE | While you can appreciate the movie’s deft, droll visual style in its current Blu-ray-quality incarnation, you can also sense how much more delicious it would be with a 4K HDR buff and shine

SOUND | This is a dialogue-driven film only occasionally punctuated by bursts of action, and the lines are all crisp and clear, as are the gunshots 

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