Movies
The success of ‘Men in Black’, starring Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones, was the result of improvisation
Tommy Lee Jones’ decision to cut almost all of his dialogue in ‘Men in Black’ forced Will Smith to improvise and proved to be one of the key factors in the film’s success.
The role of Agent J in ‘Men in Black’ was one of Will Smith’s big movie roles after the end of ‘The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air’. In this movie, he shared the lead role with veteran Tommy Lee Jones, and most of his success was due to one key factor: the good chemistry between the two actors, which was due to the fact that most of the dialogue between them was improvised. Jones didn’t like the script and decided to change his lines, which forced Smith to improvise, resulting in one of the most outstanding films in their filmography.
The improvised dialogue was the special formula for the success of ‘Men in Black’
‘Men in Black’ was an adaptation of Lowell Cunningham’s comic book of the same name. But Tommy Lee Jones didn’t like an early version of Ed Solomon’s script because he thought it was bad and didn’t capture the essence of the original work. This caused him to change most of his lines on his own, especially those where he shared a scene with Will Smith.
The key to these changes was that Will Smith was unaware of them, so when he was shooting with Jones, the dialog changes would catch him off guard, and he would have to improvise to move the scene forward. While in the vast majority of productions, this would have led to many problems and serious consequences for the “infraction,” director Barry Sonnenfeld found these changes so good that he decided to leave them intact.
The fact that Jones was the one “pulling the cart” while Smith had to play along fit their roles perfectly: Tommy Lee Jones was Agent K, a veteran of a secret government agency hiding the existence of aliens, while Will Smith was Agent J, a newly recruited rookie agent still learning the ropes. They were, in fact, one of comedy’s most classic duos: the comically serious and the hilariously chatty. Smith’s tone of disbelief in many of his one-liners with Jones was what really “sold” his character and made him believable, a consequence of the need to improvise.
The result of all this was that the majority of the movie’s reviews were positive, and it became a box office hit. The great chemistry between Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones stemmed from Jones’ quirky decision to change his dialogue without warning and Smith’s need to play along. Such action-reaction interactions become more evident in subsequent viewings of the movie.
‘Men in Black’ had two more sequels in 2002 and 2012, starring Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith, and in 2019 the spin-off Men in Black: International’ was released, starring Chris Hemsworth and Tessa Thompson. Although this last installment was a critical and box-office fiasco, franchise executives are still interested in continuing the franchise.