![]() I kind of knew it would be tough, I just didn’t realize how tough it is, that everyone is looking to you for answers for everything. What was something you weren’t warned about by the directors you had worked with previously as a cinematographer? So yeah, I think I learned a lot from those drawings. And they were off center, quirky, sometimes dark, always very visual, always had different layers of information within the frame. I don’t know, everyone has a different point of view and looks at the world a little differently, and that’s my style, I guess.ĭo you think the Charles Addams cartoons helped you develop that style? That’s just who I am, and for me, directing is all about tone, and it’s the only job a director has: maintaining consistency of tone. You don’t see the punchline to those jokes, you don’t see the carolers getting dumped with the hot oil, you don’t see Pugsley’s hair catching on fire or anything like that. I’m not a director who likes really big action scenes or gunfire… you know, so a lot of the sort of slightly darker stuff in The Addams Family, like the opening scene where the Addams Family dumps the cauldron of boiling oil on this group of overly saccharine carolers, or Wednesday electrocuting Pugsley, it all happens off-camera. Tonally, whether it’s Pushing Daisies, or the Men in Black movies, or Addams Family, or A Series of Unfortunate Events, I like a certain amount of darkness, and a certain amount of lightness. What was that trick in getting that balance between subversive and dark and family-friendly? How did you strike that? If there was ever going to be a time that I was going to direct… the fact that it was something that was A) worldbuilding and world creating, and second of all that it was kind of quirky, and a little bit dark, a little bit subversive… but mainly I was just a huge, huge Charles Addams fan. ![]() Mainly because I grew up reading the Charles Addams drawings in the New Yorker magazine, so I was a huge fan of his drawings, much more so than the television show I was more of a Munsters fan than an Addams Family fan on television. ![]() This was your first directing gig, why was this the right movie to kick off your illustrious directing career? In celebration of the film’s 30th anniversary, Sonnenfeld spoke with SYFY WIRE about the reported “troubles” on The Addams Family, why it was the perfect movie to kick off his directing career (even though he was more of a Munsters TV show guy), and how he baited MC Hammer with a 1962 Lincoln Continental in order to get one of the biggest singers on the planet at the time to craft the " Addams Groove" for the film. It proved to be the perfect movie to kick off the director's stellar genre career, which led to him helming the 1993 sequel, Addams Family Values, as well as the entire Men in Black trilogy. While the film would see its fair share of troubles, including original studio Orion Pictures being replaced mid-shooting by Paramount, it turned out to be a blockbuster hit. The movie also stars a scene-stealing Christina Ricci as Wednesday, Jimmy Workman as her poor brother Pugsley, and the normally tall and thin Christopher Lloyd as a convincingly short and squat Uncle Fester (without the use of prosthetics). Sonnenfeld’s hit film, which is currently celebrating its 30th anniversary with a brand new 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray (which he remastered himself, now with “more Mamushka!”), features Raul Julia as Gomez and Anjelica Huston as Morticia, the beating (and lusting) hearts of the macabre titular family. Way back in 1991, when MC Hammer was still “2 Legit 2 Quit,” Barry Sonnenfeld was making the transition from A-list cinematographer (particularly for the Cohen brothers) to A-list director - beginning with the November release of The Addams Family, a creepy and kooky sendup of the original Charles Addams New Yorker cartoons from 1938, which were later adapted into a popular '60s TV series on ABC.
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