Trailer
Plot summary
At the Mexico-United States border, Agents K and D intercept a smuggler's van carrying an alien disguised as an immigrant. D asks K to erase his memory and let him retire. In New York, police officer James Edwards chases a fleeing suspect who warns that something is coming and then dies in front of him. K, impressed by the chase, recruits Edwards into the Men in Black, the secret agency that monitors the aliens living among humans, and after a set of tests Edwards becomes Agent J. Upstate, a hostile alien crash-lands on a farm and takes the farmer Edgar's shape.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Men in Black (1997)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The studio wanted Clint Eastwood for Agent K, but he turned it down to direct and star in his own film, Absolute Power, reportedly suspecting Men in Black was not the right fit.
- Tommy Lee Jones only took the role of Agent K after Steven Spielberg promised the script would improve; he had called the first draft so bad he reportedly said it "stank".
- Will Smith won the part of Agent J because director Barry Sonnenfeld's wife was a fan of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, even though the studio and Spielberg preferred Chris O'Donnell.
- Barry Sonnenfeld persuaded Chris O'Donnell to turn down the role of Agent J by telling him he was not a good director and that he should skip the script.
SPOILER
Five months into the shoot, Barry Sonnenfeld scrapped the original ending and replaced it with the Bug eating Agent K, swapping Rick Baker's animatronic Bug for a computer-generated cockroach-like one at an extra cost of $4.5 million.- The New York Philharmonic refused to let the filmmakers shoot at Lincoln Center unless they paid, so Barry Sonnenfeld moved the alien-chase scene to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum instead.
- With only two weeks left in post-production, the alien Baltians were cut from the plot by changing subtitles, the MIB computer images and Frank the Pug's dialogue, though the film's novelization still includes them.
- Rick Baker called Men in Black the most complex production of his career, needing approval from both Barry Sonnenfeld and Steven Spielberg, who sometimes wanted different parts of the same alien design combined.
