It was evacuated for three hours!
Men in Black director Barry Sonnenfeld revealed that the set of the 1997 action comedy once had to be evacuated because Will Smith farted.
Sonnenfeld made the claim while appearing on the ‘Let’s Talk Off Camera With Kelly Ripa’ podcast.
He said the set was evacuated ‘for about three hours’ after the incident.
Smith starred opposite Tommy Lee Jones in Men in Black, which grossed $584 million worldwide to become the third-highest-grossing movie of 1997.
According to Sonnenfeld, it happened during the scene in which Smith and Jones are in a transforming car that travels at hyper speeds and flips over.
The two actors had to be “hermetically sealed” in the pod that was being used for the car, to be able to film the sequence.
Sonnenfeld recalled: “There are locks to prevent it from opening and falling. I say, ‘Roll camera.’ And I hear Will Smith go, ‘Oh Jesus, so sorry. Tommy, so sorry. Baz, get the ladder.’ And you hear Tommy saying, ‘That’s fine, Will. No worries, Will. Don’t worry, Will.’ Anyway, I don’t know what’s gone on, right?
“So, we race the ladder over. Yeah, Tommy reaches his leg out as the ladder is coming over, races down the stairs.
“And what happened was, Will Smith is a farter. It’s just some people are. And you really don’t want to be inside a very small hermetically sealed space with a Will Smith fart. You don’t even want to be sitting next to him at the Disney ranch.”
Sonnenfeld concluded: “We evacuated the stage for about three hours. And that’s incredible. No, he’s, you know, a lovely guy. Just, he farts. Some do, some don’t.”
The director went on to oversee the creation of two Men in Black sequels with Smith – Men in Black II in 2002 and Men in Black 3 in 2012 but neither had the box office success of the original.
