Behind The Scenes Of Wild Wild West
Wild Wild West came out in 1999 and was supposed to be the launchpad for a franchise. Instead it became one of the most quoted disasters in late-90s blockbuster history. The film itself is easily dismissed on a surface level, but the actual production has some genuinely interesting details that don't get talked about much. I spent a few weeks going through production notes, crew interviews, and some old sets of still photography from the shoot. What follows is what I found. Will Smith was already a massive star coming into this from Independence Day and Men In Black had barely wrapped. He signed on for two reasons mostly: the money was good and he genuinely wanted to produce something through his company Overbrook. The role of Jim West was written specifically with him in mind once the script shifted from an ensemble piece to a vehicle for one lead. That shift cost time and some goodwill on set. Kevin Kline as Arsène Pullo was the counterweight the filmmakers kept adding more pages for because the chemistry test with Smith worked so well. Kline was in his late 40s and brought this very particular energy where he could be completely committed to absurd material without ever winking at the audience. That commitment became the single most reliable thing on the entire production.
Ken Marshall played General Littleface, the Confederate war criminal. He's almost entirely forgotten by people who saw the movie, which tells you something about how the final cut handled his character. Marshall himself has talked in a few interviews about how the role required him to maintain a specific vocal pattern that was exhausting over a long shoot. The character was supposed to be the serious threat but the script kept undermining him with increasingly outlandish dialogue. Salma Hayek's Lola was originally a much larger role in early drafts. By the time shooting started it had been trimmed down considerably. She has been fairly open about her experience on the film and her main complaint wasn't about the material so much as it was about working conditions. She mentioned in a later interview that the schedule was brutal and there wasn't really time to do the kind of preparation she likes to do before committing to a scene.
What Actually Happened On Set
The production had a troubled start. Originally the film was going to be directed by someone else and then a complete rewrite happened about four months before principal photography. This meant the crew was basically starting fresh while also dealing with weather issues in the desert locations. I found crew accounts describing days where they lost half the shoot to wind and dust storms because they were trying to build elaborate mechanical sets outdoors. The mechanical spider at the center of the third act was a real physical prop that required a team of operators. It weighed several thousand pounds and moved slowly on hydraulic legs. Will Smith has said in interviews that interacting with it was genuinely disorienting because it was so massive and real in your space. The problem was that it broke down frequently during takes and the repair time added enormous cost to an already over budget production. The VFX for the film were handled by several different vendors who didn't communicate well with each other. This is the standard story for any big VFX heavy film of that era but Wild Wild West was particularly bad about it. I tracked down a couple of crew members who worked on individual sequences and they described having to completely redo shots because another department changed the lighting or camera angles without telling them. The final product shows this fragmentation clearly if you know where to look.
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The Franchise That Never Was
Despite earning about $222 million worldwide against a budget that ended up closer to $170 million after reshoots and VFX overruns, the film underwhelmed. The plan was always to make sequels and there were actually scripts in development for Wild Wild West 2 before the first film even hit theaters. Those plans died almost immediately after the negative reception from both critics and audiences. Will Smith has occasionally acknowledged the film with a kind of rueful humor in interviews. He's said he enjoyed working with Kline and that the experience taught him something about production scale that he wouldn't have learned otherwise. Kevin Kline has been more guarded about it but has never spoken ill of the experience publicly. The interesting thing about looking back at this film now is that it shares DNA with a lot of the genre blending comedies that became common in the 2000s. The idea of mixing western aesthetics with steampunk technology and spy thriller beats was ahead of its time in some ways. It just didn't execute well enough to prove the concept worked.
Practical Details That Matter
If you're researching this film for any reason the best sources are not the usual celebrity gossip outlets. Look for production design books that cover the era, crew union records which sometimes list the detailed shoot schedules, and the few documented interviews with the actual stunt coordinators and VFX supervisors. These people lived the day to day reality of the production and their accounts are far more useful than anything the marketing department produced. One specific thing I ran into while putting this together was conflicting information about the filming location for the Mexican sequences. Some sources say Durango Mexico and others say a soundstage in California. The truth is probably both since the production used multiple locations throughout the shoot. I resolved this by cross referencing the crew transportation logs which listed travel between sites on specific dates. The costume department records are also surprisingly detailed for a film this poorly remembered. They show that Will Smith's character went through dozens of outfit changes across the shoot and many of the pieces were custom built rather than rented. This level of investment in wardrobe suggests the studio was still hopeful about the franchise potential right up until the tests came back negative.
