Humorist Dave Barry got himself a contract to write his first novel in 1998. He decided that it might be a good idea to have some sort of plot, so he began with an idea he gleaned from his son Rob, who, with his friends, was playing a game called Killer. "Basically you had to squirt a designated person with a squirt gun at night, in Miami, which was kind of crazy, since there are people in Miami with real guns also running around," the writer remembers. "I started with what would happen if kids showed up to squirt the kid in the house at the same time professional killers, hit men, showed up really to kill the owner of the house."

From little acorns... Dave Barry was on his way. "The wonderful thing about Miami is that you don't have to make anything up. You don't have to have an imagination at all. All you have to do is read the newspaper here. The Miami Herald had virtually every plot element in this book." Dave Barry just happens to be a columnist at the Herald. Copies weren't hard to come by.

"It wrote itself," he insists. "I was not even involved. Later on, I had to go find it. It not only wrote itself, it sold itself to Hollywood, and was living in the Beverly Hills Hotel when I finally caught back up with it and was able to reclaim ownership."

Producer Tom Jacobson first read Dave Barry's novel in 1999 and immediately knew he wanted to make it his next film. Says Jacobson, "It was comedic in a unique way, in an idiosyncratic way." He had been looking for a project to do with Barry Sonnenfeld and thought "Big Trouble" would be perfect. Coincidentally, Sonnenfeld was looking for a project to direct for Touchstone Pictures when he read Dave Barry's novel.

Both Sonnenfeld and his wife, Susan Ringo, read the book, and the director says, "we just kept laughing out loud. We just loved the sensibility and the quirkiness and that it was a little bit dark and edgy. The writing was so incredibly funny and the situations were funny and quirky and different and sort of absurd." He had found a kindred spirit in Dave Barry. "I was aware of his columns in the Miami Herald, which were always funny and smart and shared my political views. And from the time I read the prologue of the book, I was instantly hooked."

Producer Barry Josephson also read the book and loved it. "Barry Sonnenfeld was convinced it would make a good film, and I totally agreed with him," Josephson says. "When he asked me to read it I thought it was laugh out loud funny. The book has a great group of characters who are very different from one another, a very odd group trapped in this comedic farce. It all hangs together so well. Best of all it's very fresh, so I think it was a fascinating concept to take on - to turn this story into a movie, to see if these characters be as funny in a film as they were on the page."

Josephson, who had been reading Dave Barry's columns and collections for years, says he was "fascinated and interested to see how Dave Barry would take on fiction. He has the same sensibility as Elmore Leonard and Carl Hiaasen, two authors I really love. It's obvious in the book that he can write character and have spontaneity the way those authors do. He finds comedy in everyday situations in such an interesting way."

Sonnenfeld also felt that the tone of "Big Trouble" was easily familiar. He had previously adapted Leonard's work successfully in "Get Shorty" and in the TV series "Maximum Bob," and, like Josephson, he felt that "Big Trouble" shared Leonard's sensibility. Sonnenfeld saw how the novel could translate to film and became convinced that he was the man for the job.

Tom Jacobson also felt that Sonnenfeld was very well suited to the material. "In his work, Barry sets up the real world which is also a little bent. In this world, comedy takes place. Now that's different from presenting a comedy world in which we are pushing more comedy. I think that's what he does so well, and what makes his movies unique."

Working with Jacobson was a big plus for Sonnenfeld. "I have admired his work and his menschiness as a producer," he says. "We had been looking for something to do together for a while, and Barry Josephson and I had always admired him as a person. It was a perfect situation at a perfect time."

Sonnenfeld got to work immediately with the writers, Robert Ramsey and Matthew Stone, who, he says, "did an incredibly good job in translating the book to a script in a very short time. Based on their script, they got me to commit to directing this movie."

While keeping the film mostly faithful to the book, Sonnenfeld points out that he felt it necessary to close ranks a bit. "We tried to make the world of this movie so small that people are constantly running into each other from other scenes, which is something I know that Dave liked very much that wasn't in the book. We're constantly bringing our characters into venues with other characters, and that was something that was present in a small way in Dave's book, but we turned it into a big part of the humor. The movie is full of coincidences."
That being said, the situations these characters find themselves in are rather unusual.

Barry Josephson says that "Big Trouble" reflects a real world in the same way Dave Barry's books and articles reflect the real world. "He loves to highlight extreme circumstances," says the producer. "All of these characters are in one form of a crisis or another -- a bad marriage, a tumultuous love affair, a hated job, a terrible assignment, new love, bad luck. And with all those daily pressures now comes an extreme circumstance thrown their way and they just have to deal with it in the best way they can."

"What's funny about the movie is that it's really all about couples," Sonnenfeld says, "some of which are very unconventional. We have Rene Russo and Tim Allen, who fall in love, who are the parents of teenagers. Another couple is those teenagers, Zooey Deschanel and Ben Foster. We've got the FBI guys, played by Omar Epps and Heavy D and we've got the two police officers - Janeane Garofalo and Patrick Warburton - and you know, those partnerships are just like all marriages. Then there's Dennis Farina and Jack Kehler, who are the two hit men from Newark, and you can see what a couple they've been - they've been together for 25 years and there are definitely rules within that relationship. Another couple is the toad from hell and the family dog, and finally, rounding it all out is the relationship between Puggy, played by Jason Lee, and the maid, Christina, played by Sofía Vergara. So throughout the movie, these people are not only interacting with their partner, but have to be part of a couple interacting with other couples."

How all this becomes a film rested for a large part with Barry Sonnenfeld. When he read the book, he says, "I saw both an overall visual style -- I loved that it took place almost exclusively at night -- but I also saw very specific shots. For instance I love wide-angle lenses, and anytime you have a movie with a toad in it and you got a wide-angle lens, there's a potential for comedy. I saw a lot of opportunities for interesting, moving, stylized shots, but it's not why I took the movie. I knew I could stylize it, but it's not like I said, 'I have to do this movie because I can do a really cool shot of a toad.'" (However, Sonnenfeld did make sure that he got the really cool shot of the toad.)

As for budding novelist Dave Barry, who started this whole thing in the first place, he says, "I was an actual journalist for a while, and then realized it was much more fun to sit around at home in my underwear and make things up. So that's what I do now, although actually you can wear anybody's underwear."

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