In the animated comedy Bee Movie, Barry B Benson (voiced by Jerry Seinfeld) discovers on a trip outside his hive that humans are stealing honey and selling it in jars. Along with a pretty florist (voiced by Renee Zellweger) with a tolerance for talking bees, Barry takes action - legal action.
The Buzz on the World of Bees: So what’s so fascinating about bees? “My idea of bees is that it’s like human society evolved a couple thousand years, a totally perfected utopia, corporate perfection,” explained Seinfeld. “So on the one hand, I see them as extremely high-tech, almost an alien-type culture. On the other hand, everything is handmade, everything is done organically. Everything is done with the concept of nature. So it was hard to kind of figure out how to blend those two ideas. Their buses, their cars… I mean that they could invent cars or that they would have escalators. They would have scuba equipment. They would be testing ways to survive a hurricane, you know?
I started with the idea that I think they’re very advanced in terms of evolution and society, but they’re very natural. All of the buildings are kind of round but they look futuristic at the same time. So that was what the inspiration was.”
The Origin of Bee Movie: Seinfeld says the idea of doing Bee Movie didn’t stem from a meeting with Steven Spielberg but from something much more casual. “It was just a social dinner and it was an off-handed remark of something I thought might be a funny comment in conversation at the dinner to make him laugh,” said Seinfeld. “I didn’t want to make the movie (laughing). He’s the one who thought it was a movie. I didn’t think it was a movie.”
Following up Seinfeld with Bee Movie: Bee Movie wasn’t the most logical project to do after Seinfeld finished its run on TV, but Seinfeld explained why he chose it as his first big post-Seinfeld project: “Well, you know, people have seen a lot of me. There’s the TV show and I’ve been a comedian on TV for many years, and I thought it’s very important to give the audience a fresh flavor. [And it’s] even more important for me to feel like I’m working with fresh ideas and fresh things. This just seemed like it would be a totally different kind of experience, to see my kind of comedy in one of these movies that looked like this. I love the look of these things and I didn’t know it, but I thought it would be worth a shot to try and do something different. I feel a responsibility to the audience to do something different. That's why a sequel is not that likely.”
The Animation Process: Seinfeld was much more hands-on than he expected to be, and he admits the process drove him insane. “But then I started to just have to accept that this is what it’s going to be and I just slowly went through it,” confessed Seinfeld. “And then I got more and more involved. I said to my wife, ‘Why do I have to do everything this way? Why can’t I find some other way that’s not such torture?’ And she said, ‘You do the same thing with a box of cookies. You just have to eat the entire box until you are sick of it, you know?’ I always have to get way in over my head. I wish I could pull the throttle back somehow.”
Seinfeld admits he wasn’t exactly qualified to be the one telling the animators what to do, but he was able to bluff his way through it. “You know, Bill Cosby said to me one time about being a comedian, ‘It’s like being an airline pilot. The airline pilot cannot come on the PA system and go, ‘Okay, I’m going to try and take her up.’ So when I walked onto the DreamWorks lot, I did not say to them, ‘Okay, we’re going to try to make a movie here.’ I just walked in and pretended like I knew what I was doing. I started ordering people around and saying, ‘I want it like this,’ because that’s the job, that’s what Jeffrey Katzenberg paid me to do, so that’s what I did.”
Wearing Multiple Hats: Seinfeld co-wrote, produced, and is the voice of Barry B Benson, the film’s main character. That’s a lot of responsibility, however he did have a talented group of writers working with him to get the story right. “I was actually very scared to even take on the idea of writing a movie,” said Seinfeld. “It just seemed long and I was a little bit intimidated, so I thought, ‘Let me get some buddies of mine around - at least we can talk about sports.’ I just didn’t want to sit in a room by myself and write a movie. I enjoy writing stand-up by myself, but the movie thing, I just wasn’t sure how to structure it and where are the act breaks and how do you keep the story going, so I needed some help from them.”
Seinfeld completed trusted his co-writers. “I did. These guys actually happen to be my friends and I’m at the point where I like being with my friends, and there’s nobody else I really wanted to write with. I just kind of liked the vibe, you know? It’s more of an atmosphere. Sometimes writing comedy is just hanging around with funny people. Someone could not put one funny line into the script, but them being in the room makes you feel funny and then you think of funny things. I can’t explain it, but this is how it works. Like there are certain people who are not funny at all - as you know (laughing) - and when we would write, if there was a person that would come in the room and it would be like someone just filled the room with water. You know, nobody felt funny any more. We couldn’t think of anything funny so we’d go, ‘You’ve got to get out of here.’”
Page 2: Casting Renee Zellweger, His Style of Comedy, and The Graduate
