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Leaving Jokes on the Cutting Room Floor: With the advent of DVDs a lot of deleted scenes have new life, but that doesn’t make it any easier to cut loose some material. Asked if it was frustrating to leave out jokes and scenes, Seinfeld replied, “There’s nothing that isn’t frustrating. It’s frustration from start to finish. I’m still frustrated. I wish I could work on it just one more week. There’s a couple of things I’d like to polish, but I’m used to that from the TV show. I mean, one of the things that they were very surprised by working with me was that they would have a scene and they would go, ‘Ehh, that doesn’t work. We need to do something different with this scene.’ And I would just go, ‘Okay, let’s have him say this, and he says that, and that.’ They would go, ‘Wait a minute…’
I would just change it right there on the spot because that’s how you work in television. There’s no time. You can’t wait. We can’t do this tomorrow because in TV, it’s like getting out the newspaper. You know the paper’s going to close. So normally if you had a scene that didn’t work, the phone calls would be made to the writers. The schedules would be organized and then the writers would come in and work for three weeks, and then they would hand them the sides. I would have it done in an hour.”
Bringing His Humor to an Animated Film: “I kind of always had this side, and never was in anything where I could express it,” said Seinfeld. “All of these visual scenes, I thought of all of them, and as a stand-up comic or on a TV show, you can’t put a camera on a bee on a tennis ball or through a car engine or some of the crazy things we did. So it’s something I’ve always wanted to do. I had an eye that I could never use, so that was probably the most fun thing about [making the film]. For the first time in my life, I was able to go, ‘You know, I’m kind of seeing things from this angle.’ So Simon [J Smith, the director] and I worked very closely together and he also has an amazing eye for camera placement and angle. We would just kind of work off of each other, and it was really fun.”
Getting Renee Zellweger to Play Along: Seinfeld says he practically stalked Zellweger to get her to say yes to being a part of Bee Movie. “I was like the leopard in the weeds with Renee. I knew her whereabouts at all time. She would go to a screening, I would somehow be there a couple of rows back. ‘Oh, Renee, funny bumping into you here again.’ I wanted her very badly for this. I knew she was the perfect person to play this part.
She’s very busy, she’s very in demand, and there is really nobody else quite like her - especially vocally. There are a lot of great actresses, of course, but not all of them have this kind of vocal skill she has. I mean, when she reads – the voice, it just comes right through the screen. Very quickly when you’re watching this movie, you believe the voice is coming out of this dummy. It’s a dummy. This whole thing is a puppet act. These aren’t real people.”
Here’s to You Mrs Robinson: There’s a scene in Bee Movie that is the animated bee equivalent of a famous scene from The Graduate. Seinfeld says that was definitely done deliberately. “Yes, of course. No, there was a time when I first conceived of the film that I was going to do a complete metaphor for The Graduate all the way, but most of it we ended up loosing. But that scene I still liked so much and I liked that movie so much I left it in.”
