Comedian Jerry Seinfeld promotes Bee Movie.
It’s been a while since we’ve seen Bee Movie's Jerry Seinfeld, other than in the occasional comedy tour and TV guest appearance (he’s been waiting in the wings, perhaps?), but he’s back in full force, on the big screen this time. Bee Movie, about a disenfranchised worker who flees his hive’s corporate honey-making structure for the wide world only to discover humans have been stealing the fruits of their labor for their own benefit, marks Seinfeld’s first venture into animation and first teaming with Steven Spielberg. The comedian sat down with Fandango to talk about what really made this project fly (and that’s it for the bee buzzwords--promise).
Q: Is it true that the genesis for Bee Movie was a joke you told Steven Spielberg?
Seinfeld: It started at a social dinner with Steven [Spielberg], where I made an offhand remark. It was just part of our dinner conversation to make him laugh. He’s the one who thought it was a movie. I didn’t want to make the movie.
Q: But you don’t argue with Steven Spielberg.
Seinfeld: No, you don’t.
Q: How much of the movie’s story is yours?
Seinfeld: I don’t really know, as I don’t keep a chart of those kinds of things, you know. A lot of people put a lot of ideas in. I kind of like to play the captain of the ship and I decide what goes in and what stays out. It’s like I’m in charge of the gate of what gets in, and then anybody can contribute anything they want. There are ideas in the movie that people in the office just threw in [coincidentally], like the idea of calling the judge “Bumbleton,” to give you an idea of how this trial’s going to go – stuff like that.
Q: Did you visit a real beekeeper?
Seinfeld: Yeah, I wanted to see what the bees do and what it looks like. It was some weird French guy, who said, “[Don’t worry], you don’t need to wear any of that protective equipment. If you treat them well and handle them in the right way, nothing will go wrong.” Well of course, he didn’t know what he was talking about. They really [got me]!
Q: Can you talk about the casting and how much did you actually get involved?
Seinfeld: Oh sure, I called everyone. I practically stalked Renee [Zellweger]. I was like the leopard in the weeds. I knew her whereabouts at all times, you know. She would go to a screening, I would somehow be there a couple of rows back, you know, “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.
Q: What movie has influenced you?
Seinfeld: You know, I really loved Gulliver’s Travels when I was a kid. When you’re small, there’s an excitement of stories that play with scale. All those stories with giants and miniature [people] always fascinated me as a kid.
Kids like things that, like Tom Thumb and you know, Mighty Mouse, ‘cause they’re small, so they relate to that, you know. So Gulliver’s Travels was a movie that I thought of a lot about while making this
Q: Making a movie can be such a slow process for somebody who’s a stand-up comedian. Did it drive you insane?
Seinfeld: Insane. Insane! But then I started to accept that this is what it’s going to be and I just slowly went through it. As 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 to spend my days 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’re sick of it.” And she’s right - I always get in way over my head.
Q: This year you’ve really gotten back in the spotlight. How has that been?
Seinfeld: It’s great. You know, the ride that I had on the sitcom was so intergalactic. We captured the country probably in the last time it was even possible to do so [in that format], because things have so fragmented. I don’t know if there will be another show that can do what we did.
There’s an old story that I like to tell about Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe. They were married and he’s of course this baseball legend and she’s doing this USO performance on an aircraft carrier. You know what those shows used to be like, they would get the sexy Hollywood actress do some cheesecake number or something like that, and the guys go berserk.
And so she comes offstage and he’s standing there, waiting for her, and the guys are all cheering and she says, “Joe, listen to that. Have you ever heard anything like it?” And he of course says, “Yeah, I have.”
So, you know, people say to me, “Boy, could you imagine what it would be like if this movie’s a big hit? Can you imagine?” and I go, “Yeah, I can.”
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