By Fred Topel | Images property of DreamWorks Animation.
Bee Movie
It's taken almost 10 years to get Jerry Seinfeld back in a major project. He's done some guest spots and gone back on the stand-up circuit, but Bee Movie will be the first time the whole world gets to see him again. We have Steven Spielberg to thank for roping him back into Hollywood.
Seinfeld Buzzes About Bee Movie
"This was not a meeting," said Seinfeld. "It was just a social dinner and it was an offhanded remark of something I thought might be a funny comment in conversation at the dinner to make him laugh. I didn’t want to make the movie. He’s the one who thought it was a movie. I didn’t think it was a movie."
As the voice of Barry Benson, a rebellious hive bee, Seinfeld makes his witty observations about human culture. However, it is a more innocent version of Seinfeld than we may be used to.
"It didn’t start off that way, but another thing I learned was that movie audiences weren’t liking me in that TV version. I had to kind of take the edge off, because it’s the way he looks. He’s younger and cuter than I am and they didn’t want him to be quite so nasty. He was nastier at a certain point of making this and I had to take that off."
Seinfeld was hands on developing the story and dialogue. The multi-year process of animation ultimately drove him insane. "I started to just have to accept that this is what it’s going to be and I just slowly went through it. And then I got more and more involved. And 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.' I always have to get way in over my head. I wish I could pull the throttle back somehow."
Even though it was a cartoon, Seinfeld felt the need to meet with real beekeepers. "I wanted to see what they do and what it looks like. And this was some weird French guy who said, ‘Well, you don’t need to wear any of that weird protective equipment. If you handle them in the right way, nothing will go wrong.’"
Ultimately, he stuck to general story structure. "The biggest challenge was, frankly, the story. I found it’s very difficult to sustain a comedy story for a full-length movie. And if you watch comedies, if you watch any movie you know that people struggle with the resolution of the story. It’s the most difficult part of a movie, but comedies in particular tend to run out of gas about 2/3rd of the way through. And then they get into these romantic things and you are kind of having fun as they get into the premise and then figuring out how to resolve the whole story, the guy and then he professes his feelings and I really loved the girl next store all along. And then they go, ‘What happened to the laughs? We were having so much fun?’ But I was determined not to do that. You have to create something that is fun to end the movie, but keep it silly and funny. So, that was the thing we had a lot of trial and error till we figured that out."
Bee Movie opens to theatres on November 2nd.
For the trailers, posters, stills and more movie info, go to the Bee
Movie Movie Page.
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