Sitting down with Bee Movie creator Jerry Seinfeld

By Robert Newton

Writers never really know what they are going to find when they interview movie people for the first time. Some, like [removed by our legal department], will sit facing the door, not making eye contact and answering curtly and with great sarcasm, while others will practically clear their schedules to have a beer with you if it means a break from seeing the city only from their hotel window. Jerry Seinfeld hasn’t granted many interviews since his decade-defining sitcom ended in 1998, and short of documentaries like Comedian, there’s not much to indicate what he is like to talk with in person. He has a real reason to get all chatty now, though, as his big CGI project, Bee Movie, is poised to be the next A Bug’s Life for DreamWorks, the studio behind the Shrek trilogy.

Just three days after sending the film off to the lab to be mastered and minted into the 3,000+ prints that will land in theatres this holiday season, a weary but steadfast Seinfeld took the time to talk with The Pulse:

“This is not working,” Seinfeld says of the promotional tour. “This is the victory lap, hopefully. Making the movie is exhausting. Talking about the movie is fun.”

The movie is about a honeybee named Barry B. Benson, a recent college graduate who wants more out of life than the inevitable career that awaits him and every other worker in New Hive City ~ a job at Honex producing honey.
Like most well conceived stories, though, Bee Movie is about more than just its plot summary.

“The film is really about how interdependent nature is,” he explains, “and how bees who think they do this small, meaningless job are actually crucial. There’s a famous Einstein quote ~ well, it’s not famous, but famous to us in the bee world ~ that if there were no more bees, humans would only live for four [more] years [from now]. I don’t know if that’s really true, but Einstein said it, and theoretically, it would have a big effect on our food supply.”

Whether Einstein actually said something like that is undetermined, though it does not change the fact that world minus bees could very well equal human extinction. It’s a pretty big subject to tackle, but the guy who pulled off a juggernaut of a show about nothing takes it on, not only as Barry the Spokesbee, but as the writer and producer, as well.

“I began it in 2003, wrote most of it in 2004, and then the story of the movie started to happen in real life, and it was really weird,” he notes, in reference to the increasing number of recent news stories regarding the apiary phenomenon known as ‘colony collapse disorder.’ “We were going to do a gag that it was all engineered by DreamWorks as a publicity stunt.”

For an animated film to connect with audience members, they have to relate to the characters and their lives, something that Seinfeld built into the movie from the start.

“I live in Manhattan, and it just reminded me of Manhattan, the world inside the hive, these crowded little pathways, everyone living in a tiny apartment, working and racing all around and they’re so busy and hyperactive and it just struck me as humanlike.”

As one of the writers of the script (with his sitcom scribes Spike Feresten and Andy Robin), Seinfeld had a lot of leeway for last-minute rewrites, something that suited his experience as a stand-up.

“The scene with me and Chris Rock [in which Rock talks about his life as a mosquito], and the scene with me and [non-bee] Renée [Zellweger] is completely improvised and the coffee, that was my idea for the scene, but when she came in, I said, ‘Just try to get me to have coffee with you.’”

The big question, however, is, “Why bees?”

“There’s something very sophisticated and interesting about bee culture to me. Just the geometry of the hexagon in the beehive and the honeycomb, it’s the most perfect geometric structure. It’s what they use in carbon fiber and when they make spaceships, because it’s the strongest shape. And they make honey, which is the most wonderful, interesting, beautiful little product.”

Seinfeld’s beautiful little product, Bee Movie, opens in movie theatres nationwide on November 2.

Read a review of ‘Bee Movie’ over at our movie site, WorcesterMovies.com.

More from Jerry…

In much the same way that George Lucas made the three Star Wars prequels for the kids he had later in life, Seinfeld, who is 53, made Bee Movie with his pint-sized critics in mind. “I love having kids – I had kids late; I got married at 45, which is the ‘Jesus Christ’ point of singlehood. It’s when you tell people you’re still single at 45 and they go, ‘Jesus Christ!’”