Jerry Seinfeld's Bee Movie

October 28, 2007

Hollywood - Jerry Seinfeld returns to the writing room for the animated film "Bee Movie".

"My wife said that she doesn't remember the last time she heard laughs like that in a movie theater," Seinfeld said. ". . . I said, 'Well, "Knocked Up" got great laughs.' But that has sexual edge and profanity, so it's not really the same sport. It's a different sport. This is a family movie, you can take your grandmother and your 4-year-old."

"After doing the series for nine years, I was very script averse," Seinfeld said during a recent press-tour stop in San Francisco. "I just couldn't look at them anymore. But I was just so attracted to this medium that I was able to deal with it again."

He got a little push from Steven Spielberg. As Seinfeld tells it, he met Spielberg in the Hamptons and half joked that he'd like to make an animated movie about bees. While Seinfeld offered almost no additional details, Spielberg agreed on the spot to help shepherd the project, and Seinfeld said the award-winning director guided the picture from beginning to end.

"He can watch a movie like nobody else," Seinfeld joked. "He watches a movie like the Terminator. It's like he sees in his head the plot and the characters and what's missing. 'You need to bring this here now.' It's all in his head."

Seinfeld voices the main character in the movie, Barry B. Benson, who doesn't like the fact that his species gives its members only one career choice: making honey. Benson romances a human (voiced by Renée Zellweger), sues humankind for capitalizing on the bees' work and then must save the world when the planetary ecosystem collapses. The voice actors make an interesting group, with Matthew Broderick, John Goodman and Chris Rock in major roles and cameos by Oprah Winfrey and a very quick-tempered Ray Liotta.

If it all sounds kind of mature for an animated film for children, Seinfeld offers no apologies.

"I totally reject this whole idea, 'We're writing a movie for kids here.' I said, 'No, we're not. We're writing the funniest movie we can make. There will be a market for that,' " Seinfeld said. "But I have to say, kids are responding really well to it."

Plus, he points out, he never wrote "Seinfeld" for kids - and they seem to be enjoying that show in reruns.

"I get more kids coming up to me for the TV series now - 10 years old and 11 years old," he said. "We certainly didn't write it for them. It just shows me that humor cuts across all lines. If something is definitely funny, people find it."

The choice to do a kids' film isn't too unusual - and not just because he now has three children, ages 6, 4 and 2. Seinfeld's love of Superman made it into the "Seinfeld" scripts several times, and he also enjoyed other classic children's programs from the 1950s and '60s.

"I loved Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy. I loved shows like the 'Thunderbirds.' I loved Gumby," Seinfeld said. "It's just fun, because you can stretch the reality. It's an unreal reality."

Seinfeld said the huge sense of discovery when he started learning about the animation process was not unlike his first years as a stand-up comic. Among his most vivid memories is his first trip to San Francisco in the 1970s, years before he went on "The Tonight Show" and his career took off.

"It was the coolest gig when I got it," Seinfeld said of his debut at the Punch Line. "I was in New York and I was 22. I didn't even have a jacket. I don't even think I had a shirt with a collar. ... I remember how insane that sounded - that they were going to put me on a plane to fly me to another city to do what was barely an act.

"That was really exciting. I got here, and I checked into this fleabag hotel, but I thought it was the coolest. And then you get into a cab and go down to the club. It was the greatest thing."

At that time, he never imagined doing feature films. And now that he's completed one, he's not in a rush to pitch another big project.

"I never made anything this long. It's like an hour and a half," Seinfeld said. "I understand after this why they had song-and-dance numbers in the Marx Brothers movies. It's very hard to sustain comedy for an entire movie."

Having reached a point where he can do almost anything he wants, Seinfeld has no idea what he wants to do next. Finally getting around to that feature film might even be a possibility.

"Now that I've done an animated movie and had my fill of that for a while, I might be interested in a small independent thing, or something weird," Seinfeld said. "But people never ask me, because they think I'll never do it.

"And I wouldn't, most of the time."