“This is the moment in your life to do something crazy” was Jerry Seinfeld’s message to everyone in the screening room. During Seinfeld’s recent Chicago visit to promote his new film, he suggested that every college student make a list of the top seven things that they really want to do with their lives and then start from there. “Try that first thing that is your fantasy. Now is the time to try it. To hell with the money!”
Jerry Seinfeld seemingly followed his own advice with the DreamWorks-produced animated feature Bee Movie, a film in which a bee rejects his only career option as a cultivator of honey, breaks one of the industry’s golden rules by befriending a New York City florist and then, upon learning that honey is a popular condiment, decides to sue the whole of humanity. Bee Movie is out now in theaters nationwide.
It is not just the film’s premise that is crazy. The whole idea for the film germinated from a joke Seinfeld came up with and once told Steven Spielberg during an awkward dinner date. Somehow this throwaway gag clicked with Spielberg, and the wheels started turning.
On September 22, Seinfeld snuck one last joke into the film before the midnight deadline. “You never really are satisfied with a film,” he said, perhaps unwittingly paraphrasing the late filmmaker Stanley Kubrick. “They just take it away from you at a certain point.”
Seinfeld prepared some live-action teaser trailers well in advance of the film’s release in which he and co-star Chris Rock appeared, but they turned out to be misleading for most audiences. “People liked them but I could tell they still didn’t really know about the movie, so I said we need to do something so people know this movie’s coming out!”
This led to Seinfeld’s dive from the top of the Carlton hotel in a bee outfit at Cannes back in May. “(DreamWorks CEO) Jeffrey Katzenberg dreamed up this stunt and I said, ‘Yeah, we should do that.’ I don’t have a lot of fear of those kinds of things. So he said ‘would you jump off of a building on a wire?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I’ll do that.'”
Seinfeld has no future plans at this point besides continuing stand-up and that is perfectly fine for him; he is now married with three children. But that is not what keeps him tied down. “I loved making the movie… but I won’t be in the theater when people laugh. I won’t feel it, and I just love to connect with people face-to-face, and I would never give that up. It’s just a more pure experience.
“I only did this because I thought it was so fresh and unique and different, but I feel like I went way past what I thought I could do,” he said. “I never thought I had the ability to make most of the stuff that I’ve made. But you find out that’s how all artists feel… All the things you think, everybody thinks.”