Jerry Seinfeld on `Bee Movie'

Jerry Seinfeld has been back in the spotlight after nearly 10 years since Seinfeld ended its run. Of course, he's never really left, with syndicated reruns playing daily, but the stand-up comic has been back with new material in the marketing for the animated film Bee Movie alone, let alone the movie itself.

After an appearance on NBC's 30 Rock, Seinfeld has been hosting a series of "TV Juniors" that air in commercial breaks. Each one features a comedic sketch from behind the scenes of the animated film.

"We weren't quite sure what we were going to do with those when we made them," said Seinfeld. "We didn't know where we were going to put them. We thought this could be an Internet thing, but NBC stepped up and they wanted them, so we sold it to them. I had seen some other people do some online things of the making of the movie and doing like, daily posts and not blogs, but streaming video of what the experience was. So, I thought, let's do it but let's just make it totally fake."

Providing the voice of Barry Benson was only the beginning of Seinfeld's commitment to the cartoon. He co-wrote the script, helped cast the other voices and directed his own costars in the recording studio.

"I started to just have to accept that this is what it's going to be and I just slowly went through it. 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."

Dreamworks Pictures co-chief Steven Spielberg courted Seinfeld for the cartoon. When Spielberg wants you to put in the work, there's no turning him down. "This was not a meeting. 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."

The story of a little bee roaming out into the human world and taking on honey producers in a satirical court battle was up Seinfeld's alley. It wasn't just the observations on human culture. Seinfeld grew up with stories of little characters.

"Probably as far as this kind of thing is concerned, Gulliver's Travel's I really loved when I was a kid. I remembered the excitement, when you're a child, when you're small, the excitement of stories that play with scale. That was the first thing and the only thing I remembered from being a kid that really played with scale. There were always stories with giants when you're a kid and I was always fascinated with those. I don't know why that interests us as humans, but this story is about scale in a lot of ways. And I know that kids like things that, where everything is gigantic or everything is miniature. So, that was one of the things that I thought, 'This would be an interesting thing to play with.'"

As the story evolved with jokes and visual gags, Seinfeld shared the credit with all the animators and directors who collaborated with him. "A lot of people put a lot of ideas in. I kind like of like to play the captain of the ship and I decide what comes in and what comes out. So there is a lot of my stuff in there though, but a lot of other people's stuff too."

The storylines of Seinfeld's TV scripts always connected mundane occurrences in complicated ways. For the feature film, it was important to Seinfeld never to let the story overpower the jokes.

"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 two-thirds 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 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. And I struggled a long time. 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 until we figured that out."

Originally, Seinfeld wanted to mimic another classic movie, The Graduate. Now all that remains is a scene of Barry floating in a honey pool. "There was a time when I first conceived of the film that I was going to do a complete metaphor for The Graduate all the way, but most of it we ended up loosing. But that scene I still liked so much and I liked that movie so much I left it in."

When it came to his costars, Seinfeld tapped frequent costar Patrick Warburton for a role as an angry, screaming human. Comedian buddy Chris Rock plays a mosquito he meets in his journeys. For the female lead, the human who helps him sue honey makers, Seinfeld wanted a movie star and sought out Rene Zellweger.

"Rene I practically stalked. I was like the leopard in the weeds with Rene. I knew her whereabouts at all time. She would go to a screening, I would somehow be there a couple of rows back. 'Oh, Rene, funny bumping into you here again.' I wanted her very badly for this. I knew she was the prefect person to play this part. She's very busy, she's very in demand and there is really nobody else quite like her, especially vocally. There are a lot of great actresses, of course, but not all of them have this kind of vocal skill she has. I mean, when she reads, the voice just comes right through the screen. Very quickly when you're watching this movie, you believe the voice is coming out of this dummy. It's a dummy. This whole thing is a puppet act. These aren't real people."

Barry Benson originally was more like the Jerry Seinfeld of the TV sitcom. He had to tone down his persona to create a more innocent version of himself. "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."

The Disney model for animated movies always peppers them with enough songs to qualify them as musicals and sell lucrative soundtrack albums. Seinfeld wanted to hint at that too, but it did not make the final cut.

"There was a huge, very elaborate musical production number that I ended up having to get rid of, because it just seemed to throw off the plot drives at a crucial moment. But there is the song that Matthew [Broderick] and I did that's at the end of the credits. That's the only thing that remains."

Bee Movie opens Friday.