Jerry Seinfeld Once Used Steven Spielberg to Trick Chris Rock Into Starring in ‘Bee Movie’
Jerry Seinfeld lent his voice to the animated feature Bee Movie, which he had a hand in developing. But to get comedian Chris Rock on board the feature, Seinfeld told him that a filmmaking legend would be a part of the project.
Chris Rock was told he’d meet Steven Spielberg on ‘Bee Movie’
Bee Movie was a Seinfeld flick that featured a heavy ensemble cast. In addition to Rock, the film’s roster was rounded out by Renee Zellweger, Oprah Winfrey, Matthew Broderick, among others. Being the producer of the film, Seinfeld confided that he had a hand in everything about Bee Movie. Including the cast.
“I fell in love with the whole thing. I got into the architecture of the buildings, and the colors that we should use; and I just got into it,” Seinfeld once said according to Black Film. “They have amazing people over there and I would go from room to room. I would work on props, and voices, and actors. ‘How about this person and this person….’ I just got into the whole thing.”
Rock wasn’t a stranger to doing animated films having been a part of the Madagascar franchise. But the comedian joked that he might have joined Bee Movie under false pretenses. According to a 2007 interview he did with Collider, Rock was under the impression that Spielberg would be a part of the film.
“No, he told me what it was, but he actually told me Spielberg was going to be in it and when I get there, there is no Spielberg. So, he kind of owes me. I don’t know how. I’m just gonna hold on to that chip and just figure out when I get to cash it in,” Rock said.
Jerry Seinfeld didn’t want to make ‘Bee Movie’, but Steven Spielberg did
Seinfeld was interested in doing Bee Movie because he wanted to do something different after his run on Seinfeld. He’d been offered film scripts that he lacked passion for, and soon entertained the idea of doing his own movie. He especially grew curious about doing an animated film when he’d seen what those kinds of pictures were capable of.
“But [then] I saw this whole technology, and the look of it is so different. I thought, ‘Gee, what if we took that look but [made them] talk like I want them to talk, maybe that would be something interesting.’ I just got excited about it,” Seinfeld once told Rotten Tomatoes.
When he first conceived the idea, however, Seinfeld was a bit hesitant to bring it to the big screen. Talking with Spielberg about Bee Movie, the Oscar-winning director seemed more excited for the feature than Seinfeld.
“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,” Seinfeld said in a separate Collider interview.
How Jerry Seinfeld felt being in charge of ‘Bee Movie’
Seinfeld soon discovered that developing a film was much different than developing a TV series. What troubled Seinfeld the most was how slow the process was for Bee Movie, which was a pace he wasn’t accustomed to.
“But, then I started to just have to accept that this is what it’s going to be and I just slowly went through it,” Seinfeld said. “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?’”
Seinfeld shared that the hardest part of Bee Movie was developing its story. Telling a comedy story in the span of two hours was different than storytelling for a sitcom with multiple episodes.
“And if you watch comedies or 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,” he said.
