Last month we had the opportunity to sit down with Jerry Seinfeld and talk about his new film, Bee Movie. Here is a transcript of that round table interview.
Q: Do you find there’s a big difference in the kind of comedy you have to invent?
A: There’s a big difference. Sometimes you can do certain things on stage, or even in a TV series, and people see the look on your face and they know what you mean, so you can get away with certain things. But if you can’t create that look on an animated character, which is essentially a puppet, the line will hit the audience in a very bad way. It’s like different musical instruments. You may be playing the same song, but you pick up a different instrument and it has a totally different feel and sound to it. You have to discover it. Each of these things is like a petting zoo and you’re blindfolded. They want you to take care of this animal, which is your show. But you’re blindfolded. We’re going to put you in a room with the animal, and the food that it needs. And everything it needs is in the room, and you’re in the room with the animal. But you’re blindfolded. So you go into this room and start feeling around for this stuff. Feel a little fur, and you feel a little claw. And you go, “Oh, my God, what is this thing?” This is the great advantage that you have doing a TV series. Say, for example, my series — which is the only one I know anything about — by year four, we knew exactly what this thing ate, when it wanted to go out, how it liked to be petted. What it liked and what it didn’t like. And what makes a movie so challenging — so much more challenging than a TV series, frankly — is that you never get that opportunity. Because you make a TV show and you put it out there and you get a reaction. You go, “Okay, this work. This doesn’t work.” You put out another one. “They like this. They don’t like this.” But with a movie, you get one shot at it. Even though you have test screenings, pretty much, we’re going to put this lemur in people’s living rooms. And, just, bang, they’re going to react to it. I hope I didn’t over-answer your question. [Laughs] This is one of my big things of creative pursuits. You have your idea you want to do, but then you got to figure out what does this thing want to be? You got to let it lead you a little.
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Today I was invited to a special screening of footage from Jerry Seinfeld’s Bee Movie in San Francisco. Seinfeld and director Steve Hickner were in town to present the footage and do interviews (I’ll be posting the interviews at a later date. I would like to first start off by saying how unimpressed I have been with computer animation outside of Pixar. Pixar seems to be the only company that knows how to craft a story, and create interesting characters. Dreamworks Animation always seemed like a subpar product to me. Yes, even the Shrek films. The 2006 film Over The Hedge was the closest the studio ever got to winning me over, and even that was not “spectacular”.
