O Magazine interview

Seinfeld speaks to Winfrey in an interview for O Magazine about producing Bee Movie.

I asked Steven Spielberg to direct a commercial I was going to make for American Express. I’d never met him, but I thought, What the hell why don’t I call? I’m Jerry Seinfeld, I’m not just nobody. [Laughs] Steven says, I can’t do it, but why don’t we have dinner tomorrow in East Hampton? I say, That sounds great. Then I hang up the phone and go, Oh my God! I’m a Jewish boy from Long Island, and I’m having dinner with Steven Spielberg! It was like my second Bar Mitzvah.

[At dinner] when we started talking about kids we were off to the races, but then the conversation ground to a halt. It happens to the best of us. As an entertainer, that’s when I kick into gear and say something witty to jump-start the conversation. The night before, I was sitting with a couple of friends, eating a Twizzler, and I said, What if somebody did a film called Bee Movie, and it was about bees? So during the dinner with Steven, I said this to relieve the lull we’d just crashed into. I figured, he’s a director, he’ll relate to the term B movie. But he didn’t laugh; he fixed his eyes on me and said, We’re going to make that movie. I was like, What do you mean we, Kemosabe? He said it was a great idea, and when he gets excited, it’s almost scary. He can get everyone else in the room excited! You don’t meet older people like that too often. It’s wonderful.