Film: Bee Movie

"Bee Movie" The Film Makers

(Left to right) Director STEVE HICKNER; writer, producer and voice of Barry B. Benson, JERRY SEINFELD; producer CHRISTINA STEINBERG; and director SIMON J. SMITH of DreamWorks’ BEE MOVIE, to be released by Paramount Pictures in November 2007.

The film stars Jerry Seinfeld, Renée Zellweger, Matthew Broderick, John Goodman, Chris Rock, Kathy Bates, Patrick Warburton, Barry Levinson, Megan Mullally, Larry Miller and Rip Torn.   The film is directed by Simon J. Smith and Steve Hickner and written by Jerry Seinfeld and Spike Feresten & Barry Marder & Andy Robin.  DreamWorks’ “Bee Movie” is produced by Jerry Seinfeld and Christina Steinberg.  The music is by Rupert Gregson-Williams.  This movie has been rated PG for mild suggestive humor. Photo Credit: Art Streiber

ABOUT THE FILMMAKERS

SIMON J. SMITH (Director) came to PDI/DreamWorks in 1997 as head of layout for the company’s feature film division.  A CG animation veteran with nearly 20 years of experience, Simon supervised the layout department on PDI/DreamWorks’ first computer animated feature, “Antz,” before serving as cameraman on “Shrek” and director on the Universal Studios theater experience “Shrek 4-D.”
Smith began his career in London, where he worked at SVC Television, the editing and effects house Framestore and the post house VTR, where he established his own 3D department. Immediately prior to joining PDI/DreamWorks, Smith served at The Mill in London as the lead CG supervisor on commercial projects for Nike, Honda,

Volvo and VW Polo.  He was a pioneer in the field of pre-visualization, and used that skill set to create PDI’s layout department, which became an integral part of PDI’s filmmaking process.  Simon was also instrumental in helping to set up a CG layout department for Aardman Animations for the production of “Chicken Run.”
Known for his work on the award-winning pop video “Go West” for the Pet Shop Boys, Simon also received the first ever Gold Leaf Award for his 3D directorial work on the commercial West Lites.

STEVE HICKNER (Director), one of our most experienced animation filmmakers, made his directorial debut on DreamWorks’ epic animated feature “The Prince of Egypt,” and then went on to executive-produce “Joseph: King of Dreams,” its direct-to-video prequel.  He served as head of story for the Shrek 4-D ride, and worked as a story artist on the television series “Father of the Pride” and the theatrical releases “Shark Tale” and “Over the Hedge.”

Prior to joining DreamWorks, he served as a producer on the animated features “We’re Back! A Dinosaur’s Story” and “Balto,” and as associate producer on “An American Tail: Fievel Goes West,” both from Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment. Earlier in his career, he worked on such animated film favorites as “The Little Mermaid,” “The Black Cauldron” and “The Great Mouse Detective,” as well as “Who Framed Roger Rabbit.”
 
JERRY SEINFELD (Screenplay / Producer) See bio in “About the Cast” above.

After a long career in live-action filmmaking and feature film development, CHRISTINA STEINBERG (Producer) joined DreamWorks Animation in 2005 to produce the Jerry Seinfeld comedy “Bee Movie.”

Prior to joining DreamWorks, she ran Junction Entertainment, a production company she formed with director Jon Turteltaub in 1998.  Together, they produced a wide range of feature films, such as the blockbuster Jerry Bruckheimer film “National Treasure,” starring Nicolas Cage; the family-friendly Disney’s “The Kid,” starring Bruce Willis; and the Anthony Hopkins starrer “Instinct.”

Before teaming up with Turteltaub, Steinberg served as a senior vice president of production at Touchstone Pictures, where she worked with such key talent and filmmakers as Robert Redford and Michelle Pfeiffer on “Up Close and Personal”; director Penny Marshall on “The Preacher’s Wife”; and John Travolta on “Phenomenon.” Steinberg graduated from Cornell University and started her career in publishing as an assistant editor at Harper’s Bazaar.

SPIKE FERESTEN (Screenplay) was raised in West Bridgewater, MA, where he attended public school and got his first job as a bag boy at the local supermarket. With his dream to be the next Jimi Hendrix, Feresten attended Berklee College of Music in Boston.

One night, disillusioned with his career choice, Feresten thought he might feel better if he dropped four-foot fluorescent light bulbs out the window of his dorm room just to watch them shatter on the sidewalk eight stories below. He got caught and was evicted. Soon after, Feresten saw David Letterman performing the exact same stunt on his late-night talk show, and a real light bulb went on: if network television encouraged this sort of behavior, he might have a future after all. Thus, a career in TV comedy was born.

Feresten came up through the ranks of television, working first as an intern at NBC in New York. His career took on a Hollywood fable quality when his job as the receptionist for “Saturday Night Live” led him to pass jokes he had written to “Weekend Update's” Dennis Miller. Eventually, Feresten's full-time job at SNL led to a staff writing position in 1990 at “Late Night with David Letterman,” where he wrote for five years and earned five Emmy nominations.

In 1995, Feresten left the late-night realm to join the writing staff of the groundbreaking sitcom “Seinfeld,” where he wrote for three seasons, becoming supervising producer in 1998. During his “Seinfeld” tenure, Feresten garnered an additional three Emmy nominations, including one for his famed “Soup Nazi” episode, which remains part of the pop-culture vernacular.

In addition to “Seinfeld” and “Letterman,” Feresten wrote and developed other television comedy, penning episodes of “Space Ghost Coast to Coast” and “The Jamie Kennedy Experiment.”
Feresten is married and currently lives in Los Angeles.

It is wildly alleged that BARRY MARDER (Screenplay) is the creator and author of the “Letters From a Nut” books, including Letters From a Nut, More Letters From a Nut and Extra Nutty! Even More Letters From a Nut, which he wrote under the name of Ted L. Nancy.

The books have sold 1,250,000 copies and are still in hardcover today, the first published over 10 years ago.  They are also published internationally. Marder also created and authored Stories From a Moron under the name Ed Broth. He recently authored and sold two new Ted L. Nancy books to the National Lampoon: Ted L. Nancy - Hello Junk Mail! (I am The Kabobbys Of Glendale) and Ted L. Nancy's Afternoon Stories. He is hoping that the success of “Bee Movie” will get him Writer’s Guild health insurance.
   
ANDY ROBIN (Screenplay) is a writer and director who worked on NBC’s “Seinfeld” for several season, penning “The Junior Mint” and “The Barber” and teaming with Gregg Kavet to write many others, including “The Jimmy” and “The Fatigues,” which won the Writers Guild Award for Episodic Comedy. With Kavet, Robin wrote and directed “Live Free or Die,” an independent film which won the Jury Prize for Best Narrative Film at the 2006 South By Southwest Festival and Best New American Film at the 2006 Seattle International Film Festival. The two also wrote the 2005 Simon Spotlight book Saving Face, a humorous guide to awkward social situations.  They are currently at work on a pilot about baseball scouts for HBO.

NICK FLETCHER (Editor), who joined DreamWorks in 1995 as the supervising editor on the animated feature “The Prince of Egypt,” most recently edited the hit DreamWorks animated feature “Shark Tale” and, prior to that, DreamWorks’ “Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron.”

Before joining DreamWorks, Fletcher worked at Amblimation in London, where he served as the supervising editor on “An American Tail: Fievel Goes West.” He also served as the animation editor on “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” and the co-supervising editor on both “We’re Back: A Dinosaur’s Story” and “Balto.”

Born in Wales, Fletcher began his career at John Wood Sound Studios in London with work on various commercials. He then moved on to Richard Williams Animation in 1981.


ALEX McDOWELL (Production Designer), whose career as a production designer spans two-plus decades of award-winning music videos, television commercials and feature films, continues to garner respect and acclaim for his innovative and specific design sensibility.

In 2006, McDowell was named Royal Designer for Industry by the RSA, the UK’s most prestigious design society, and was appointed Visiting Artist at MIT’s Media Lab.

An advocate of progressive film design, McDowell integrates digital technology and traditional design technique, creating a production design process that allows for unprecedented control over the look of the final film. He started incorporating digital design into his modus operandi with “Fight Club.” He sophisticated the process in 1999 with one of the first fully integrated digital design departments for Steven Spielberg's “Minority Report,” creating an intensely researched world of 2054, immersed in future technology. For Spielberg's “The Terminal,” he set up another cutting-edge art department to realize a full-sized airport terminal, the largest architectural set ever built for film.

Among McDowell's other recent credits are the fantastical world of “Dr. Seuss' the Cat in the Hat,” and two films with Tim Burton: the stop-motion animated feature “Corpse Bride,” which combines grey Victorian Eastern Europe and an improbably lively Land of the Dead, and “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” Roald Dahl's classic story about eccentric chocolatier Willy Wonka. The latter film McDowell cites as the most demanding of his career, encompassing an aesthetic he describes as “Russian Space Age Pop meets German Expressionism through the lens of a futuristic Italian ‘James Bond’ B movie on a British back lot."

McDowell segued from “Charlie” to the Weinstein Company release “Breaking and Entering,” an original contemporary drama written and directed by Anthony Minghella. Starring Jude Law as a successful London landscape architect, the film follows a series of criminal and emotional thefts. Among the complicated enhanced sets and locations, the film demanded the conceptual design of an appropriated 50-acre landscaped site in Central London.

Since returning to the States, McDowell has recently completed not only production design on “Bee Movie” but also development for “The Fantastic Mr. Fox,” a stop-motion animated film to be directed by Wes Anderson.

He is currently working on “Watchmen,” based on the graphic novel by Alan Moore and directed by Zack Snyder. He continues to work as an executive designer for DreamWorks Animation.

McDowell is also involved in projects under the auspices of Matter Art & Science, a networked group of artists, designers, scientists and engineers he founded in 2000, which explores the integration of design and engineering and brings art and science into a new convergence. Key projects include: a robotic opera, “Death and the Powers,” for composer Tod Machover with libretto by poet Robert Pinsky, in association with MIT Media Lab; a fully immersive exhibit space in association with Long Beach University Art Museum; and serving as advisor for Oblong Industries in their development of a gesture recognition interface for the entertainment industry.

Additionally, he is on the Advisory Board for the University Art Museum, Cal State Long Beach, where he is the guest curator on a new series of exhibitions that fuse emergent media, computer science, engineering, electronic music, digital art research and art production.

A classically-trained painter who attended Central School of Art in London, McDowell lived his first seven years in Indonesia before attending British Quaker boarding schools. After graduating Central School, he opened the graphics design firm Rocking Russian Design in 1978, and designed album covers and music videos for artists of almost every persuasion, including a video for The Cure which featured the band inside a wardrobe, one of the smallest sets every built.

His arresting work consistently reflected his bent for experimentation and love of music. Relocating to Los Angeles in 1986 to design commercials and music videos, he worked with cutting-edge directors, and by the early 90's had segued into film production design. Among the credits he accrued are “The Lawnmower Man,” “The Crow,” “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” “Fight Club” and “The Affair of the Necklace.”

McDowell makes his home in Los Angeles with his wife, painter Kirsten Everberg, and their two children. He is active in public speaking, participating in many international design and film conferences where he serves as a guest-speaker and conducts master classes and workshops.

CHRISTOPHE LAUTRETTE (Art Director) knew at an early age that he wanted to work in animation. By the time he started grade school, he was already illustrating stories, drawing comics and doing caricatures of his classmates. His pencil and paper became the conduit for his broad imagination. Little did he know that this imagination would lead him into a career in feature animation, taking him from France to the U.S.

Lautrette began his art education in Toulouse, a city in the south of France. His studies focused on architecture, design, illustration, photography, fashion and art history. When he was 18 he attended Les Gobelins, an art university in Paris renowned for its animation program.

After graduating from Les Gobelins, he worked as assistant animator on “The Goofy Movie” in Disney's Paris studio. He then worked at Bibo Films where, depending on the project, he worked as animator, background artist and/or artistic director.
Lautrette moved to Los Angeles in 1996 and began work at DreamWorks Animation as layout artist on the studio's first film, “The Prince of Egypt.” He went on to work in visual development for several films, including such titles as “Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron,” “Flushed Away” and the upcoming “Kung Fu Panda.”

Lautrette currently lives in Los Angeles, playing "grown-up" to his wife and two young sons.

DOUG COOPER (Visual Effects Supervisor) joined DreamWorks in 1986 as a CG effects animator and technical director on “The Prince of Egypt,” and went on to serve as digital supervisor on “Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron.” He most recently serves as visual effects supervisor on the studio’s hit animated feature “Shark Tale.”

Prior to joining DreamWorks, Cooper worked as a scene planner and software developer for special effects on the Amblimation feature “Balto.” Cooper’s association with Amblimation began when he worked as a technical coordinator for American Film Technologies in San Diego on the feature “We’re Back! A Dinosaur’s Story.”

Cooper is a member of the Visual Effects Society (VES), ACM/SIGGRAPH and ASIFA Hollywood.

FABIO LIGNINI (Head of Character Animation) has been a major force in the animation department at DreamWorks Animation since the studio’s inception. Prior to “Bee Movie,” Lignini worked as a supervising animator on the recent hit “Flushed Away,” the Academy Award®-nominated hit comedy “Shark Tale,” the 2003 action-adventure “Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas,” the Academy Award®-nominated traditional epic “Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron,” “The Road to El Dorado” and the groundbreaking classic “The Prince of Egypt.”
Prior to joining DreamWorks in 1995, Lignini worked at Amblimation Studios in London as a senior animator on the features “Balto,” “We’re Back: A Dinosaur’s Story” and “An American Tail: Fievel Goes West.”

Lignini worked as a freelance animator and director in Brazil on several award-winning short films. He served as a co-director on “Alex,” which won a Caracol Award for the Best Animated Short at the ninth annual International Festival of Latin American Cinema in Havana, Cuba. Lignini also directed the five-minute short “When Bats Are Silent,” which went on to win five awards, including the Debut Prize Award at the second Los Angeles International Animation Celebration, as well as the Debut Prize at the second Hiroshima International Animation Festival in Japan. The film also garnered a Best Animated Film Award at Fest Rio in Rio de Janeiro, as well as the Coral Negro Award for the Best Animated Short at the eighth annual Festival of Latin American Cinema.

Lignini also served as an animation instructor for animation workshops and courses for The National Film Board of Canada, as well as the

Laura Alvim Cultural Center and the Rui Barbosa Cultural Center in Rio de Janeiro.
A native of Belo Horizonte, Brazil, Lignini studied at the Universidade Catolica de Minas Gerais in Brazil. He also received animation training with instructors from the National Film Board of Canada and has taken directing courses at UCLA and The Travis Group.

RUPERT GREGSON-WILLIAMS (Composer) has scored a wide variety of film and television projects. Most recently, he composed the scores to the summer hit “I Pronounce You Chuck and Larry,” Adam Sandler’s “Click” and DreamWorks’ animated hit “Over the Hedge.” In 2004, he collaborated with Andrea Guerra to compose the score for the acclaimed true-life drama “Hotel Rwanda,” for which the composers won the European Film Award. He more recently contributed to the scores of the Oscar®-winning animated feature “Wallace & Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit” and Antoine Fuqua’s live-action epic “King Arthur.” His upcoming films include the Adam Sandler comedy “You Don’t Mess with the Zohan.”

Gregson-Williams has also created the scores for such feature films as the teen comedy “What a Girl Wants,” starring Amanda Bynes and Colin Firth; the biographical comedy-drama “The Night We Called It a Day,” starring Dennis Hopper and Melanie Griffith; Brad Mirman’s crime-comedy “Crime Spree,” starring Gérard Depardieu and Harvey Keitel; Nick Hurran’s “Plots With a View,” starring Brenda Blethyn and Alfred Molina; Peter Hewitt’s “Thunderpants,” starring Simon Callow; Nick Hurran’s “Virtual Sexuality”; and Geneviève Jolliffe’s “Urban Ghost Story.” He has also collaborated with composer Hans Zimmer on a number of animated and live-action features.

Gregson-Williams received an Emmy Award nomination for his score for “Jack and the Beanstalk: The Real Story.” His television work also includes Peter Hewitt’s “Princess of Thieves” and four projects for director Nick Hurran: “Walk Away and I Stumble”; “Take a Girl Like You”; “Happy Birthday Shakespeare”; and the series “The Last Detective.” He also scored the acclaimed documentary miniseries “Long Way Round,” with Ewan McGregor and Charlie Boorman.

In addition to his busy film schedule, Gregson-Williams has composed for the London Symphony Orchestra, wrote the FIFA Soccer World Cup anthem, produced albums for EMI and worked alongside several famed conductors and recording artists.

HANS ZIMMER (Executive Music Producer) is one of the film industry’s most prolific composers, with well over 100 film scores to his credit.
In 1994, he won both an Academy Award® and a Golden Globe Award for his score to the animated blockbuster “The Lion King,” which also spawned one of the most successful soundtrack albums ever.  Zimmer’s music for “The Lion King” continues to draw applause in the award-winning stage production of the musical, which earned the 1998 Tony Award for Best Musical, as well as a Grammy Award for Best Original Cast Album.

Zimmer has garnered six additional Academy Award® nominations, the latest for his “Gladiator” score, for which he also won a Golden Globe Award and earned a Grammy Award nomination.  He has also been Academy Award®-nominated for “The Prince of Egypt,” “The Thin Red Line,” “As Good As It Gets,” “The Preacher’s Wife” and “Rain Man.”  Last year, he earned his eighth Golden Globe nomination for his score for the worldwide blockbuster “The Da Vinci Code.”  He had previously earned additional Golden Globe nominations for his work on “Spanglish,” “The Last Samurai,” “Pearl Harbor,” “Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron” and “The Prince of Egypt.”

His music scored two of the biggest hits of 2007:  “Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End” and “The Simpsons Movie.”  His long list of film credits also includes “The Holiday,” “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest,” Gore Verbinski’s “The Weather Man,” the DreamWorks blockbuster “Madagascar,” the Warner Bros. hit “Batman Begins” (co-written with James Newton Howard), “Matchstick Men,” “Black Hawk Down,” “The Ring,” “Hannibal,” “Crimson Tide,” “Thelma & Louise,” “Driving Miss Daisy,” “Mission: Impossible II,” “A League of Their Own,” “Black Rain,” “Backdraft,” “True Romance” and “My Beautiful Launderette.”  His upcoming feature scoring projects include “The Dark Knight,” the sequel to “Batman Begins,” and the big screen adaptation of the stage hit “Frost/Nixon.”

"Bee Movie" Index

Film Home Page | Entertainment Magazine

2007 Film Entertainment Magazine / EMOL.org. All rights reserved.

Film Entertainment Magazine

Bee Movie (2007)
Starring: Jerry Seinfeld, Renée Zellweger Director: Steve Hickner, Simon J. Smith

Barry B. Benson (Seinfeld), a bee who has just graduated from college, is disillusioned at his lone career choice: making honey. On a special trip outside the hive, Barry's life is saved by Vanessa (Zellweger), a florist in New York City. As their relationship blossoms, he discovers humans actually eat honey, and subsequently decides to sue us. Find out more about Bee Movie

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