Trey Parker and Matt Stone are at it again. Seven years after their subversive cartoon South Park debuted on Comedy Central, they're still causing trouble, pissing people off and making the news for it. This weekend, Paramount Pictures releases their latest project, Team America: World Police, a big budget action adventure movie about a group that fights terrorists all over the globe. It was done completely with puppets.

Already, the movie has come dangerously close to getting an NC-17 rating due to its graphic sex scenes involving, of all things, anatomically incorrect puppets, and at least one of the actors spoofed in the movie has gone public with his ire.

Trey and Matt were able to take a few minutes off from their busy schedule trying to roll out the next season of South Park to talk to ComingSoon.net about their big budget puppet show. Having worked together for thirteen years, it's amazing to talk to them since they tend to finish each other's sentences. While Trey did most of the talking, Matt always seemed to be able to jump in at the right time with the perfect joke.

CS!: How far back did the idea go to make this movie completely with puppets?
Trey Parker: About two years ago, we were watching Tech TV and they were doing repeats of "Thunderbirds". We both had the same reaction. We remembered the show, not necessarily as Thunderbirds, and we were like "This is really cool!" We talked about how it was a cool thing that everything was handmade, because it was animation, but it was also live action. That was the appealing thing to us being animators. It was a totally different thing we could do and yet use the experience we had in animation. We were going to do a puppet disaster movie, then we started adding real people into it, like Hans Blix and Kim Jong Il and then we just decided to make the whole setting political.

CS!: Can you talk a bit about working with the Chiodo Brothers?
Parker: The Chiodo Brothers produced and made the puppets and got the puppeteers together. They were the entire puppet department. Nothing like this had ever been done before, and they just completely took the ball and rose to the level that it took to do it. They were heroic really.

CS!: How long did it take them to make all of the puppets' animatronic heads?
Parker: A year and a half maybe, because we went through a big R&D (research and development) stage. The technology had changed so much since the Thunderbirds time, the were able to get these really articulated heads that did all these things, but it started to look almost like Chucky.
Matt Stone: And we knew how awesome the Chucky movies were. We didn't want to step on their toes. (laughter)
Parker: On South Park, we just have a big oval and two circles. All the characters, if you take their clothes off, look exactly the same. But we knew from doing it for nine years that all you need are the right eyebrows and the right mouth shape and you can get across any emotion. So we said, "Take all that stuff out. Just give us all the control we can over eyebrows and mouth shape and we can get all of the emotions across."

CS!: And what point while making the film did you realize… "What were we thinking?"
Parker: Every single day. (laughter) In the R&D phase, we did several test shoots, and we kept trying to shoot this one scene over and over. It was the first dressing room scene where Gary meets Spottswoode (the Team America leader). We figured because it's just two puppets that talk it should be easy. The first time we tried to shoot that scene, it took about 28 hours and we never got it; the second time, it took about 27 hours, and we still never got it. We were already in pretty deep, money wise, since Paramount had to spend so much money just making the puppets and the sets. We were like "Dude, we're never going to make it. Like there's no way. This movie is impossible to make, and then, as we got into shooting the film and even deeper into the money and we got to these gigantic sets and 12 -13 puppets, it was just obvious that what we thought we were going to accomplish we weren't going to accomplish. We had to massively rewrite every single day to make it something accomplishable.
Stone: Trey and I feel it's a huge accomplishment that we got anything on film that kind of resembles a movie. It was tough.

CS!: The puppet's eyes look amazing. How important was it to get those right?
Stone: It's probably the most important thing that the eyes are humanlike. I think they got those from a glass eye maker.
Parker: We kind of discovered, again from South Park, that the secret is all in the eyes, even with animation. In South Park, their eyes are gigantic and that's what you're looking at all the time. We've been asked to look at other animated shows that are coming out, but we don't even have to listen to the story. If you see cartoon characters with little beady eyes, it's not going to work.
Stone: It doesn't suck you in. It's the big mouth and big eyes.
Parker: And so we purposely went for really big eyes on the puppets.

CS!: Okay we have to ask. Was it difficult shooting the puppet sex scene, and what exactly did you cut out to get it down to an R-Rating?
Parker: It's about 50 seconds long now and it used to be about 23 or 24 minutes long. (laughter) It was probably twice as long as it is. Really, it was just that a lot of the shots were longer and then it had a few extra special positions of lovemaking that showed that they really loved each other. The MPAA decided that you all weren't adult enough to see that,
Stone: That was the only thing in the whole movie the MPAA had a problem with…the puppet sex.
Parker: Which is pretty funny, since it was one of the easier things to shoot. It was something we've all had experience doing as children, taking the GI Joe and the Barbie and…
Stone: All you do is stick them together and it works.

CS!: Did you deliberately make the fight scenes not too perfect so we aren't allowed to forget that we're just watching puppets?
Parker: There was a lot of times where we just had what we called a "good enough policy," where we would watch and the puppet would kind of flop around and that kind of looked like [what we were going for]…
Stone: Good enough! Next shot!

CS!: So let's get to the celebrity appearances. Why Alec Baldwin?
Stone: Alec Baldwin seems like the most vocal of the activist liberal Hollywood crowd. He seemed to be the guy whose always upfront in that stuff. He gets the most animated and angry about it.
Parker: We actually wrote the movie before the Iraq war started. The idea of America being the world police is an idea well before George Bush. We wanted the movie to be about America. We didn't want it to be about the last year or last two years or about George Bush but we wanted it to be about America and America's place in the world and all of the emotions we go through as Americans. When we were doing another draft on the script, the Iraq war was just starting to escalate. It was just this insane period that we can all remember where for about two months, you would turn on a news channel, like CNN, to find out what is going on, and you'd get "Things are heating up in Iraq and here for commentary… is Sean Penn." And you'd get Sean Penn telling you what was going on in Iraq. And you're just like "WHAT??" We had the same reaction a lot of people did, that it was ridiculous. So we were like "let's put that in the movie" because it was just hysterical.

CS!: And have you gotten any feedback from any of them?
Stone: Nobody except for Sean Penn. I think that most of the actors that we use in the Film Actors Guild are going to think its funny, because ultimately, it is. If you guys have seen the movie, it's just absurd and stupid and it's just fun. Except for Sean Penn who just showed himself to be so humorless that he couldn't even have fun with that.
Parker: Sean seemed so angry in the letter, but there was not one thing that he could have done to help us any more than he did. One week before we come out, he sends a letter to the papers and gets us on the front page of everything. At first, we were going to write him a letter back and get into it, but then we were just like "Hey, he really did us a gigantic favor! That easily made us an extra 10 or 12 million dollars!"
Stone: We should send him flowers really.

CS!: Have either of you officially responded to him?
Stone: We have had six days of interviews after we got the letter, so we've responded in every interview. By the way, that letter wasn't to us. It was an open letter. We got it a day before it was "leaked," but he sent it to the LA Times.
Parker: All he did was take something that Matt said in Rolling Stone, take it out of context and then claim that was what he was mad about, when in fact, we had heard from people who know him that he was pissed off as soon as he saw that he was in the movie.
Stone: Because he was in the teaser.
Parker: He was honestly like "How dare someone make fun of me?" What was so funny is that in the movie, we have him be like "I went to Iraq! I went to Iraq!" when all of us are like, "We don't give a rat's ass if you went to Iraq, dude. I went to the Grand Canyon once, but that doesn't make me an expert!" Then we get this letter and it's like "PS: And I went to Iraq! I went to Iraq!"
Stone: It's almost exactly what he said in the movie.

CS!: I'm guessing that most people still think that letter was a joke.
Parker: Actually, people thought we wrote it!
Stone: Our lawyer and people from Paramount called us and said "Did you guys plant that letter? Because if you did, you just can't do that" and we were like "No, we didn't. He really wrote that."

CS!: How did you cast the voices and why did you do many of them yourselves?
Stone: Spottswoode is a voiceover actor named Daran [Norris] who did an awesome job and we got in a guy to do Alec Baldwin. For the women's voices, Christa Millar does Lisa. She's someone we've worked with before.
Parker: She was in "That's My Bush!" (the duo's short-lived sitcom)
Stone: Originally, we weren't going to do any of the voices, but it always seems to be that we're the only ones there at 3 o'clock in the morning when we're editing and we just start doing the voices.
Parker: We changed lines so much that it just became out of necessity that had to do all that stuff.
Stone: Yeah, we rewrite and rewrite. We literally changed two or three dozen lines a week ago when we were in the final mix. Because of the puppet mouths, you can change things, as long as it hits the rhythm. We were changing lines all over the place, adding jokes and stuff.

CS!: Who did the voice for Matt Damon?
Parker: Actually, we both did.
Stone: We both did parts, but that's not a very tough voice. Anyone could have done that one.
Parker: The way that happened was funny, too. That wasn't in the script. We started getting the puppet molds back for the actors, but you can only use one skull that these faces go over, so sometimes you'd get a puppet that looked close and sometimes you just didn't. I remember the Matt Damon one we were supposed to shoot that day, and the puppeteers came down and were like "Here's Matt Damon!" and we were like "Dude! That doesn't look like Matt Damon! He looks retarded!" Honestly, out of all those people, we've met Matt Damon before, and he's actually a pretty cool guy and a talented actor. It's just because his puppet was screwed up that he got voiced that way.
Stone: It just shows that it's totally not personal.

CS!: Was it deliberate that the movie's main villain, Kim Jong Il, comes across like a global Eric Cartman?
Parker: I think that comes across no matter what. Basically, when I start screaming, I just start sounding like Cartman, which is why I can never get people to take me seriously when I'm screaming.
Stone: Yeah, we noticed that, but it wasn't conscious at the beginning. He kind of just does turn into Cartman.
Parker: We realized that if Cartman did become the dictator of a country, it would probably be North Korea. Everyone would starve, he'd be threatening everybody with weapons, and he'd be a real shithead.

CS!: Have you heard back from Kim Jong Il yet?
Parker: Apparently, we're going to wait two weeks after the opening and then we are sending a print to Kim Jong Il, but no, he hasn't called yet.
Stone: If he did send a letter, and if it was just him and Sean, that would be the best!

CS!: Can you talk a bit about the movie's politics?
Stone: As Trey said, we set out to make a Bruckheimer movie with puppets. That really was our central thing. Making that funny meant picking serious subject matter, which made it more and more funny. Having puppets talk about how their date didn't show up for the prom isn't as funny as puppets talking about terrorism and WMV's. That's just way funnier. It really came from wanting to tell a story from that point of view and less from having a political agenda, knowing what's right for the world and trying to tell a story that is going to service that. That is like what Michael Moore does, which to us, really is not very honest filmmaking. We were interested in the emotions behind the politics and the emotions of being American the last three years. Gary's story is about being confused, being proud and being ashamed. Not wanting the power, the guilt or responsibility. I think that's what a lot of Americans feel about us being the police of the world and that has nothing to do with this election. It is a uniquely American conundrum that we've all had to deal with, and we'll all have to deal with more.
Parker: There were a couple weeks where we thought about putting a Bush puppet in it…
Stone: If we did Bush, we were going to do Kerry...
Parker: Yeah, and it seemed that every time we tried to write scenes for it, it seemed to immediately let the audience off the hook because then, the entire movie and the statements it was making, the political side, was all about Bush or all about the last six months instead of being all about America.
Stone: Although our own politics may be subconsciously in there, we kept our own politics out of it. We have strong political opinions, but we're not very well educated in global foreign policies, so we decided to just leave that alone.
Parker: And we don't assume to know the answers. We think it's really complicated stuff and there is no real clear cut answer on how to deal with this and what we should be doing so what we always end up doing is laughing at the people that are extremely on this side screaming at the people on that side, which is really all we do in "South Park"
Stone: It's the secret of South Park.
Parker: We just pick a topic. We have two groups go to war over something and in the middle, we have the boys going like "Hey! Guys! Stop killing each other."
Stone: Ultimately, we tried to make the movie optimistic and pro-American-andnot in a Hallmark way or a super-saccharine way-because we basically don't think the world is as dire as either side says it is.

CS!: You mentioned that you didn't want to get involved in politics but then there's that comment you made about P. Diddy's campaign to get voters that got Sean Penn so riled up.
Parker: It really has nothing to do with the movie. David Wilde from Rolling Stone just happened to be in our office at three in the morning watching us edit. I don't know why we started talking about it…
Stone: We were drunk. (laughter)
Parker: We were drunk. I honestly believe that to encourage uninformed people to go vote is not doing anybody any favors. And it's not about on the left or the right, both parties do it, Democrats and Republicans, they go and recruit uninformed, unaware people, because they want to appeal to their emotional impulses and get them to vote for their side.
Stone: The greatest campaign would be to go out and get informed. If you have a solid opinion, then go vote, that's American. But to tell Joe Blow, whose been snowboarding for eight years and doesn't watch a lick of news and doesn't know anything, then show up at an event and say vote or I'll kill you, that doesn't seem that democratic.
Parker: It wasn't us making a big foray into politics. That's just common sense. Most people agree with that. I think the parties like those campaigns, because they're the easiest people to get to vote for your cause. That's why we have candidates, especially for president, that do nothing but appeal to emotion. They don't talk about anything with any kind of substance because you have a bunch of uniformed people out there. There's all kinds of political science about having literacy or civic tests before you're able to vote. We haven't gotten that deep. It just seems common sense to us. If you don't have an opinion and you're unaware of the issues, stay home. Don't vote because the country doesn't need your vote.
Stone: Go vote if you want, but don't have a group pressure you into voting. If you think like I do, that no matter who you vote for, there's going to be a giant shithead running the country, don't let some group pressure you into voting.
Parker: You shouldn't be shamed into voting.
Stone: Or threatened.

CS!: What is the secret to making the satire in Team America so funny?
Parker: How do actors in Bruckheimer movies read those lines with a straight face?
Stone: We were laughing as we were watching "Pearl Harbor", because it's the most brilliant comedy ever written. How can we elevate to this? A big chore about doing an R-rated puppet movie is that we spent a long time figuring out what the right tone would be. We wrote a script that had a lot of jokes in it. As we started shooting, we realized that the puppets couldn't pull off comedy, because you can't get the nuance out of a puppet, but as soon as you have the puppet say the most serious line, then you were laughing. Every day, we were re-writing the script for technical reasons, but also to take all the jokes out. Every time a puppet would say a joke, we would take it out and replace it with a serious line, and it was funnier.
Parker: Both of us have the same favorite scene in the movie: when Gary and Lisa are in their little ship on their way to Cairo, she asks if he's okay, and he replies, "I was thinking, if I mess up a line on stage, I get a bad review; if I mess up here, we're all dead." She replies, "I believe in you Gary. Belief is all we have". That is the single funniest line to us. Obviously, if you read that on a script, Paramount is confused because they thought it was a comedy. Where's the joke in that? Yet when you see those puppets say those lines, it's the funniest scene to us.
Stone: It was a big lesson in scoring too. You could put a comedy score behind it (starts humming a comical melody) and it would ruin it. We had to shoot all day and edit all night to stay on schedule. Every time we shot a scene, it didn't look like much of anything until we would put the soundtrack to "Armageddon" underneath it, and then it totally worked.
Parker: There's a couple of times where the music never pays attention to the dialogue at all. It's completely serious all the time.

CS!: Yeah, the funniest parts of Team America may be the songs. Who did you get to do those?
Stone: Trey does.
Parker: I do the songs. After the "South Park" movie, we swore we'd never do another movie again, but then the idea of a puppet movie seemed too good to not do. As soon as we came up with the idea, of course I wanted to make it a musical, and thank God we didn't, because it would have been even more impossible. But we came up with this other idea. What if we did a Bruckheimer movie with puppets? We realized that really it's so close to being a puppet movie anyway, why not go all the way with it?
Stone: It would be great as a puppet movie!
Parker: We started watching these Bruckheimer movies and we were like "You know what? These are musicals!" Except Bruckheimer, instead of having these characters break out into a song, he gets Aerosmith to do a song. Every twelve or thirteen minutes there is a song with images, so I knew that I was going to write THOSE kind of movie moment songs. I just wrote them like that. The Kim Jong Il song is the one that didn't quite fit within that but it was just one that came to my head and I couldn't resist putting it in the movie.
Stone: It seems to make sense. He's lonely.

CS!: Is there anything you cut back on that you thought might have been too offensive?
Stone: Nothing, to tell you the truth. Doing this movie is a little bit different from "South Park", dealing with subject matter like terrorism. We were concerned in one of the early drafts about how a 9/11 joke would go over, but when we screened it, people loved it. It just showed that even though these are serious themes and serious subject matter, it doesn't mean that for a little while, in a puppet movie, we can't all laugh and release some of the pressure that we've all felt about when every day you open the paper and it's like "The world is ending" and you're like "Oh My God!" This movie is really just supposed to be a pressure valve for that stuff. We didn't find any subject matter we didn't want to satirize. It was just doing it in a way to achieve that purpose, not doing it in a way that was offensive. Ultimately, we want people to laugh at the movie, so it was just finding that tonal balance.
Parker: For us, the balance is that we never like to come across as cynical. We're both very optimistic guys, and I think that with South Park especially, we try to always have some kind of underlying sweetness and underlying heart to it all. There is optimism simply in laughing. If we were to find out that we had cancer tomorrow, we would be making a joke about it. That's how we deal with things, it's how we think about things and so do a lot of people and I think that's why people respond to it. And there's a lot of people that have no sense of humor that don't understand that. They say if you're making fun of something, it simply means that you absolutely don't care, you don't think about it and everything is trite to you, and it's totally not true.

CS!: Some people criticize your work because they say that it's not subtle in the satire. Would you guys ever do something subtler?
Stone: We don't get off on subtlety. We're not subtle guys.
Parker: Subtle doesn't make us any money. We just don't understand subtlety. It's a criticism that's valid, but it's just not us.

CS!: What age do you think is appropriate for kids to see Team America?
Parker: I think you should be 23 or 24. (laughter) Honestly, we told our friends who had 14-year-olds to leave them at home. I think around 15, but again, it depends. There are extremely immature 16-year-olds that shouldn't see it, too and there are extremely mature 14-year-olds that will probably be all right. That's why it should be up to an adult or parent. That's why the NC-17 rating is kind of ridiculous, because a parent should be the one that decides and knows what their child can take.

CS!: Will you guys ever make a sequel to Team America?
Stone: I will never even go near a puppet again.
Parker: This was the most horrible experience.
Stone: When I have kids and take them to the park, if some guy's doing a puppet show, I'm setting him on fire.

[ source: COMING SOON ]