Despite - or perhaps because of - its seemingly indefatigable propensity for profanity, South Park has in the past eight years become one of the most resonant and influential icons in American popular culture. Of course it doesn't hurt that the relatively simple animation allows creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone to move with lightning speed, eviscerating such sacred cows as The Passion of the Christ mere weeks after its release in theaters.

This weekend, however, Parker and Stone take their best big screen shot yet at the very thing they've lampooned time and again on Comedy Central: bloated, ambitious, effects-laden action movies such as Disney's much maligned 2002 offering Pearl Harbor .

Billed as a Jerry Bruckheimer-style epic, Team America: World Police follows a group of heroic government agents (played by marionettes) who live inside Mount Rushmore and travel the globe. When their latest assignment requires impersonating a terrorist to infiltrate a network of evildoers intent on distributing weapons of mass destruction, New York theater actor Gary Johnston is called in to help out the team.

During a recent interview with FilmStew , Parker and Stone admitted the only way to make fun of the over-the-top swagger of films like Armageddon and Pearl Harbor is to write it into the script as an honest-to-goodness plot development. “To parody a Bruckheimer movie, you have to do a Bruckheimer movie, basically,” explains Stone. “We went back and forth between parodying Bruckheimer moments, but in more of a hero's journey kind of like George Lucas- Matrix kind of movie.”

“A Bruckheimer hero isn't like a Luke Skywalker, because a Bruckheimer hero knows from the beginning he's awesome, and then has a moment when he falters, and then in the end he's awesome,” Stone continues. “Whereas the Frodo or Luke Skywalker, they don't believe they're the one, they don't believe they're the one, and then finally they're the one.”

Stone adds that this particular narrative element gave he and Parker more than a few moments of frustration. “That gave us so much f*cking grief, because we went back and forth in Gary's story,” Stone recalls. “It‘s an extremely different first thirty minutes to the movie, especially if he's like, ‘What? Me? I can't do this,' or if he's like, ‘Okay I'll give it a try.'”

“It was like all of those scenes seemed to be way funnier with the Bruckheimer-ness, so he was never like, ‘What's going on?'” Stone continues. “All of that stuff seemed to take all of the air out of the movie, and whenever he was like, ‘I'll do what I can but I don't know if I can,' it worked.”

Despite Stone and Parker's successful eight-year run on the small and big screen with South Park , there was a degree of hesitation at Paramount with regards to the duo's unconventional production methods. “Paramount was really nervous because they knew that our style was to get to the movie set and change absolutely everything,” reveals Parker with a laugh. “With South Park , we change the entire show before it goes on the air, and people were like, ‘You know, you can't do that with this because these are puppets.'”

“We don't like doing that, and we tried, but we got to set and came to find out you can't do that,” he adds. “Every day we would get to set and it would be like, ‘Wait, with this set these puppets can't do what's in the storyboard.' So we were like, ‘All of you just f*ckin' back off.

We're going to do what we do, which is just sort of guerilla-style figure out how to get something on film.”

Adds Stone: “That was the hardest part of the movie, trying to stay spontaneous, be funny in the midst of just total tedium.”

During production, the South Park duo were focused on applying what they had learned from South Park to Team America 's expanded, three-dimensional canvas. As it turns out, it was still largely all about the eyebrows. “On South Park , the only thing we have to get across our characters is eyebrows and mouth shape,” explains Parker. “After eight years of doing it, we now know that we can get any emotion across with the right eyebrow position and the right mouth shape.”

“So we told the guys making the puppets for Team America that all that matters is that we have total control over the mouth and that the eyebrows can do all different kinds of things,” he continues. “It proved to be true, too, because with the puppets, a lot of times we did this thing with the eyebrow servo down and a puppet would be talking, and we would just very slowly raise that servo up while he was talking.”

"It was like, ‘And then, I was raped by Mr. Mestopheles' and it suddenly makes him look like he's really thinking and feeling. It was pretty cool.”

Parker says the initial phase of character development for the marionettes involved riding a fine line between wanting them to stay sort of endearing and charming versus wooden and clumsy. Still, he and Stone knew they needed a little bit more emotion than the level contained in the inspirational 1960's British TV show Thunderbirds .

For good measure, they went to the same well that helped inspire George Lucas' original Star Wars vision. “ Team America is sort of like standard Joseph Campbell stuff too, because before the third act you've got to go through the eye of the needle and sort of prove that you're willing to commit to the third act,” insists Parker. “That's what it's all about. We were like, ‘Let's do it with a blow job.'”

He also points to the very first test shoots for Team America , which confirmed their so-called vision for the picture might in fact suffer from delusions of grandeur. “The first time that we actually got a crew together, we were shooting that dressing room scene where Spottswoode first comes and meets Gary,” he explains. “We shot that just because it was very simple - it was just two puppets, with Gary sitting down the whole time and Spottswoode standing there.”

“We went to shoot that thinking, ‘Okay, we'll spend a few hours shooting that and we'll shoot it a couple ways,'” he describes. “We wanted to see things like eyelines into camera, [such as] was that better to do it South Park -style right into camera? Was it better to do more traditional over the shoulder stuff?”

Eighteen hours later, Parker and Stone had one shaky version of the scene in the can. “We were like, ‘Uh-oh,' because it was really just like, ‘Okay, in this shot, all we need is the puppet to go like this,'” Parker says, turning his head. “It was just like [a head bobbling] for hours on end, and we were just like, ‘Oh my God.'”

At the time of the interview, the PR windmills were turning with news of Sean Penn's objections that Parker and Stone, through their public statements, were implicitly endorsing U.S presidential election voter apathy. But regardless of how enthusiastic audiences are this weekend about the puppet show, Penn should have no fears of a sequel.

“Not in a million years,” maintains Parker, who pulled double duties as co-writer and director. “Find someone else to make it, because I will not put myself through that again. It's the worst time I've ever had in my life.”

“There was one time on this film that I had fun,” he adds. “I'm not kidding. It has been the worst year of our lives. It was on average, eighteen hours a day, seven days a week, not one day off except for the Fourth of July, and all just super hard and all just left-brain things.”

“It was all problem-solving,” he continues. “There was a lot less creativity and a lot more just, ‘How the fuck do we do this?'”

Ultimately, however, Parker hopes that their biggest problem is finding an appropriate category for their efforts to receive recognition come 2004 awards time. “ Team America should be considered as animated, but the Academy's already trying to say that it doesn't count as animation,” he says. “Which is ridiculous because the definition of animation is bringing something dead to life, and we did that.”

At the very least, that should put Parker and Stone in good standing for a belated AMPAS Lifetime Achievement Award, say around … 2044.

[ source: FILMSTEW ]