He was honestly like “How dare someone make fun of me?” And what was so funny is that in the movie what we have them do is be “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, you know. It’s funny that we then get this letter and it’s like “PS: And I went to Iraq! I went to Iraq!”
- Trey Parker, on Sean Penn

By Jenny Halper in New York City

When South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker set out to make a “Jerry Bruckheimer movie with marionettes,” they didn’t know what they were getting themselves into. Several years, one hundred sets, and sixty marionette strings later, their raucously funny second full-length film is debuting in movie theaters nationwide.

Featuring inspired music (“Pearl Harbor Sucks”, “America, Fuck Yeah!"), and hilariously unsubtle jabs at almost every facet of American culture, “Team America: World Police” is a wake-up call for anyone who takes politics too seriously. The action-packet film follows a group of would-be heroes who travel the globe, stopping terrorists and saving lives. When a group of Hollywood actors try to thwart their efforts, Team America must work even harder to stop dictator Kim Jong II from reeking havoc with “9/11 times 10,000.”

Stone and Parker recently took time to speak to New York press about their latest endeavor- an exhaustive effort they wrote, directed, performed, and composed songs for, with the support of a talented crew. The talented twosome chatted about everything from why they haven’t responded to Sean Penn’s letter, to why the controversy-causing sex scene was actually the easiest sequence to film. And, for the record, they do sound very much alike.

Q: At what point in the making of the film did you think, "What the fuck were we thinking?"

TREY: Every single day. Literally, as soon as we even did the first test shoot. We had to do a bunch of –in the sort of research and development phase, which was about a year and a half, we did several test shoots and we kept trying to shoot this one scene over and over, which was the first dressing room scene where Gary meets Spottsworth. We tried to just shoot that because we figured it’s just two puppets, they just talk, it should be easy, and the first time we tried to shoot that scene, it took about 28 hours and we never got it, and the second time, it took about 27 hours, and we still never got it. And already, we were already in pretty deep money wise that Paramount had to spend so much money just making these puppets and these sets, and we were like…Oh, 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.

MATT: Trey and I feel like it’s a huge accomplishment that we got anything on film that kind of resembles a movie. It was tough.

Q: Was the puppet sex difficult to shoot? What was cut to get an R-Rating?

TREY: Its about 50 seconds long now and it used to be about 23 or 24 minutes long. (Laughs). It was probably twice as long as it is. And really, it was just a lot of the shots you saw were longer and then it had a few extra special positions of lovemaking that showed they really loved each other. The MPAA decided that you all weren’t adult enough to see that,

MATT: That was the only thing in the whole movie the MPAA had a problem with…the puppet sex.

TREY: Which is pretty funny, because it was one of the easier things to shoot because it was something we’ve all had experience doing as children, taking the GiJoe and the Barbie and doing this…

MATT: All you do is stick them together and it works.

Q: Is there was any reason why you didn’t make the fight scenes not being too perfect?

TREY: We just knew that’s what you get. There was a lot of times where we just sort of had a “Good Enough” policy called it, all the time. Where we would watch and “In this scene they’re supposed to that” and the puppet would kind of flop around and that kind of looks like that..moving on.

MATT: Good enough! Next shot!

Q: What age should people be able to see it?

MATT: 13’s borderline.

TREY: I think you should be 23 or 24. Honestly, we definitely 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’s extremely mature 14 year olds that will probably be alright. That’s why it should be up to an adult. That’s why it should be up to a 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.

Q: Why make Alec Baldwin the President of F.A.G. (Film Actors Guild)?

TREY: Why Alec Baldwin? Why any of them? It was really…

MATT: Alec Baldwin seems the most vocal of the activist liberal Hollywood crowd.

TREY: Especially when we were making…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 us, all of the emotions we go through as Americans. And so, when we were doing another draft on the script, the Iraq war was just starting to escalate, and it was just this insane period that we can all remember where for about two months, you would turn in 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 to 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 was that it was ridiculous. It was funny to us, so we were like “let’s put that in the movie” because it was just hysterical.

MATT: Alec Baldwin seemed to be the guy whose always upfront in that stuff. He gets the most animated and angry about it.

Q: Any feedback from anybody?

MATT: Nobody except for Sean Penn. I think…I know 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

TREY: It’s so stupid.

MATT: 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.

TREY: Sean...It was funny because he seemed angry in the letter and there was not one thing that he could have done to help us anymore. One week before we come out, he sends a letter to the papers and gets us on the front page of anything.

MATT: It was on the Drudge Report for two full days

TREY: Easily made us an extra 10 or 12 million dollars. At first, we were going to write him a letter back and get into it, and we were just like “Hey, he really did us a gigantic favor!”

MATT: We should send him flowers, really.

Q: So you haven’t responded to the letter yet?

MATT: No, I mean in interviews. Now we have six days of interviews after we got the letter so we have 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.

TREY: It was funny because all he did was take something that Matt said in Rolling Stone and take it out of context and then claim, “this is what I’m 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.

MATT: Because he was in the teaser.

TREY: He was honestly like “How dare someone make fun of me?” And what was so funny is that in the movie what we have them do is be “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, you know. It’s funny that we then get this letter and it’s like “PS: And I went to Iraq! I went to Iraq!”

MATT: If you saw the movie, it’s almost exactly what he said in the movie.

Q: People probably think it was a joke...

TREY: People thought we wrote it!

MATT: 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."

Q: How far back did you decide to do this movie with puppets?

TREY: The first idea was “let’s make a puppet movie!” because it was about two years ago and we were watching Tech TV and they were doing repeats of “Thunderbirds”. We both had the same reaction. We remembered the show…we weren’t like “Ooo..that’s Thunderbirds”…and then, as we were watching it, we were like “This is really cool”, the fact that everything was handmade and everything. WE sort of talked about how it was a cool thing because it was animation, but it was live action. That was the appealing thing to us being animators. It was a totally different thing we could do and yet the experience we had in animation. We were going to do a puppet disaster movie and a few different things and then we just started adding real people into it, like Hans Blix and Kim Jung Il and then we just decided to make the whole setting political.

Q: When Jerry Anderson first went to make the puppets, he went to the person who made glass eyes and it was the first time that he made two eyes that were the same. Was that important to you to get the eyes right?

MATT: The eyes are probably the most important thing that those are humanlike. I don’t know where they got the eyes, but I think it’s from a glass eye maker.

TREY: It’s important too because we…unlike…you see some of Jerry Anderson’s later work and he was so obsessed with getting his things to really look human that as he got into the Captain Scarlett age and later, that you would see the eyes get smaller. But we knew, again from South Park, we kind of discovered the secret, which is that it’s all in the eyes, even with animation. The thing about South Park is their eyes are gigantic and that’s what you’re looking at all the time. It’s funny because we’ve been asked to look at other animated shows that are coming out, and they’ll give us a pilot. We don’t even have to listen to the story. We don’t have to see anything. If you see cartoon characters with little beady eyes, it’s not going to work.

MATT: It doesn’t suck you in. It’s the big mouth and big eyes.

TREY: And so we purposely went for really big eyes on these puppets.

MATT: Also, one thing we learned…the Chiodo Brothers knew that we didn’t know is that all of the puppets are slightly cross-eyed, because if they just look straight ahead then they’ll have that sort of dead stare.

TREY: They sort of look like The Simpsons.

MATT: They’re just slightly cross eyed. When we look at each other…when you make eye contact with somebody, you actually do go slightly cross-eyed. That helps them look more lifelike.

Q: This film is coming out before the election, and filmgoers are going to be seeing something anti-Bush but they’re seeing something that goes after everyone...

MATT: As Trey said, we set out to make a Bruckheimer movie with puppets. That really was our central thing. Making that funny meant picking the… more and more serious subject matter made it more and more funny. Having puppets talk about like ‘Oh, my date to the prom didn’ t show up” just isn’t as funny as puppets talking about terrorism and WMVs That’s just way funnier. So it really came from wanting to tell a story from that point of view and less from like… “we have this political agenda and we know what’s right for the world and we’re going to try to tell a story that is going to service that”, which is like what Michael Moore does or those kind of movies, which to us, really is not very honest filmmaking. The honest filmmaking is supposed to be art. Where in the process of making this movie, we were interested in the emotions behind the politics and the emotions of being American the last three years. And that’s Gary’s story is being confused…being proud…being ashamed…being like when he’s like “I don’t want the power. I don’t want the guilt. I don’t want the 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 just has something to do with…it is a uniquely American conundrum that we’ve all had to deal with and we’ll all have to deal with more.

TREY: There was a couple week period where we thought about putting a Bush puppet in it…

MATT: If we did Bush, we were going to do Kerry.

TREY: 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 immediately, the entire movie, 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.

MATT: One thing that Trey and I liked about the film the most is that our own politics may be subconsciously in there but 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.

TREY: 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”

MATT: It’s the secret of South Park

TREY: We just pick a topic. We have the boys, who are just boys in the middle watching two groups go to war over something and in the middle, they’re just like “Hey! Guys! Stop killing each other.” Because there is no clear-cut answer.

MATT: Ultimately, we tried to make the movie—and it’s not in a Hallmark way or a super-saccharine way—but we tried to make the movie optimistic and pro-American, because we basically don’t think the world is as dire as either side says it is.

Q: What did you cut back on? What did you think may be too offensive?

MATT: Really nothing, to tell you the truth. Doing this movie is a little bit different from South Park, just doing this sort of subject matter with terrorism. We were concerned with some of the early draft about how a 9/11 joke would go over, but then 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” and this movie is really just supposed to be a pressure valve for that stuff. So really 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 like offensive. Ultimately, we want people to laugh at the movie so it was just finding that tonal balance.

TREY: The balance, too, for us, is always trying and we do it week to week on South Park too is that we never like to come across as cynical. Because we’re both very optimistic guys and I think that with South Park especially, we try to always have…there is always some kind of underlying sweetness and underlying heart to it all. There is optimism simply in laughing. People that can laugh about…we’ve always said that we are just those kind of people. 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. That 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.

Q: Have you heard from Kim Jong Il yet?

Trey: No, he hasn’t called yet. He didn’t send a letter like Sean.

Matt: If he did send a letter. If it was just him and Sean, that would be the best!

Trey: Apparently, we’re going to wait two weeks after the opening and then we are sending a print to Kim Jong Il.

Q: Did you depict him as the global Eric Cartman?

Trey: Yeah, I mean I think that comes across no matter what. It’s funny because 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.

Matt: Yeah, we noticed that but it wasn’t conscious at the beginning, but he kind of does just turn into Cartman.

Trey: We realized that if Cartman did become the dictator of a country, that’s pretty much who he would get. It would be North Korea. Everyone would starve. He’d be threatening everybody with weapons. He’d be a real shithead.

"Team America: World Police" opens in theaters today