Team America *Contains Dialogue Spoilers

[brockly]

this sounds great. unfortunately i wont be able to see it in the theatre until march. australia sux

[Ghostboy]

It was indeed brilliant. Brilliantly hilarious. I don't think it's as complex as JB makes it out to be, though...I guess you could look at it on multiple levels, but it seemed to me to simply be an exagerated Bruckheimer film in which the stupid patriotism often depicted in such production is carried to a logical conclusion (everyone getting pissed when America saves the day by fucking everything up). The actor stuff was just making fun of all the self-serious Hollywood pundits, who I'm sure do get on the nerves of some people  -- I don't mind them, and I approve of actors useing their position to speak up politically, but I understand completely where Stone and Parker are coming from and found it hilarious.  Sean Penn's letter only proved their point.

And while the satire is great and astute, I can't stop laughing about (SPOILER) the oral sex and the vomit. Call me lowbrow, but those moments, particularly the former, were something else.

My only problem with it was that Bush and Cheney weren't shown with all the other world delegates. While America is nicely slaughtered on the whole, I felt it would only have been fair for them to be there.

Also, the head of Team America is named Spottiswoode, and I just KNOW  Matt and Trey were watching Tomorrow Never Dies, directed by Roger Spottiswoode, and marveled at how goofy that name is, because I did the same thing myself.

[ᾦɐļᵲʊʂ]

Where the hell do I start?

This movie was amazing.

The vomit was hilarious.  The whole "Promise me you can't die."  "You know I can't do that..." "I'd make love to you right now if you were to promise me that."  "I promise I'll never die." and of course, the following scene.  The theme song, the Pearl Harbor love song, this movie was damn near flawless comedy.  The fight at the beginning where they just rub the puppets together and then one falls down.  Hilarious.  The whole LEASE take-off.

I tried to just pick my favorite part and put it in white, but there are still more, and I practically named the whole movie.

I highly recommend this film.

[picolas]

http://imdb.com/name/nm0453535/

[MacGuffin]

'Team America' Takes on the World



Sometimes Trey Parker and Matt Stone are trying to make you laugh, and sometimes they're trying to make you squirm. The "South Park" creators do all of the above with their new film, "Team America: World Police," which narrowly avoided an NC-17 rating by trimming a hardcore sex scene between puppets.

"Team America" is inspired by the old "Thunderbirds" puppet sci-fi adventure TV show. Parker and Stone, who delight in pushing the limits of both comedy and taste, borrow the format to mock the Iraq war and Hollywood blow-up epics like "Con Air" and "Armageddon."

The movie follows a squad of marionette heroes who fight terrorists (never mind that they reduce Paris and Cairo to ruins in the process). They recruit a Broadway actor, Gary, as an undercover operative. But Gary isn't always on board with their aggressive ways yet he's tired of Hollywood liberal whining and, hey, somebody's got to stop North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il from destroying the world, right?

Parker and Stone had puppets made of President Bush and John Kerry, but ultimately cut both characters from the movie, saying they didn't want it to be blatantly political.

"For us, it's a way to think about all the emotions behind the politics," Stone said. "It's not so much, 'Here's what we should do. ...' Gary is supposed to (represent) all the emotions that we've felt over the past couple years (about America's role in the world.) Are you proud? Are you ashamed? It's probably a combination of both."

Parker and Stone don't feel they have much to add to political discourse in general.

"I think the only thing we do assert is that it's fine and good for everyone to hate us (Americans) and think we're (jerks), but there is a big difference between (jerks) and (psychos)" like Osama Bin Laden, Parker said substituting profane body-part slang for his descriptions.

Body parts were conspicuously absent from the puppet sex scene the marionettes have only a network of joints and hinges awkwardly bumping and grinding. After the scene was cut, the movie ratings board gave "Team America" an R.

"It's still funny," Stone said if the scene, "but nowhere near what it was. The scene itself is so funny and innocuous. It's not mean-spirited. It's not edgy. It's just what kids do. We all did that with dolls growing up."

Old college friends Parker and Stone are mostly tickled by what they see as the silliness of the ratings board decision. Parker points out that the pervasive gruesome violence such as the gory, bullet-riddled bodies of puppet celebrities didn't raise any eyebrows.

The old phrase "equal opportunity offender" applies generously to this movie, which attempts to place the world's population in three groups: sissies represented by Hollywood peaceniks like Tim Robbins and Michael Moore; jerks played by hard-charging "My country, right or wrong" nationalists on the "world police" team; and psychos terrorists, dictators and global criminals.

In "Team America," jerks need the sissies to keep them in line, and sissies need the jerks to protect them from psychos.

Overall, the movie is just meant to provoke people, regardless of their politics.

"That's much more interesting than, 'Here's what we think!'" Stone said. "We don't know anything about foreign policy or anything. We don't know anything about anything."

"We make cartoons," Parker added, with mock feebleness.

So far only one celebrity they lampoon has lashed back: Sean Penn, who entered their comedic cross-hairs when he made a trip to Iraq and then published ads denouncing the then-impending American attack.

In the letter, the Oscar-winning "Mystic River" star said he didn't "mind being of service, in satire and silliness" as a character who becomes a pawn of North Korea's super-villain, but took issue with Stone on another matter.

In a recent Rolling Stone magazine article, Stone mocked hip-hop mogul P. Diddy's "Vote or Die" registration campaign, saying he didn't think "uninformed" people should be encouraged to go to the polls.

"It's all well to joke about me or whomever you choose," Penn wrote. "Not so well, to encourage irresponsibility that will ultimately lead to the disembowelment, mutilation, exploitation, and death of innocent people throughout the world."

Stone claimed Penn misunderstood him.

"My whole thing is I just wish uninformed people would just stay home," Stone told The Associated Press. "If you don't know who you're going to vote for, there's no shame in not voting."

Parker said he was just grateful for the free press Penn gave them by sending his letter to the Los Angeles Times: "It's really funny because in the letter he's really unhappy with us, and yet he couldn't have done anything better for the movie. Now we're on the front page again!"

They reserve their harshest treatment, however, for "Fahrenheit 9/11" filmmaker Michael Moore but their disdain is as much personal as political.

Stone, who is from Littleton, Colo., agreed to talk about his hometown and the infamous high-school shooting there for Moore's anti-gun documentary "Bowling for Columbine."

"We have a very specific beef with Michael Moore," Stone said. "I did an interview, and he didn't mischaracterize me or anything I said in the movie. But what he did do was put this cartoon right after me that made it look like we did that cartoon."

Parker and Stone still harbor hard feelings about that sassy, anti-gun cartoon because they feel it was done in "South Park" style. They believe the proximity to Stone's interview misled some fans into thinking they had done the cartoon, even though Moore never said they did.

For this slight, Moore's punishment in "Team America" is extreme: he's depicted as a gibbering, overweight, hot-dog eating buffoon who straps explosives to his body to blow up the American do-gooders. The puppet was reportedly stuffed with ham when it blew.

Cruel? Certainly. Unfair? Yes.

But the "South Park" guys like to make you squirm.

[hedwig]

http://imdb.com/name/nm0453535/

My love/hate relationship with IMDB has reached an all time high.

[hedwig]

"We have a very specific beef with Michael Moore," Stone said. "I did an interview, and he didn't mischaracterize me or anything I said in the movie. But what he did do was put this cartoon right after me that made it look like we did that cartoon."

Parker and Stone still harbor hard feelings about that sassy, anti-gun cartoon because they feel it was done in "South Park" style. They believe the proximity to Stone's interview misled some fans into thinking they had done the cartoon, even though Moore never said they did.

For this slight, Moore's punishment in "Team America" is extreme: he's depicted as a gibbering, overweight, hot-dog eating buffoon who straps explosives to his body to blow up the American do-gooders. The puppet was reportedly stuffed with ham when it blew.

Cruel? Certainly. Unfair? Yes.

But the "South Park" guys like to make you squirm.[/size]

That's a stupid reason to make him the most extreme target -- but I'm sure it's hilarious anyway. (I like the ham thing!)

[Jeremy Blackman]

That's a stupid reason to make him the most extreme target -- but I'm sure it's hilarious anyway. (I like the ham thing!)

Oh, it's not that bad. (MINOR SPOILER) The worst they do is make him look like a fat slob who goes around like a crazy person and eats hot dogs (and I'm not sure he would disagree with that).

[hedwig]

That's a stupid reason to make him the most extreme target -- but I'm sure it's hilarious anyway. (I like the ham thing!)

Oh, it's not that bad. (MINOR SPOILER) The worst they do is make him look like a fat slob who goes around like a crazy person and eats hot dogs (and I'm not sure he would disagree with that).

What about the bomb-strapped-to-himself, thing?

[Jeremy Blackman]

(MINOR SPOILERS)

I actually thought that was absurd enough that it wasn't offensive. Like the fact that the terrorists say nothing but "durka durka Allah jihad."

[hedwig]

(MINOR SPOILERS)

I actually thought that was absurd enough that it wasn't offensive. Like the fact that the terrorists say nothing but "durka durka Allah jihad."

The latter is a satirical comment on the stereotypes of muslims since 9/11, or someshit.

The Michael Moore bomb-strap thing sounds a little different -- 'cause they have "very special beef" with him.

(Sorry for this fanboy crap...)

I haven't seen this movie yet but once I do, I'm sure I'll love it. I don't like South Park but I LOVE the concept, plot, etc. and the trailer is hilarious.

And Matt Stone DID offer some intelligent comments in BFC. And Trey Parker is a brilliant, hilarious, cool kind of guy. So, hey.

You know?

EDIT -- Also, in that interview a few pages back Stone says, "I'm just unsure of how real that 'news' was" or something to that effect -- about F911.

[matt35mm]

'cause they have "very special beef" with him.

(Homer style):
Mmm.  Very special beef.  (drools)

[Fernando]

Good interview at Latino Review. Really long.

At what point in the making of the film did you say, what the hell were we thinking?

TREY: Every single day. Literally, as soon as we even did the first test shoot. We had to do a 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 Spottswoode. 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. 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.

What age is appropriate to see the movie?

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 and 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.

What did you cut back on? What did you think was too offensive to leave in the film?

MATT: Really nothing, to tell you the truth. Doing this movie is a little bit different from South Park. 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. 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 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 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 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. I think that's why people respond to it. And there are 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. It's totally not true.

Talk about working with the Chiodos, the guys that designed the puppets.

MATT: The Chiodos are awesome.

TREY: The Chiodo Brothers, they produced the puppets, 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 ran and rose to the level that it took to do it. They were heroic really.

Was it difficult to shoot the puppet sex scenes? What did you cut to avoid the NC-17 rating?

TREY: It's about 50 seconds long now and it used to be about 23 or 24 minutes long. 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 G.I. JOE and the Barbie and doing it.

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

When did you guys decide to make this film with puppets?

TREY: It was about two years ago and we were watching Tech TV. They were doing repeats of "Thunderbirds". We both had the same reaction. We remembered the show. 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. We were going to do a puppet disaster movie and a few different things. 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.

How long did it take to make all the animatronic heads?

TREY: A year and a half maybe. Because we went through a big stage of R&D (research and development) where the first heads came back and because the technology had changed so much since the Thunderbirds time, servos have gotten smaller. They were able to really get these articulated heads that did all these things and we kind of went "No, no...Pull it back", because it started to look like Chucky almost.

MATT: And we knew how awesome the Chucky movies were. We didn't want to step on their toes.

TREY: But we knew from South Park...On South Park, we just have a big oval and two circles and 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."

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 are humanlike. I don't know where they got the eyes, but I think it's from a glass eye maker.

TREY: We knew, again from South Park, 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 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 Simpson's.

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.

Why make Alec Baldwin be the leader of the actors?

TREY: Why Alec Baldwin? Why any of them?

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

TREY: 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 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 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 had, 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 who's always upfront in that stuff. He gets the most animated and angry about it.

Any feedback from any of the actors?

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: 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 everything.

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.

So you haven't responded to it?

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.

I thought it was a joke, a publicity ploy.

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."

A lot of people think that you guys are making a statement about the Iraq War with the film, but that's not the focus at all.

MATT: We set out to make a Bruckheimer movie with puppets. That really was our central thing. Making that funny meant picking the more serious subject matter. 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 WMD's. That's just way funnier. So it really came from wanting to tell a story from that point of view and less from "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. 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, being confused, being proud, being ashamed, like when he says "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 a uniquely American conundrum.

TREY: There was a two 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 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. What we should be doing is what we always end up doing, 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.

The music was brilliant. Who composes the music?

MATT: Trey does.

TREY: I do the songs. Of course, as soon as we had the idea, after the South Park movie, we swore we'd never do another movie again. Then the idea of a puppet movie seemed too good to not do. 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 Armageddon is so close to being a puppet movie anyway. Why not go all the way with it?

MATT: It would be great as a puppet movie!

TREY: We started watching these Bruckheimer movies and we were like "You know what? These are musicals!" Bruckheimer really does do that, instead of having these characters break out into a song, he gets Aerosmith to do a song. Almost to the minute, every twelve or thirteen minutes, there is a song. I can still make the music, but I'm going to write those kinds of songs. Hit those movie moment songs, where there's going to be the "he has to make the big decision song", which became the country song, "the love scene song", "the road back song", which is the Pearl Harbor song, obviously, the "montage song". I just wrote them like that. The Kim Jung 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.

Is Kim Jung Il 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.

South Park is a show that Comedy central uses to launch other shows, like the Chapelle Show. How does that make you guys feel and have you seen Drawn Together?

TREY: I haven't seen Drawn Together yet, but this last year on South Park was so great because the Chapelle Show is so good. That show had so many brilliant moments. It's so good, and this sounds weird, to feel actually proud to be on Comedy central. For the last year there was a solid hour of television. It helped our ratings.

MATT: It brought our show up too. We thought, okay, there's this really good show on after us. We better make our show good too.

TREY: With Kid Notorious and those kinds of shows, you always feel like you're dragging dead weight. They've launched every new show for the last eight years off the back of South Park. This last year with Dave Chapelle was so great. For us, it's not a competition thing; we'd love to have more great shows on the network. It helps us.

A lot of people I've spoken to believe that this has been one of the strongest seasons for South Park, particularly citing Passion of the Jew?

MATT: It's funny, but we actually both think that Passion of the Jew was the worst show of last season. We both think that last season was our best in terms of writing, but Passion of the Jew was the worst.

TREY: Passion of the Jew, writing wise, is not a solid show. It doesn't make a lot of sense.

MATT: The first episode of last season, the one where the boys all become ninjas and it becomes Japanese anime. We were really proud of that show.

TREY: I think that was one of my favorite shows we've done. I felt that was really an incredible show. I was proud of that show.

How do you do serious satire? Make dramatic dialogue so funny?

TREY: How do actors in Bruckheimer movies read those lines? All those lines come from that kind of thing, where you're watching it and think, how could you possibly say that with a straight face.

MATT: Just watching Pearl Harbor and laughing, it's the most brilliant comedy ever written. We got to do this. How can we elevate to this. We spent a long time figuring out what the right tone would be for this movie. 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 nuance out of a puppet. Then as soon as you have the puppet say the most serious line, then you were laughing. We quickly were every day 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.

TREY: Both of us have the same favorite scene in the movie, which is when Gary and Lisa are in their little ship on their way to Cairo. Its right after the first time that "America, Fuck Yeah" plays. Basically, Gary's sitting there in all this crappy make-up and the whole exchange is, "Gary, are you okay? I was thinking if I mess up a line on stage it's a bad review, if I mess up here, we're all dead." That is the single funniest line to us. She says, "I believe in you Gary, belief is all we have". Obviously, if you read that in a script, Paramount is going, "we thought this was a comedy. Where's the joke in that?" Yet when you see those puppets say those lines, to us it's the funniest scene.

MATT: It was a big lesson in scoring too. You could put a comedy score behind it (starts humming) and it would ruin it. We would put a scene together and think, wow, this doesn't look like much of anything. Then we would take the soundtrack to Armageddon and put it beneath it. All of a sudden, it totally worked. The underlying conceit, the underlying joke of the movie is what you're seeing and what they're talking about versus the score totally doesn't make sense.

Will you guys ever make a sequel to Team America?

MATT: I will never even go near a puppet again.

TREY: This was the most horrible experience.

MATT: When I have kids and take them to the park, if some guy's doing a puppet show I'm setting him on fire.

Are you guys dicks, assholes, or pussies?

TREY: I don't know, sometimes I feel like a dick.

MATT: I think we're like a lot of people. We're that thing in between them all.

TREY: The taint...we're hermaphroditic.

You mentioned that you don't want to get involved in politics. Why comment on P. Diddy and say that his voting campaign is silly?

TREY: We didn't mean it. It has nothing to do with the movie. David Wild, 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...

MATT: We were drunk.

TREY: We were drunk. I honestly believe it, but to encourage uninformed people to go vote, he's 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. I don't think that anyone should pat somebody on the back for a vote or die campaign.

MATT: 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.

TREY: 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 you 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 are all kinds of political science about having literacy or civic tests before you're able to vote. I don't know about that, and 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.

MATT: Vote if you want, that's okay too, but don't have a group pressure you into voting. If you really don't know, and 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.

TREY: You shouldn't be shamed into voting.

MATT: Or threatened.

Do you watch the debates?

MATT: Yeah, we watch the debates. They're screamingly funny.

TREY: I haven't seen them. We've been so busy until the last two days.

MATT: We finished the movie last Thursday.

TREY: We were doing the Dennis Miller show last week and they had a live shot of Mount St. Helens and on the other channel the vice-presidential debate. We watched Mount St. Helens, it was so much better.

Is the project with the Avenue Q guys still happening and what is that?

TREY: We just talked about doing something with them and that was a year ago.

MATT: We keep talking on the phone and sending e-mails back and forth. It just so happened that we had this one project that we'd both wanted to do.

TREY: I went out to breakfast with the Avenue Q guys. They're asking us, "What should we do?" Like we're the sages, which is an amazing position to be in. I said "do whatever you want, do what you want to do." They were like, "we want to do a musical about the founding of the Mormon Church." That stopped me in my tracks, because literally in the first six months of meeting in college we talked about the exact same thing. We've loosely been talking about doing it sometime in the future.

MATT: We're taking a big vacation first.

TREY: Those guys have tons of stuff to do anyway.

The only criticism I've heard of your work is that you're not subtle in your satire. Team America: World Police falls under that category. Have you guys ever planned to do more subtle work?

MATT: We don't get off on subtlety. We're not subtle guys.

TREY: 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.

Will you ever release a DVDA album?

TREY: It is bullshit that we have not been able to get our band together. We're too busy doing all this other stuff.

[©brad]

i kicked up the font size a notch. hard to see 'n all. hope u don't mind.

[Fernando]

i kicked up the font size a notch. hard to see 'n all. hope u don't mind.

It all depends, do you plan to run away from xixax again?