They remain the most politically incorrect observers of American society in an often conservative environment. Matt Stone and Trey Parker, creators of TV’s infamous South Park, continue to challenge censorship and social norms as they bring movie audiences Team America: World Police, a satirical look at the United States (and the world) post-9/11 — through the eyes of a group of marionettes, no less.
Team America are a group of superhero-style adventurers who travel the world fighting terrorism and other evils. The movie contains puppets, stirring tongue-in-cheek musical numbers, not to mention the most original and side-splitting sex scene ever put on celluloid.
How long was this idea in gestation, and when did they decide it was appropriate to go ahead with it?
“We have been working on this for two years,” says Parker, “and we turned in the first draft of the script well before the Iraq war.” Stone adds: “It came more out of watching Thunderbirds on TV … We noticed with Thunderbirds that it was funniest when it took itself seriously.”
The studio, says Parker, was all for the idea, and into the “political incorrectness” of it — “They were just confused by the puppet thing. Especially the R-rated puppet thing. Until they started seeing footage they were really … I mean, this movie got shut down and started up again at least three times.”
“But it was never about the politics,” says Stone. “It was just like … we had to fight for it time after time.”
Working with puppets was a new experience for the animators. “We had to learn on the way, unfortunately,” says Stone. “There is no one in LA we could turn to and say, ‘How do you do this?’ There were a lot of people who pretended to know, who would come to us and say, ‘Here is how you do it,’ and we would get to the set and go ‘That didn’t fuckin’ work, it doesn’t work at all’ … Luckily we sort of had this guerrilla filmmaking background, so thank God we knew how to make crappy stupid stuff because that is all you could do.”
Says Parker, “When we were watching it with friends a couple of weeks ago, they would laugh at stuff like Jerry getting into the car, which is really clumsy. I was like, ‘What? We spent so long trying to get it to look okay’, and they went, ‘We wish you had done more like that.’ We worked really hard to get certain things to look right and everyone laughed at them anyway!”
Sean Penn, one of Hollywood’s leading protestors against the Iraq invasion, seems to have taken exception to the portrayal of him in Team America. “Yeah, he did an open memo,” says Parker. “We were baffled by it, because on the one hand the memo appears to be really pissed off, but on the other hand there isn’t anything he could have done to help us more.
“He says he is not mad at all about us using his likeness, which is mainly satire and silliness.” Penn was upset, it seemed, by earlier comments by Parker and Stone, telling uninformed voters in the November US election to simply not vote. “We thought to encourage uninformed voters to go vote isn’t going to help the country that much. If you don’t really know what you want to do, then just don’t vote.
“We always said the campaign was about getting informed,” says Parker. “I think that [the idea of] vote or die is just ridiculous. That is just our personal opinion. We said, ‘If you don’t know anything and if you are just going to vote for George Bush because he is already in office, or if you are going to vote for John Kerry because he is on the cover of Rolling Stone, don’t vote.”
The Penn memo got Team America a lot of publicity. “He did us a gigantic favour.” The other people lampooned in the film (including Michael Moore) don’t seem to care as much. Parker says, “I think they are smart enough — it is obviously satire. Sean Penn really is just humourless.”
How far is too far ? “The sky is the limit,” says Parker. “Talk about any serious issue you want to throw at us [and] we will probably start joking about it within a minute. For us that is the only way we can get to the core of the truth of any issue.
“A lot of people don’t have a sense of humour. They think that if you are joking about something you just don’t care at all. [But] you have to think about something pretty seriously in order to make a joke about it. We put three years of our life into this film so it is not like we don’t care about the issues involved. It is the only way we know to examine them.”
Besides Thunderbirds, Parker and Stone obviously drew on American action movies for their satire in Team America. Stone says, “We watched Top Gun three or four times. We watched a lot of the [‘king of explosions’ producer Jerry] Bruckheimer stuff.”
“Yeah,” says Parker, “we watched Pearl Harbor to get the nuances of the puppets just right … We really used Ben Affleck as a model.”
And what about South Park? Are they planning to keep going with that show?
“We keep surprising ourselves with South Park,” says Parker. “Every season we kind of go in and go bang. I don’t know if we have anything left. And then I think, ‘Last season was one of our best seasons ever.’ A lot of people tell us that it has just gotten better.”
Are they planning any more feature films at this point?
“Never!” says Stone. “Very concrete plans to never do another feature film again.”