MATT STONE AND TREY PARKER, THE CREATORS OF TEAM AMERICA,TALK ABOUT HATRED OF PUPPETRY, THE SEX SCENE, AND WHY THEY’D LIKE TO SEND FLOWERS TO SEAN PENN
Where did this love of puppetry come from?
Matt: It’s not. It’s actually a distinct hatred of puppetry.
Trey: It came from watching some of the “Thunderbirds” stuff and just going, ‘God, it looks so cool! That must be easy!’
Matt: I’m so glad this movie’s done. I can’t even tell you.
No sequel?
Matt: No way. It’s the hardest thing we’ve ever done in our lives.
I’m sure everyone’s asked you this, but the Sean Penn letter at The Drudge Report, have you gotten any other responses from Hollywood in regards to this?
Trey: No, just Sean Penn. Sean Penn was brave enough to send us a letter. It’s so funny that he wrote a little letter. “Let me write a letter. I’m official. This is an official document.” The thing that’s so funny is our lawyer actually called us after the letter hit The Drudge Report because we got it before it hit The Drudge Report. Our lawyer honestly thought that we did it. He’s like, “Did you guys write that letter because it sounds like you wrote it?” I’m like “No. You know that was really Sean Penn.”
Matt: He couldn’t have done us a bigger favor. There’s nothing he could have done to help us out more. So it was just really strange.
Trey: We should send him some flowers.
Matt: Yeah.
Is there something in “Team America” that is on the cutting room floor we’re going see on the DVD?
Matt: Just sex scenes.
Oh, there are more sex scenes?
Trey: The sex scene was a two minute long lovemaking scene.
Matt: The puppets made love.
Trey: It took longer and it was more intimate. The MPAA cut it down to a 45 second long small sex scene.
Matt: The DVD will have the whole sex scene on it, and foreign cuts of the movie too.
How do you think this will go over in Europe?
Trey: Just yesterday we had our Hollywood foreign press and everybody pretty much across the board loved it except for this one German lady, who just hated us.
Matt: Hated us! She was just…nailing us. She was like ‘This is hateful, this is not funny!’
Trey: ‘This is hateful! What if Tim Robbins’ son goes to see his father set on fire?’
Matt: I was really not concerned but I was very interested to see what a foreign audience would see in it. And even the Korean guy, he loved it.
Trey: There was an Egyptian guy there. He liked it.
It’s an interesting take because on one level you show “Team America” blowing up pyramids and doing all these things that the world is criticizing America for doing and I think that’s very clever and very bold of you to do that, yet making them our heroes in the movie.
Matt: Right. That’s the phantom director. If you want to do a Jerry Bruckheimer movie, they have to be the good guys and they have to save the world, so you just do something where they’re bad guys.
Trey: And it doesn’t matter….
In the movie, I was totally with them, and in this I found myself having a hard time. Like, was I really behind Team America? If somebody died in Team America would I really care, whereas if Stan on South Park dies I am really cracked-up.
Trey: Well the only important person that you care about hopefully in this movie is Gary. He’s the person who is supposed to represent all of us.
How many voices do you guys do in the film?
Trey: Well, except for the girls, Spottswoode and Alec Baldwin, we do most of the voices.
Matt: It’s really an added necessity. It’s not because we are out of voices. We have done all the voices we can do on South Park. It’s just that we write so much and when we’re the only ones there at 4 in the morning, we can’t bring all the actors in again, so it’s just out of necessity we do the voices.
Trey: Yep.
Matt: And we’re not that great.
Trey: No.
Kim Jung Ill sounds a lot like Cartman, which I’m sure you’ve heard.
Trey: Yeah, especially when he screams. I think when I start screaming, I sound like Cartman, which is why I have no effect on people when I get mad because they all just start laughing.
Besides the fish and the cats is there anything else that is real that I missed in the film regarding to animals?
Matt: The cockroach was real. There was an actual cockroach wrangler that came and it was so funny because we got to this point in the movie where everything in was so hard and took so long and we’re always cutting pages, going ”There’s no way we’ll ever get this.” Then they came to us and said “Guys, we’re not really going to have the cockroach gag are we?” and I’m like “Yeah we got to.” I’m like “Look at what it says in the script. Your supposed to have a cockroach crawl up a ramp and into the spaceship and have the space ship take off.” We’re like “Yeah, it will be impossible,” but the cockroach wrangler was like “I’ll get that cockroach in that ship.” And they start rolling and the cockroach on the first take goes up the ramp, gets in the ship and the thing closes.
Trey: Easiest thing to shoot in the whole movie, the dumb cockroach. It was insane.
In the shark scene was that catfish or baby shark?
Trey: No, those are baby nurse sharks.
Matt: And one is totally asleep the entire time.
Trey: The thing is nurse sharks hate, hate Swiss diplomats. That’s why we picked them. That’s why we picked nurse sharks, because we knew they would eat Hans Blix.
