Trey Parker and Matt Stone talk Team America: World Police

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Coming Soon interviewed Trey Parker and Matt Stone ("South Park"), and asked them about their latest movie "Team America: World Police" which was released by Paramount Pictures. A big budget action adventure movie, completely made with puppets, about a group that fights terrorists all over the globe.

CS: How far back did the idea go to make this movie completely with puppets?

Trey Parker: About two years ago, we were watching Tech TV and they were doing repeats of "Thunderbirds". We both had the same reaction. We remembered the show, not necessarily as Thunderbirds, and we were like "This is really cool!" We talked about how it was a cool thing that everything was handmade, because it was animation, but it was also live action. That was the appealing thing to us being animators. It was a totally different thing we could do and yet use the experience we had in animation. We were going to do a puppet disaster movie, then we started adding real people into it, like Hans Blix and Kim Jong Il and then we just decided to make the whole setting political.

CS: Can you talk a bit about working with the Chiodo Brothers?

Parker: The Chiodo Brothers produced 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 rose to the level that it took to do it. They were heroic really.

CS: How long did it take them to make all of the puppets' animatronic heads?

Parker: A year and a half maybe, because we went through a big R&D (research and development) stage. The technology had changed so much since the Thunderbirds time, the were able to get these really articulated heads that did all these things, but it started to look almost like Chucky.
Matt Stone: And we knew how awesome the Chucky movies were. We didn't want to step on their toes. (laughter)
Parker: On South Park, we just have a big oval and two circles. 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."