Trey Parker and Matt Stone: The "South Park" Guys, Uncut

WARNING! Team America: World Police is R-rated by the MPAA for "Graphic, crude & sexual humor, violent images & strong language; all involving puppets"

If you are old enough or younger and still allowed to watch the clever, satirical, downright wicked animated TV series "South Park", then you might have also seen the theatrical film South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut. The creators, Matt Stone... cute, glasses and Trey Parker...cute, no glasses, met as film students at the University of Colorado and, after writing and producing several irreverent shorts like Frosty vs. Santa Claus and Cannibal: The Musical, the two created the young residents of the small mountain town of "South Park". The series came to the Comedy Central channel in 1997 and made a huge splash.

The duo enjoyed Gerry Anderson's "Thunderbirds" TV series when they were younger and wanted to produce a remake for the big screen. After this year's live action Thunderbirds was in the works, the partners gave up the quest but retained the idea of using the marionette puppets in a tale of their own. Thus, Team America: World Police was born. You've probably heard your friends talking about "that weird puppet movie" that's coming your way. Well, this isn't your little bro's Saturday morning treat. Be warned, "Team America" is raunchy, in-your-face political satire and very, very R-rated. It's also hilarious. Trey and Matt are kinda raunchy, soft-spoken, friendly and, yes, hilarious.

TeenHollywood: Okay, there is an Osama puppet in the film. Were you ever worried that he might be captured before the movie came out?

Trey: That puppet, it wasn't in the script as Osama. Somehow the puppet guys made it, and it's supposed to be a terrorist. We were like, 'Oh, it kind of looks like Osama.' But it was never intended to be him. It was just intended to be a generic terrorist. But then we were kind of like, 'Well, if people think that it's supposed to be him, that's funny too.'

TeenHollywood: So you tried to avoid having puppets of famous world figures?

Matt: Well, Kim Jong Il (of North Korea) is the only one. Everyone else, whenever we started to make it too 'real world', it started losing the metaphor and it started becoming just really literal and then you weren't allowed to just fill in the blanks. Everything was just spelled out for you.

TeenHollywood: But, you have tons of Hollywood references and puppets. You guys do an hilarious song about Armageddon and Pearl Harbor director Michael Bay. Has he come after you in his Hummer yet?

Matt: (laughing) No. I'm not afraid of Michael Bay.

Trey: People tell me that they see him at the gym all the time and he has a baseball hat. First of all it's a baseball hat so that you won't recognize him, (yeah, right) but his baseball hat says 'Bay' on it. It's the ultimate cheese-ball. That makes me kind of like him actually.

Matt: Some of my good friends are actors. What FAG (Film Actors' Guild) represents in the movie is a personal issue which Trey and I have. You start to think that you know everything about everything and it's very intoxicating to not want to go, 'Well, the thing is about Iraq is..."

Trey: [Actors say] 'Let me tell you what's going on in Iraq. I'll tell you what's going on in Iraq'

Matt: And everyone will print it as though it's gospel. So for us, the ridiculousness really hit home in the build up to the Iraq war when you had Sean Penn on CNN and Janeane Garafalo on 'Crossfire.' It crossed that line from like protest songs or having art comments about world events. It became like, 'What the f--k are you doing on our news shows?'

TeenHollywood: The actor puppet Gary is sort of the everyman character. He gives a raunchy little speech near the end. Does he sort of sum up what you guys think about America and the world situation?

Trey: Yeah. The team is going through all these emotions that we go through being the police of the world which is that you're proud sometimes, you're ashamed sometimes, you're confused about what you're supposed to think when the rest of the world hates you or gets pissed off at you for not doing anything. The end is really just Gary coming to terms with it and it's his little world view. It's that it's not a perfect world, but don't put us in the same category as a—holes. That's about as strong a statement as we wanted to make.

TeenHollywood: So are you taking a certain political stance with this movie?

Trey: No, not really.

Matt: It's funny because what always happens with 'South Park' and we've noticed already has happened with this movie, is that everyone kind of thinks that it's on their side. We always try to do that. We don't start off with an agenda, going, 'Lets make this statement,' because we don't assume to know the answer. We think that this shit is super complicated and the last people to understand global politics is us, right? So basically, our point is this, 'Dude, it's really complicated.' But, it's already turned out that a bunch of people on the right are like, 'Finally, a f---ing Republican thing,' and people on the left are like, 'Oh, finally, you guys have done a great thing.'

Trey: They see what they want to see.

TeenHollywood: Sean Penn wrote a letter protesting you guys using him as a puppet. Did you talk to him about it?

Matt: No. See, we're just confounded because on the one hand it seems like he's pissed off in that letter. On the other hand there is nothing that he could've done to help us out more than to send a letter out to the newspapers and we're on the front page again of everything right now and the Drudge Report, there's a big picture of "Team America" and the Sean Penn letter. There's like there's nothing he could've done to help this movie more.

TeenHollywood: Do you object to some of the rock the vote kind of stuff?

Trey: All we said is if you aren't informed then don't vote and our [film] doesn't have anything to do with right or left.

Matt: Those campaigns should be about get informed and not just go and vote. It shouldn't be "vote or die'.

Trey: P-Diddy has the one where it's like vote or die. I mean, it's all a big publicity thing for him so that he looks like a civic-minded person, but really I do think that it's a threat to democracy to encourage millions of uninformed people to vote.

TeenHollywood: Did you ever want to approach some of these stars and see if they might play along with you guys?

Trey: It was funny to us if they weren't in on the joke. There's a chumminess that we didn't want to have.

TeenHollywood: Which song are you going to submit for the Oscars this year?

Trey: I think "Ronrey" [or Lonely.. a song sung by the Kim Jong Il puppet] --it probably has the best chance.

TeenHollywood: There's a Michael Moore puppet in the film. Did you guys work with Michael Moore on Bowling for Columbine?

Matt: I did an interview for Bowling for Columbine because I'm from Littleton. I grew up in Colorado. He asked me to do it and I agreed to do it. That was the extent of it. I'd met him a couple of times and I did that interview and that's it. But as far as people thinking that we did that animation that's after me in the movie, we didn't do that. A lot of people think we did, but we didn't.

Trey: That's where my personal anger toward Michael Moore came in because everyone was like, 'Oh, you guys did that cartoon? You did that cartoon?' Then I finally saw the movie and it was like, 'F--k. He made it look like we did that cartoon,' because he put it on right after Matt and it kind of looked like our thing. Then I saw the cartoon and it's so anti-American and mean and I was just like, 'People think that I did that?' I was really bummed out. He's a manipulator.

Matt: He put me and that cartoon together to create meaning and that's what he does in all his movies. He tries to make you think something that isn't there. He plays really fast and loose with the rules.

Trey: We've been asked that before. It went back and forth and there were so many different tones and takes on the movie. There were so many different ways to say, 'This is our point of view,' and there was a time when they were going to be more multi-ethnic, the team, and then it was like, 'No, no because Bruckheimer wouldn't do that.' It was this idea that the phantom director was this kind of cheesy. We went back and forth on that and I don't know why. It just ended up being all white people.

TeenHollywood: And you made this film like a big action adventure movie.

Matt: Yeah. We always talk about the phantom director. The biggest character of this movie is the director who's making this movie that actually puts things on the subtitles like 'This is how far Cairo is from America.'

TeenHollywood: There has to be tons of stuff on the cutting room floor.

Trey: The sex scene.

Matt: The sex scene was a two minute long love making scene. It was a love making scene.

Trey: They make love.

Matt: It was longer and the MPAA cut it down to a forty five second long sex scene. So the DVD will have the whole sex scene on it and so will the foreign release. [We're talking sex with puppets here].

TeenHollywood: How do you think the film will do overseas?

Trey: Well, yesterday we had the Hollywood Foreign Press and everyone pretty much across the board loved it except for this one German lady who just hated it. She was railing us. 'What if Tim Robbins' son goes to see his father be set on fire?!' I was actually really, not concerned, but I was very interested to see what a foreign audience will think. Even a Korean guy, he loved it. There was an Egyptian guy there and he liked it too.

TeenHollywood: Well you show the team blowing up the pyramids and stuff in the Arab world but they are supposed to be heroes in the film.

Matt: Again, that's the phantom director. If you want to do a Bruckheimer movie, they have to be the good guys and they have to save the world.

TeenHollywood: You guys enjoyed the original Thunderbirds. Where did that love of puppetry come from?

Trey: It's not love anymore.

Matt: It's a hating now. We were just watching some of the 'Thunderbird' stuff and it looked so cool. We were like, 'That must be easy. Lets do that.' Ugh. I'm so glad that this movie is done.

TeenHollywood: So it was hard to do.. will there be a sequel?

Trey: No way. It's the hardest thing that we've ever done in our life. We have an idea actually that if it does well and Paramount wants to do the sequel, we're going to figure the director that we hate more than anyone in the world which is probably Tom Shadyac (Bruce Almighty, Patch Adams, Ace Ventura) and say, 'Tom, we think that you should do the sequel,' because it is putting someone through absolute hell. It was the worst experience. I'm so glad that it's over.

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Lynn Barker is a Hollywood-based entertainment journalist and produced screenwriter.