by MATTHEW HAYS

The Toronto Film Festival was a fitting place for Trey Parker and Matt Stone to sit down to pump up their latest project, Team America: World Police.

Fitting, because the event has become entirely celebrity soaked, and Parker and Stone have made a career of trashing and mocking the excesses of American celebrity culture. But the all-puppet movie - which takes on the politics of the war in Iraq and Michael Moore, among many others - wasn't even part of the official proceedings: the perils of puppet moviemaking had proven so challenging that, as of four weeks ago, Parker and Stone's film wasn't even complete. As such, the two were crashing the Toronto party, showing off bits and pieces of their movie rather than a completed feature.

But what they did have to show was more than tantalizing: in private rooms in a swank downtown hotel, a 20 minute reel was screened. Probably by no mere coincidence, the nuttiness unravelled on Sept. 11, the three-year anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

And the reel was as utterly hilarious as the conceptual description would lead you to believe. In Team America, Parker and Stone imagine a world not so far away from our own: when the U.S. faces a growing terrorist threat in the guise of rogues gaining access to weapons of mass destruction, they enlist Team America, a patriotic five-person posse of agents hell-bent on destroying anything that gets in the way of their war on terror.

But don't look to Team America for a sure footing in the war on terror: these agents are bunglers who can't quite hit the broad side of a barn, destroying the Eiffel Tower in a clumsy attempt to take out a weapons-of-mass-destruction-toting Arab terrorist (in a moment that is surely meant to be shorthand for the entire war in Iraq). As in South Park, the fictional characters Parker and Stone have dreamt up interact with real-life political leaders and celebrities, including North Korea's Kim Jong-il and weapons inspector Hans Blix.

But Team America's crucial and winning central conceit is a stroke of comic genius: Parker and Stone's war on terror is being fought by a cast of Thunderbirds-style puppets. Add a healthy dose of studio action-movie stupidity - a dart aimed squarely at the bombastic idiosyncrasies of Jerry Bruckheimer movies - and plenty of running political commentary, and you've got a Parker-Stone special with, as the old adage goes, something to offend everyone.

Retro inspiration

Parker and Stone say they were hit with the inspiration while channel-surfing together over two years ago. They came across an episode of Thunderbirds, Gerry Anderson's '60s cult oddity in which a team of puppets ("filmed in Supermarionation!") navigated their way through the world of international espionage.

"We were sitting there going, ‘I remember this show,'" recalls Parker, pulling his feet up onto the couch he's sitting on. "We were saying, ‘Good lord, this is awful!' It's too bad the scripts were so bad because the puppets are really cool. Then we decided we were going to do a Bruckheimer movie with puppets. The plan was to do a disaster movie, like Armageddon or The Day After Tomorrow, which we read the script for and thought was the perfect puppet movie."

"We were going to do a global-warming episode of South Park," furthers Stone. "And we thought, ‘Can you imagine The Day After Tomorrow with puppets? What a perfect movie!' It had to be the worst script of all time."

The two then contacted their agents with the idea of making a Thunderbirds movie when they received the bad news: a Thunderbirds feature was already in the works, albeit this time the puppets would be replaced with human actors (now there's a concept!). "When we heard they were making it without puppets, we were like, ‘What??'" says Parker. "Just because the stories were so good? We decided to do the puppets, but fighting terrorism."

The movie looks like tons of fun. There are loads of the expected sight gags, martial arts fight sequences (puppet strings in full view), ludicrous musical numbers (Kim Jong-il belts out a solo) and the most explicit big-screen puppet-on-puppet sex scene since Bride of Chucky. But Parker and Stone confirm the actual making of the film has been laborious and exhausting.

"The producers said yes to this right away," says Parker, adding that nothing in their original script was yanked by Paramount execs. "And they thought this would be super-duper cheap because it's a puppet movie. But it was so hard making this movie! Doing things with puppets is way harder than you'd think. We could only get seven or eight shots done a day, if we were lucky. We had three units running at once. There was an incredible attention to detail, each 22-inch puppet had to be outfitted specifically for the film."

"We're taking some time off after this, for sure," says Stone. "We've been at Team America and South Park for eight months solid."

True to form, Parker and Stone's script is a tribute to inanity, and they pursue a take-no-prisoners approach to comedy. The film begins as Team America seeks to recruit a new member, someone who would be able to go undercover in the Middle East and infiltrate Islamic extremist terrorists. They go to the first place that springs to mind: Broadway, where they yank the young and good-looking Gary from his leading role in a musical to help them fight the bad guys. And while there are no gay puppets per se ("After Will & Grace and Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, we were sick of gay," says Stone), Stone and Parker call the legion of anti-war bleeding-heart actors the Film Actors Guild, rendering its acronym FAG.

Offend one, offend all

While Team America can be read as a skewering of brazen Bush idiocy, the inclusion of FAG means liberal actors also come under fire (there are puppets of Sean Penn, Susan Sarandon and Michael Moore). But it's impossible not to think of politics as the puppets play war. The movie is coming out, after all, on Oct. 15, just over two weeks before the U.S. presidential election takes place. But don't look for anti-Bush bromides in the style of Michael Moore (Fahrenheit 9/11) or John Sayles (Silver City). Parker and Stone admit to watching the news, but do not consider themselves foreign-policy experts - and they insist they hope to offend everyone equally.

Team America, naturally, evoked responses long before anyone had even seen it. The American right was the first to rise to the bait, with a White House advisor telling Matt Drudge that he was horrified Parker and Stone would make comic fodder out of the sacred war on terror. "We're not surprised the attacks came from the right first," says Parker. "They're good at that."

Parker and Stone attempt to convey the notion that they're non-partisan comic writers, taking no prisoners and respecting no institution or person. When pressed, though, they concede they're not so wild about Bush's handling of international affairs. Isn't it a fair read of their work that they are Democrats and not Republicans?

"That's a good read," Parker responds, reluctantly. "We don't like Bush, but that's not what the movie is," adds Stone. The two had toyed with the idea of including puppets of Bush and Kerry, but pulled back after a brief tryout. "Including a Bush puppet brought it to this very literal level," explains Stone. "It made it more like a Saturday Night Live sketch. Which is fine, those can be funny, but we don't actually even think of this as political, but rather a good story." Parker interrupts: "We'd like to think that our movie is a lot bigger than Bush and this election. As much as this is about the war on terror, the concept of America as the world police has been around a lot longer."

"The movie itself, and South Park too, ridicules celebrities who talk about things they don't really know about, and something we do in the movie is ridicule activist actors," says Stone. "That's why we're intentionally not injecting our own opinions into the interviews or the movie because to do so would be hypocritical. Why does who we vote for have anything to do with this movie?"

Because, I venture, as Americans you have responsibility as your country has launched a war that has killed over 10,000 Iraqis, as well as over 1,000 Americans.

"But we're filmmakers," counters Stone. I press on: as such, it could be argued, you have an even bigger responsibility because of your influence.

"At the end of the day, our job is to make people laugh," responds Parker. "That's what people pay us to do, and that's what we're good at."

Adds Stone: "The idea behind the movie is what it's like to get into the emotions of what it's like to be an American over the past three years. Actually the whole idea of the world police has been around for a long, long time, long before Bush. It is what Americans have to deal with, and Canadians don't. There is no Team Canada, except in hockey. We [the filmmakers] have our own ideas, for sure, and if we have a few beers we go off on them.

"But this film is about the uniquely American conundrum: the world hates us, and then when we don't show up and save the day, they hate us even more. Unfortunately, it's both a curse and a blessing. But the humour always comes first, then the politics. In fact, we'll change our political point of view if that makes the story better."

"We're making fun of everyone," concludes Parker. "We're making fun of action movies, the idea of a world police, Republicans, Democrats, and the terrorists themselves. Everyone looks pretty silly. And everyone's a puppet, so it's fitting."

Team America: World Police opens Friday, Oct. 15

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