“It was the worst time of my entire life”: Why Trey Parker and Matt Stone hated ‘Team America’
While Trey Parker and Matt Stone will eternally be known for their adult animation series South Park, they’ve also handled several other productions that have assured their status as American comedy icons, and sometimes it’s hard to look beyond their raucous 2004 puppetry comedy film Team America: World Police.
As always with Parker and Stone, Team America provides satire of the most provocative kind, with the film serving as a piss-take of the action film genre and the over-patriotism of the United States. Using puppets as characters, Team America tells of a Broadway actor who joins a counterterrorism force to save the world from Kim Jong Il, Islamic terrorists and a swathe of famous Hollywood actors.
However, despite the film’s notoriety and commercial and critical success, both Parker and Stone seem to hate the film – or at least the ordeal they both had to go through in getting it made. After all, using puppetry and miniature effects for a 98-minute movie was no short task, and it resulted in the pair feeling completely worn out.
In fact, Stone once told The Sun (via The Guardian), “It was the worst time of my entire life – I never want to see a puppet again.” According to the South Park legend, Team America ruined “all the serious relationships” in his life. “You just become a different person,” he said, “get completely stressed out and don’t pay attention to anything else.”
Stone and Parker’s routine quickly became a working day of 20 hours, aided by coffee and sleeping pills. Yes, the duo had their movie at the end of the gruelling process, but Stone himself said he felt “like a piece of shit”, noting, “None of your friends like you, your parents don’t like you.”
“I don’t know why we thought doing a puppet movie would be fun because it was terrible,” Stone added. As always, though, there’s an element of humour in Stone, and even the torture of Team America couldn’t stop him from jokingly putting the blame on puppets themselves, who “couldn’t do anything at all”.
Parker had also spoken of the mammoth task that lay ahead of him and his creative partner when they took on their puppet comedy.” We went to shoot the test scene thinking, ‘Well, we’ll spend a few hours shooting, and we’ll shoot it a couple ways,'” he once told Entertainment Weekly.” After spending 18 hours, we had barely gotten one version of the scene.”
What initially looked like a fun project quickly turned into one of the worst experiences of Parker and Stone’s lives. In order to get each puppet to move and speak, the duo had to hire 35 puppeteers amongst an overall crew of around 200 people. Even with the added help, though, Parker admitted that after just one week of shooting, he would have done “anything”, even watching his own mother die, “to get out of it.”
Even once the film was finished, Parker and Stone had to battle with the Motion Picture Association of America in order to get it ratified for theatrical release. Due to an explicit sex scene, the rating finally came back at an NC-17. Finally, Team America was completed, and when it was released in October 2004, it was forever written into the excellent back catalogue of the South Park and The Book of Mormon writers, though it was easily their most difficult undertaking.
