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Primer Trailer. Sleekest trailer in recent memory. (The movie is made dirt cheap too.)

In Focus: Puppetry of the Meanest Uncut. "[On Thunderbirds] When I saw it, I was definitely, like, “I remember this.” And Matt was the same way: We both kind of remembered it, but we weren’t fans. And we realized a lot of our friends were in the same boat. And then once we started watching them, we realized the reason was: They couldn’t even hold our interest when we were kids. They’re so expository and slow — just dialogue and dialogue and dialogue, and it took itself really seriously. And now I understand why, of course: It’s easy to have a puppet sit there and talk. [laughs] At first, we were like, “Why didn’t he do so much more?” And now we’re like, “Oh. That’s why.”

It’s funny when someone responds with, “Oh, well they think this is funny?” No, we just think that everything’s funny. We think that “funny” is a great thing and “funny” is a great way to think about things and deal with things... People who don’t have great senses of humor think that comedy is that you just think something’s trite and stupid and you don’t care about it. [They think] if you’re laughing, it’s because what you think you’re laughing at is stupid — because that’s about as far as their sense of humor goes. People don’t realize that it can be something a lot deeper than that.

What we’re sick of — and it’s getting even worse — is: You either like Michael Moore or you wanna f***in’ go overseas and shoot Iraqis. There can’t be a middle ground. Basically, if you think Michael Moore’s full of s***, then you are a super-Christian right-wing whatever. And we’re both just pretty middle-ground guys. We find just as many things to rip on on the left as we do on the right. People on the far left and the far right are the same exact person to us. [laughs]

[On Team America] It’s about “us,” the people who have to sit here and say, “F*** — everyone kind of hates us right now. How do I feel about that?” Really, all the Team America members are people you’re supposed to like; they’re kind of mess-ups and they get it wrong sometimes, but gosh-darn it, they’re tryin’. [laughs]

Janeane Garofalo wouldn’t do that because she’d know it would be hypocritical. The left never really tells you to shut up. The right just likes to think the left is stupid and the left just likes to think the right is evil. [laughs]

The only good thing about “Thunderbirds” was the artistry of the puppets and the look — it’s really what made it “Thunderbirds.” The concept and the characters and the stories are pretty mediocre — but what’s made it last is the time and care that the people who did that show put into the marionettes. I mean, they really formed an entirely new niche of filmmaking — and f***in’ Universal or some idiot somewhere, some exec, decides it has to be a “Spy Kids.” That’s just Hollywood in a nutshell.

The whole movie has that kind of feel. We ask this question about four times a day on the set: “What Would Jerry do?” We’re gonna get bracelets made — like the “What Would Jesus Do?” bracelets. Because we’d ask, “What would Jerry Bruckheimer do?” when we were trying to figure something out. “Jerry would put this kind of song here,” or “Jerry would do this kind of move here.” “This is the way he would introduce the team base.”

We got about five or six shots today on second unit and we were like, “Whoa! That was a pretty good day!” Our third unit got two that they’d set up last night and three or four shots today…. And there are between 1,500 and 2,000 shots in a normal film, I think... It’s really hard to get into a creative groove, because you do one little piece, and then three hours later, you do another little piece, and then later you do another little piece that’s four weeks later — and you just don’t get into a normal groove of “Let’s do a scene! Let’s get crazy!”

Even if this movie wasn’t coming out until next year, we’d edit at night. After the first week of filming, we edited all weekend — and we completely changed the script. Now, not all the plot elements, not all the characters — but we completely changed the tone of the script after the first week of shooting. Because we knew the film had to be kind of serious in tone to be funny, because it’s puppets — but we didn’t even know how serious it had to be. And it wasn’t one of those things where you could go shoot a bunch of film for 12 weeks and start editing, because we would have ended up with a s***ty film. Especially when you’re doing something like this, in a new medium... I don’t understand how anyone could do a film and not want to edit while they’re doing it — because that’s when you know what you’re getting. Shooting, or animating, editing, songwriting, voicing — you do it all at once. I don’t understand how people go, “First we’ll do this, and then we’ll do that, and then we’ll edit, and then we’ll be done!” Because it just doesn’t work that way.

We work Thursday morning until Wednesday morning, basically. We have one day off. We start Thursday, and the hours get longer and longer and longer until we work a 24-hour day on Tuesday in order to get the show done by Wednesday... I think [computer animation] makes it a better show — because Sunday, Monday and Tuesday, we can sit there and completely change it, and decide something isn’t working, and go a whole other route — and put in things that happened the day before. And that’s what makes it exciting and fun for us."