Christmas on Mars Interview

Here's a transcript of an interview with The Flaming Lips' Wayne Coyne, who recently saw his long-awaited film, Christmas on Mars, premiered in New York. He sat down with Pitchfork's Paul Thompson. Enjoy!

During the chat, Wayne explains why the Christmas On Mars that will screen all over the place this fall and hit DVD November 11 from Warner Bros. will kick the ass of any of its previous incarnations. He also discusses the understandably unorthodox way one shoots a movie over an seven-year span largely in the backyard, and just how a nice gentleman like himself came into possession of a "Crack Shack".


Pitchfork: So, tell me about this movie you guys are finally putting out. I guess the big question is, what took you so long?

WC: [Laughing] Probably a combination of things. But I think the worst thing that delayed it was really not anything that was bad. I call it "being interrupted by success." You know, we had done The Soft Bulletin, which came out in 1999, and we knew we that were gonna make another record before too long. But in between this, we were still in this mode of kind of just-- not re-creating what we could be, but kind of doing different things. For the longest time in the Flaming Lips we were like, "Make a record, go on tour. Come back, make another record," and you know, I think, frankly, we were kind of like, "There's more to life than just recording records and going on tour." And we thought that if we wanted to do different stuff, we would. So, I think I thought, "Well, why don't we make a movie."

We had already done a lot of music videos with [director] Brad Beesley. By then we'd almost done 20 videos with him or something, and we'd always talked about how the Flaming Lips should have a movie, like the Ramones have a movie, or the Beatles. Not in a pretentious way, just like, "Yeah! We should have a movie!" We thought, "Well, why not? We'll just sort of make one and see what happens."

And I think it would not be too much of a leap of anybody's imagination that knows us at all to think, "Oh, well they'll have a Christmas movie in outer space. Sure." I think anybody could think, "Of course, they could do that." I'm not saying there wouldn't be other themes that we could explore, but for me to say that we're making a movie called Christmas on Mars, people are like, "Of course! Of course you'll make that!"

We started to make it at the very beginning of 2001. I can tell you this for certain, we had played a New Year's show at the Metro up in Chicago. I was driving home from that show, from Chicago to Oklahoma City, maybe not the next day, but the day after the next day, and I remember me and Michelle [Martin-Coyne, Wayne's wife] talking about, "Well, I guess we'll make this movie." She was like, "All right, I guess you're gonna make that." And I remember on that drive home from Chicago, we put in motion that we were gonna do it.

So anyways, we started to make it in 2001, and we were also starting to record Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, and so we didn't know Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots was even gonna be that, so, as we moved along we thought, "Well, we'll just see how this works out." To our surprise, the Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots record sort of became this bigger thing than we ever thought it would be. Still even is now. I run into people all the time who know that record, and know "Do You Realize??" and know stuff like that, who really don't even know that much about us. And really, that just kept building and building, almost to the point where we-- I don't remember which year, but maybe 2003?-- I'm not sure we shot anything for Christmas on Mars. Not intentionally, I just think we never really got back to being able to fit anything else in the schedule.

So, 2001, 2002: a lot of shooting. 2004, 2005: a lot of shooting. And then 2006 going into 2007 would've been, even making At War with the Mystics and starting to panic about, "Oh my god, are we ever going to finish Christmas on Mars?" And then, even, say, this time last year, as Halloween and Thanksgiving approached, we thought, "Dude, let's not do anything else until we can either decide whether Christmas on Mars can work, and will it work. And if it will work, let's finish it. If it won't work, let's decide." So we spent a couple of months around Christmas and New Year's last year deciding what its fate could be, and then quickly deciding, "Hey! I think it's gonna be good." And then we transferred it to HD, and then threw it all into the super computers and started to panic, and put it into the state that it's in now. So that's my story so far. [laughs]

Pitchfork: I remember years and years ago, being in my dorm room or something like that and seeing some production stills, maybe photos of the sets and of you in a space suit and all these things--

WC: Yeah, yeah. I think there's a trailer still out there that says, "Coming Christmas 2003."

Pitchfork: Yes, I remember that one. Was it frustrating for you guys, all the delays you went through? Or was it good to have that time to work it out that way?

WC: Yeah, when I think of it now, the movie that we could've finished in 2001 would've sucked. The movie that we could've finished in 2002 would've just been a disaster, even into 2003, it would've been very cobbled together, amateuristic stuff. But as we went along, we really did stumble upon some accidental themes, and with the things you could do with computers, and all that sort of stuff just sort of really accelerated into where the stuff that we could do right here at my house became-- you could almost do anything.

That's not to say that there still wasn't a lot of skill and good luck involved in it becoming what it was. We definitely turned a corner around 2004, 2005 where it was like, well damn, now suddenly things that weren't possible even a year ago are now very possible, as far as just being able to shoot CGI and things that were intended to go into the computer and be manipulated. I was waiting for that, in a way. I mean honestly, I kept shooting things, thinking, "Fuck! Why can't we do this or that?" And, you know, always sort of working at just the edge of the technology that we could afford, anyways. The technology was out there, [but] we're not George Lucas, so you know, we had to wait until it came into a way that we could experiment with it ourselves.

So, not really frustrating, because in a sense, I don't think anybody really cares. It's sort of like, "You're making this movie, who really cares?" I know if I would've gone into it, even in 2001, saying, "You know, this is going to take us five years to make," I think I would've, even myself been like, "Ah, it's just fuckin' too long. Who wants to fuck with that?" Even in thinking that it was going to take seven years, if I had told anybody that it was gonna take seven years, they would've said, "Well dude, I'm out of here. I don't wanna wait around that long."

But I think it's kind of like getting fat people to walk 20 miles. If you just do it 100 yards at a time, and nobody knows how far they are going, they can do it! [laughs] And I would include myself in those fat people! You know, you do this little by little and you don't realize your potential, or you don't realize how really rich, and how far you can go. I have to say that a lot of it was just dumb luck that I stumbled upon some things musically. And I stumbled upon some actors, I stumbled upon some themes and some locations that just made it a lot better.

I didn't have a lot of horrible bad luck that made it seem like everyhing that I had shot previously now was sort of obsolete. Everything that I shot I ended up using. And some of the things that I shot in the very beginning are things that don't happen until the very end of the movie, so it's a strange combination of our most primitive junk right next to our most advanced junk. Even in the making of the movie, it's sort of like, "Wow!" In a sense, I like that. I like that you can never really tell where we're at in our evolution. Are we still just this, you know, this fish trying to climb out of the water? Or are we just this giant, advanced species now, that can do anything it wants? It kind of jumps back and forth.

Pitchfork: Is the finished product similar to how you had envisioned it on that drive from Chicago to Oklahoma City?

WC: It is, but I think that would give me way too much credit. I mean, if I was to think of what I could hold in my imagination at any one time and say, "This is what I want to happen," it would be maybe five or six moments throughout the entire movie that I could say, "Damn! That's exactly what I wanted!" But interspersed in between all these moments of clarity and vision, there is just nothing. You can't really imagine every moment of a movie in the same way that you wouldn't expect a novelist to envision every sentence of his 800-page novel.

You just think, well, you know what you're gonna do, and you just-- when it comes down to the very specifics of it, you kind of have to rely on your mode of panic, and how well your imagination and creativity and all that works when you're in that moment. And you know, frankly, I never worried about that. I never worried that as we moved into the very specifics of it, what would it be? I always knew, since I'm the one making the movie, if I didn't like it, I'd just simply build another set and do it again. I was the one doing it all, so I never really worried about if I didn't like it. I just thought, "Well, if I didn't like it, I'll just do it again! Who cares?"

There were a couple of times where I shot things, or started off in one mode and thought, "Well, I really didn't want to do that." I would just change my mind. And frankly, I don't think anybody really cared. The guys who were shooting it with me, and even the guys in the band, they would sort of trust me. No one really demanded that they know too much about what we were doing. They'd be like, "Well, I'm sure it'll work." They'd come in, and we'd shoot for a couple of days and then, you know, I'd put it together on my own time and be like, "Oh okay, that'll work." I didn't have some producer that had given me $10 million, demanding results. I could just kind of do whatever I thought was right, and move in that way. And like I said, I got very lucky that some of the things that I wanted to work did work. Not because I knew what I was doing, just through dumb luck, it just looked beautiful and sounded great and captured some magical mood. And you just have to hope that you get lucky when you do big things like making a movie, or something.

Pitchfork: Is there something in particular that happened through that process that you might not have been expecting that you really liked?

WC: Elements of the Flaming Lips fan base know that Steven [Drozd, Lips drummer] was a heroin addict. A pretty severe heroin addict, right as 2001 turned into 2002. That's right when we were shooting some very intense scenes, and I know for certain that some of the nights-- I mean, we would shoot into the night, almost every time that we shot, because it takes a long time to set up lights and all this sort of junk-- and there would be times where we would be shooting some of his dialogue scenes where he is really-- I don't know what is the proper word for it-- at the height or at the lowest ebb of his heroin addiction. You know, as bad as a heroin addict could be. And really, me expecting almost the next day, for someone to call me and say, you know, "We found Steven dead in his car last night." I mean, that severe.

I think in a sense that there is something-- and I know it sounds ridiculous to speak of that having an impression on the film, or in the mood or whatever-- I see in it now as having influenced the way that he would stand, or the way that I would have him say the lines, or the way that everybody around us would be reacting. Not in a bad way, I mean, because Steven was always charming and always funny and always great to be around, even at the height of his worst moments of heroin addiction. Don't get me wrong-- there were very strange moments that I wouldn't have been able to say, as a dumb film director with costumes and junk like that saying, "Can you be weird?" I don't know if I could've really got that. But the situations would just sometimes be simply weird. And the film would roll and we'd record what people said, and it would turn into this otherworldly moment.

Now that's going bizarrely in one dramatic direction, but there would be other times-- I remember even one of the first scenes I was shooting where I was working at this abandoned cement factory, and I was using the flooded-out stairs that went down to the basement of this cement factory that had been flooded for probably 20 years. All just full of shit and sludge and grease and all kinds of stuff. There was this water that was kind of permanently in there, and I'd snuck in there and started to build this set using this water that was in this basement entrance.

The day before I went to shoot in this water-- I had set up lights and all kinds of generators and all this stuff to make this scene happen-- the fucking owner came in and pumped all this water out of this basement that I was gonna use. He didn't realize that I'd spent a good ten days in there fixing all this up, either. He came in and was like, "I thought you'd already shot that damn thing!" And I was like, "Well, no, I'm just getting ready to." He's like "Well, I'm gonna pump that out today." So in a panic, as soon as he got done pumping it out, I put lights and smoke and stuff into the empty hole, where there was gonna be water. And I think the scene, looking at it now, turned out probably better than it would've ever been if I had shot it in this stupid water. Because it just would have been a disaster with lighting and all that sort of stuff.

So you know, I just took any situation that I had and thought, "Well, all right, let's fuckin' make that work." And I think you have to. I think that everybody who ever goes about making any kind of film in this kind of way, where you can control so little of it, if you're lucky, all those catastrophes that happen, you're able to use them, and just say, "Fuck it! Now the movie can be about that."

But I mean, thematically, it never really veered that far from what I had thought the story could possibly be saying. In that way, like I said, I just got lucky.

Pitchfork: Building on that, I know you crafted a lot of these sets. You built them in your yard and things like that. What has happened to those, over time?

WC: Some of them would just be rooms in my house. We have a big house, and the back part of it was always kind of up for grabs. We never lived in the very back part, but [the Lips] rehearsed, and we would have band gear back there and stuff. So I would just sort of take one of those rooms, empty everything out of it, and use it for a set, and then we'd shoot that scene. Then once I thought, "Well, that went good," I'd just tear that scene down and build another one. Sometimes they would be made and then simply destroyed to make room for the next set.

As time went on, I acquired this bigger building in the back of my house. The old man that lived behind me died, and he had a big work shack, big work garage/building back there, and I was able to build sets in it, but the same thing would happen. I would build some elaborate sets, and as soon as that went well, "All right, tear those down and just start on the next one." There would be a little bit of pain, like, "Damn, we spent a long time doing that," but that really is the nature of movie sets, you just fuckin' make em', shoot it, and tear it down.

There would be some that lived for a couple of years in my back yard, there was a shack in this other section of my back yard, there was this house-- you have to remember, we would buy these properties around us as time went on. In 2001, when we started, I didn't have these properties. But as 2003, 2004 came along, these properties kind of became available, so I bought them and sort of expanded what my back yard could become. One of the houses was this abandoned house that people would buy crack in, so we called it the "Crack Shack". [laughs] It was just a little shack, it had a bathroom and stuff in it but none of it worked, so we just sort of tore all of that out and then built a scene in it that actually Fred Armisen from "Saturday Night Live" is in.

Now, I didn't know it was a crack shack until my oldest brother Tommy-- some of my brothers are in the movie, but my oldest brother isn't in the movie-- came and said, "Wow, this is the Crack Shack!" I asked him, "What do you mean, the 'Crack Shack'?" And he's like, "Well, I used to buy crack in the house up front, and we'd come back to this little shack and we'd smoke crack."

We were doing a lot of renovation on our house, and now there's virtually nothing left except for this big fiberglass gas tank container on one corner of my lot. And then there's, like, tubes and shit like that in my garage, but I don't know if you would readily see a lot of evidence of it now. So some of it, it's about damn time I got rid of it.

But there is a rock climbing facility that I visited the other day when a magazine came into town, and I hadn't been down there since 2006 or the very end of 2005, and some of those sets-- we built those in some very strange corners of this giant rock climbing facility-- and those are still there. You'd be amazed how well glue and duct tape hold up. So for a couple of years now they've been sitting there. So some of those will probably be there for a couple more years.

Pitchfork: What are you doing with all of the space you used to shoot the film? You said you bought up all of these properties...

WC: Well, little by little. We're turning one into a guest house, so when some of the Flaming Lips crew that doesn't live in Oklahoma City come they can just stay here and have access to all of our stuff. It's a nice, big, crazy house that some old people lived in that we were able to buy. Another one of my sort of computer guys lives in it, and the other one is just a kind of big storage/work space for all of the Flaming Lips projects that are going on here, so it's kind of a little bit of a-- I hate to say it-- an art compound. We have a giant, strange house here that's kind of always in different states of already-renovation. It's just an ongoing disaster, I have to say. A lot going on here all the time.

Pitchfork: The special edition of the Christmas on Mars DVD comes with a CD of the soundtrack for the film. How did that soundtrack come together? Was the music made after the shooting? Or was it always involved with the process of making the film?

WC: Well, the music that we ended up using, most of it was really created in the last stages of the filming and the editing. Even, say, a year ago. Now, we thought we had music all along. We would make music sometimes, and actually shoot the scene almost like a music video, to the music that we made. There are bits of that that we did end up using. But a lot of it kept... not getting refined, but we would find a simpler version of the moods that we thought we wanted.

In the beginning, I think we didn't know how many scenes we thought we really wanted. So we made a lot more scenes available for me to use in the editing than I really ended up using. I really only ended up using one main scene that has variations on it throughout the whole film. In the beginning, me and Steven, we sort of-- not in a contrived way-- but we thought, "Oh, let's give these characters some different types of themes, and let's see how they play out as I edit it." But as I got closer into the editing, I really wanted more of just one theme that had different atmospheres about it. And that's what we really ended up doing.

For people who know movie composers, I would say it ended up, for me, feeling like a cross between Bernard Herrmann, who has done Albert Hitchcock and Martin Scorsese, you know, real dense, not fully orchestrated, but strange, dense orchestration. And then stuff that is as elaborate as, say, Igor Stravinsky. Abstract and very ornate and complex and Eastern European-sounding stuff. A lot of people that would come into the studio while we were making it thought that we had somehow sort of got a Russian orchestra, or a Russian composer to make this music. Because some of it feels like it came from Siberia or something, which I thought was perfect. Little by little, as we went, I wanted it to feel like some kind of drug-damaged foreign film that you found in your collection, that was actually made 60 years ago. So as we went, I think me and Steven kept pushing it to the denser, just more exotic strangeness. So that's what we kind of ended up doing. But most of that really happened at the very end of the film.

Pitchfork: So, should the soundtrack be taken as more a score than as a proper new Flaming Lips album?

WC: It's exactly a score. I think people that know Flaming Lips music would hear it and think, "oh, I hear the Flaming Lips in there." I say that because I don't want people to think, "Oh, it's songs about Wayne singing about Christmas and Mars," because it's not like that. It's a dense, emotional score that goes with this sort of strange movie.

[A Warner Bros. rep gets on the phone to let us know that we have one more question left.]

Pitchfork: I wanted to make sure to ask about "Do You Realize??" being nominated for the title of Official Oklahoma Rock Song.

WC: [Laughs] Exactly, yeah!

Pitchfork: [Laughs] Very interested in your thoughts on that.

WC: Well, I do think there is a segment of people in Oklahoma that really do love the Flaming Lips and love this other idea of what someone from Oklahoma could be like. And I think-- and though I haven't tried to be, I haven't pursued it-- I've sort of become the spokesperson for this "other person" who could come from Oklahoma.

I think when people think of music from coming from Oklahoma, they think of Toby Keith or even Garth Brooks or even Woody Guthrie, you know? People think, "Why do we have to just be about the Bible and about football? Why can't we be about something like the Flaming Lips?" And I salute them! I say, "Well, that's great if you want that."

I don't know if it'll really happen, but I'm glad that people feel strongly enough about that type of identity also being associated with Oklahoma that they nominated it. I secretly say to people, "I hope it doesn't win," not because I think it would be bad, but there is a sense that people who really love the song "Do You Realize??"-- not for me, but I know for a lot of people, they're like, "You know, that's my song. And I didn't discover it on a commercial, and I didn't discover it because it was a big popular song. I discovered it because I believe in this idea of what the song is about."

I have a couple letters... I swear, I get letters all of the time; there is a letter sitting on my table right in front of me about people who have used it at this guy's funeral, a young guy who just died in August. A young guy that was at one of our shows that we did over the summer, and they use this song in these very powerful moments in their lives, and I don't think that it being used in a commercial or being used for this state song would diminish that, but in a sense I don't really push for it. I think, "Well, if it becomes that, I'm not gonna stop it." But I'm not saying, "It needs to be that." So that would be my take on it. I know there is a campaign of people who want it to be that, but I'm not really one of them.

Pitchfork: Good to know.

WC: [Laughs] I'm not against it! But I'm not leading that charge. So let it stand like that, however you want to interpret that, that would be my take on it. For better or worse.

Here's the trailer for the film as well!