ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Let's talk about the meat of the movie.
WAYNE COYNE: What did you think?

See, that's the thing. You're gonna need to help me here.
All right, I'll help you.

From a structural perspective, I understand. We're on Mars. Humans aren't meant to live on Mars. They're miserable. Plus there's no oxygen because someone packed a Santa suit instead of oxygen. And it's Christmas. Santa Claus goes crazy, kills himself, and then this alien played by you shows up, and he's kind of like Jesus, speaking of Jesus. But he also puts on the Santa suit. But also there's a baby. Um, do I get the general idea?
Yeah.

But there was some stuff I did find confusing. So if you could just give me the overarching theme: Goodness trumps miserable-ness?
Well. I'm kind of hoping that I'm gonna find out from you guys. I'm not sure it all has one theme that you can throw it all under. But there's the middle of the movie, where the main character has to retrieve the Santa suit from the dead Santa. Which is an utterly awkward, humiliating scene for him. And I guess part of what it's saying is: That really is the dilemma. Any time anybody tries to insert this idea of optimism, you almost feel like, Oh my God, why am I struggling with this pettiness when there really are serious things going on? But that's the perfect time to create this self-made joy, because if we don't make it, it doesn't happen. We know that the horrible things in life will happen to us. We don't have to help them along. But the wonderful things in life really don't happen unless we sort of ignite them, or go towards them, or embrace them. And I think that's the other side of the sort of gloom and doom and existential despair that is in the mindset of everybody there. I like the idea that there are elements of it that are just simply absurd, and you just get absorbed into it as the movie goes. You're like, Of course there's an alien that's gonna walk around. You just kind of accept it, like, Okay, Wayne, it's your movie.

Right. There was a lot of letting go required.
One thing I don't like about some of the $200 million Hollywood movies is they just try to tell you everything. Dude, look, I know it's a movie. You don't have to tell me how your f---ing machines work. They're not real machines anyway. It's kind of what I always liked about the Star Wars stuff. We just assume of course there's a big universe out there, with all kinds of f---ing weird exotic creatures, and we're gonna run into them. We're not gonna explain them. We're gonna move on. Make it what you want. That's what people do with music, in a way. That's why music has so much power. It really plays while your life is happening to you, and you can forever connect that song with real moments in your life. And it's beautiful. You know, you can see why people invented it. It's f---ing awesome. It's like high-heeled shoes and ice cream. F--- yeah! It wasn't here! Let's invent it!

What was the significance of all the vaginas and dead babies? What on earth was happening in your life that this was a central visual element?
Well, I mean, it is a Christmas movie. Which in regards to what people think about that, is really about some type of birth. Um, and I just think it's cool to look at. Who doesn't want to see gaping vaginal orifices, if they could? It's my movie, I'm doing what I like. I'm not ashamed. [Laughs] I know it's disturbing, but I wouldn't think it's pornographic. I mean, in a sense, I don't think it's as disturbing as watching a real birth. I've never been present at one, but I've seen plenty of videotapes.

What I thought was the most interesting thing about this in a bigger-picture sense is that y'all's shows are these huge kinetic multicolor spectacles. And the movie is black and white, very static, very slowly paced. Is that dichotomy intentional?
Well, it's another experience. I wanted the movie to seem as though it's playing kind of quietly in some isolated corner of your mind. It's not really Christmas, it's not really Mars — it's you, sort of detached from your life. You have to remember: I was born in 1961, so we grew up with a lot of black-and-white TVs, and a lot of it was movies from the '40s, or stuff like The Twilight Zone. And the old Christmas movies. I think anybody that's been around me would know that, to me, Christmas is just part of my life. It's not something you celebrate, it's just something that we live. And to me, that doesn't seem silly. But I can see where, you know, if you're not around us all the time, you could think, You guys are freaks. So there's some beauty in taking away the element of color and design and all that, and getting down to the dreamlike quality of the black and white. I think it's beautiful. To me it doesn't seem bleak or empty. We want you to be quiet, and we want you to go inside yourself. And all these little things that happen to you during the movie, hopefully you carry them with you, and you think about them, and you keep bringing meaning into it.

NEXT PAGE: ''It was a fetus, yeah.''

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