ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: This isn't going to be a theatrical release — you want to play it at festivals. Is that because you want to be there to set up the Dolby surround sound personally?
WAYNE COYNE: Well, I want to do this for the beginning life of it, anyway. I know by Christmas we're gonna put it out on DVD, but especially for die-hard fans — I do talk to kids who are like, ''Gosh, I've just been waiting so long for this'' — to not present it to them first, have their opinions shape it, to me wouldn't be right.
And will you mind if it turns into a late-night dorm cult classic? A Mystery Science Theater 3000 thing?
I think it would be perfect for that. I really made it in the spirit of when me and my older brothers would go to see midnight movies when we were teenagers. I saw Pink Floyd's Live at Pompeii in a theater just two blocks from my house. We sat in the theater and smoked pot, and walked out thinking, F---, life is perfect for us. You can carry 1,000 movies on your iPod and see them any time you want, but a communal, intense experience, everybody experiencing the same thing at the same time — it's always gonna be a powerful thing. Sitting in a room, watching this thing, and then when you leave it's 2 or 3 in the morning and you're like, What the f--- has just happened to us? Did we get absorbed into it? Or did it absorb into us? Do whatever you want. It's your time to have an intense freakout. There's no restrictions on this. This is as free as art can be made. I don't know. What did you think?
Well, there was a point — you know, I come in all intellectual. I think the point where Steven walked in on the guy who was watching the dental videos, and he was eating a sausage that turned into a dead baby?
It was a fetus, yeah.
I think that was the moment that I started laughing. And from that point on it was like, You know what? F---. Go for it. Whatever. I just let go, and then it kind of became fascinating. But it has stuck with me for some reason, whether I have any clue what happened in it or not. Even given the problems I had with it — the woman being trapped in the giant bubble for example...
Why? What do you mean — why is that a problem? I'm just curious.
You have one chick in the movie and you have her trapped, quarantined in a bubble giving birth to a baby in a fishbowl that she feeds through a giant tube that comes out of her stomach?
Why is that disturbing?
Women can be productive parts of space stations outside of just childbirth.
But see, you're reading too much into that.
I get all feministy and pissed off.
My suggestion is you need to calm down on that.
I'm just giving you a hard time.
I know you are.
But what my friend Becky said that I thought was a good point — she thought it felt more like an art installation than a movie.
Which is exactly what I want. Especially for that crowd. Some of my friends, I would never take them to an arty movie and expect them to like it, but that crowd at the festivals, presenting it that way.... I don't know. Did you get any of the popcorn outside?
It was being mobbed when we went in, but I did get an empty box.
Well, there ya go. It's a cool box.
But I was told there was acid on the popcorn, and I didn't get any, so I'm a little sad.
Really. People said there was acid on the popcorn.
The brown kernels were rumored to be made of acid. I think I was lied to.
[Laughs]
But I think we would have believed anything at that point.
Well, I like that. I mean, really, we all dreamed that rock festivals were really like that, and then we go to them, and you know, they're not. But they should be.
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