The Spaceship Within

Wayne Coyne and The Flaming Lips Release Christmas On Mars

2009-01-09

Written By: Jacob Sprecher

• Increase Font Size
• Decrease Font Size

Wayne Coyne, founding and seminal member of The Flaming Lips, is a man out on another trip. This of course is a compliment, as Coyne happens to be endowed with a sense of creativity and professionalism that does not apply to the average musician or, for the sake of cliché terminology, artist. Begun in 2001, this fall season has finally seen the long-awaited release of Christmas On Mars, a psychedelic sci-fi film written, produced and scored by The Lips with Coyne at the helm. Destined for campy-but-not-too-campy cult status, Mars has enjoyed success with independent theatres across the country. Synthesis spoke with the elegant Coyne while kicking back at his Oklahoma City residence in anticipation of the film’s screening. 

So I understand you wound up at the doctor’s office yesterday?
I have this muscle in my shoulder and I don’t know what I did to it. My wife is building this big, marble floor pathway in the back of our house and we moved some of that a couple weeks ago. I either pulled it then or slept on it wrong…which sounds pathetic, if you think about it. 

That’s bound to happen, I suppose.
I’ve been telling people, that [when] I was in Mexico last week playing shows with Nine Inch Nails, that we were at some strange Mexican brothel out in the country and I got in a fight with a Hell’s Angels midget and he pushed me into the corner. 

A good enough lie, I’ll believe that. But Christmas On Mars; it must feel good to have it circulating after all these years. 
I’ve seen it now probably 20 times with the audience in there. And to have them laugh, and to have them cheer and to have them sort of, get the movie in the way I intended them to; that’s a big relief. I mean I have to say I’m showing it to the Flaming Lips audience. I don’t think just the normal guy off the street is going to walk in to see it… But I know that we have an audience that is a lot like myself, where they’re artists or musicians or filmmakers, and that’s beautiful. We [do] have people that just want to see it and be entertained, get high, do some drugs and have a freakout; and then we have other people that are really looking at it as a way to inspire them to do their own trip.

Thematically speaking, birth was right at the forefront of the film from start to finish. Can you expand on that notion?
I guess in way, the film just sort of exposes my obsessions. This idea of outer space being this almost unspeakable, gigantic, overwhelming thing that is both wonderful and frightening. I don’t know why outer space always seems to represent some kind of far-reaching intelligence, or something. [You say] “I want to know, I want to know,” and yet it doesn’t let you know. Humans always want to ask “Why?” and outer space just says—I don’t know, I always go back to this like, beginning of time…[trails off] Even speaking to you about it now, my mind kind of falls in on itself, it’s just so overwhelming [laughs]. I really don’t know if I can finish the interview.
[But] When I speak of Christmas I never speak of it in a religious way. I never think of it as like Jesus and God and all that shit. I just like it in the way that people put up lights and trees and we embrace the idea of a Santa Claus. To me it’s a colorful freakout in the middle of winter, which I think is awesome, and the fact that people do it every year, sometimes begrudgingly even, and yet it does have this sort of contagiousness about it. And I can tell you for sure—this is one of the things that made me believe I could do a movie like this; in 1996 my father was dying of cancer, and from the end of the summer ‘til New Year’s Eve when he was dying little by little, we had this Christmas, almost as he was in his worst state. And it was really a struggle to get into the spirit. “Why do we give a shit about putting up lights and Christmas trees and all this? Do I really wanna bother with all that when there’s this heavier thing going on?” And I was on the way home from the bank, it had to be in the beginning of December, and I noticed people putting up Christmas lights. And for some reason these lights really affected me. I thought, “Wow, I’m so glad everybody else is in the Christmas spirit, ‘cause I’m not.” And that really is the answer. It pronounces to the world that you’re not defeated. This creation, this thing that we do, proving to the universe that we believe that we can be happy, is worth doing. And I have to say that it really did change me. It changed me from feeling like death and humanistic things all ended in darkness and defeat. Love and trust, and all these things that we have to believe in really do exist out there… Was that your question?

From a directorial standpoint, there are certainly David Lynch moments, Space Odyssey moments; was this intentional or did it come out naturally?
I don’t know if I was consciously trying. I mean, obviously I love David Lynch and I love Stanley Kubrick. But I do know for sure that when I started to make [Christmas On Mars] there were elements of Eraserhead that I wanted to be part of the mood of this film. It’s a kind of strange uncertainty; there’s an unease about that whole film that I somehow, in my own life, in my own dimension of what I want to put into the world, this theme of Christmas On Mars was that. It had that kind of, “I’m not sure if I’m standing in the real world or if I’m standing in a world that I’ve created because I’ve gone insane.” But there was also this futuristic trip-out aspect. And that was where I kept trying to jump back and forth in a Wizard of Oz kind of way, which to me feels like the Stanley Kubrick trip where I go into the fantastical space color shit. 
Because when I was young everyone that I was around—my older brothers and all their friends—we were all listening to music, taking drugs, thinking we were gonna live in outer space. [When] we would think about the year 2008, we would just think we’d be fucking flying around in outer space like Star Wars by now. Of course as I got older, I realized that wasn’t going to happen, and sometimes I think what people do is they make films that create the world that they wanted to live in. I think I wanted that world to exist, and so I just said, “Fuck it. I’ll make a movie that is that world.”

You created portions of the set in your own backyard. What were some of the particulars in the process? 
[The following is one example in a lengthy list.] There’s a couple shots of this big, tube-looking hallway that the guys will walk through quite a few times. And that is a…let’s say you’re at the gas station. You’re pumping gas, and you think, “That gas is in something.” It’s buried underground at the 7-Eleven or wherever. Well back in like 1970 those [containers] were made out of this toxic fucking fiberglass, and I don’t know why, but there is a field in the south part of Oklahoma City where someone has about 100 of those sort of piled up. 
Well I drove by those and thought, “I could turn one of those into a space tunnel.” And I swear to God, I went over one day and was sort of rummaging through them—there wasn’t anybody there but I knew somebody owned these—and I picked one out that I thought looked like it was in pretty good shape and I called the guy, and he met me over there. And you gotta think this is a guy probably working in the oil fields 20 years ago and here am I, this guy in a fucking weird rock group called The Flaming Lips; what’s he gonna think of me? 
And he said, “Why do you want it? What are you going to do?” And I just told him, “I’m going to make this weird movie about outer space and I’m gonna use this as a space tunnel.” And as I told him about it he literally got excited, he said, “Well I’ll take it over to your house for free.” He put it on the back of this big, flatbed trailer thing, chained it down, brought it over here and only charged me 300 bucks for the whole thing.