Those Flaming Lips sure are a festive lot. The last real psychedelic rock 'n' roll experience rolled into Indio to play a set at Coachella that was baffling, too brief, hilarious and exhilarating. Dressed, as usual, in outlandish costumes with a swirling mass on the stage, they created a magical lysergic world. "One of us is high," the audience thinks, "and I think it's both of us."

Even though it was hotter than the hinges of hell in Indo the weekend of Coachella, the Lips' thoughts were decidedly wintry. During the festival, frontman Wayne Coyne was continuing work on the Christmas film he's directing and that the band has been working on for some time now. Fellow Lip Steven Drozd explained the concept.

"Right now it's called Christmas on Mars. I guess the quick version would be, it's sort of a cross between It's a Wonderful Life or a classic Christmas movie meets a 2001, Stanley Kubrick science fiction movie, meets like a cheap, low budget movie like Eraserhead. If you combine all those things together, that's sort of what it feels and looks like," said Drozd. 

"Basically the story is that we finally colonized Mars, and it's a story about all these people that exist on Mars. After being there for a year everyone starts to get depressed and lonely—which is actually I guess is a real thing that happens when you're in outer space. And they decide to celebrate Christmas on Mars and they have all these obstacles to overcome. All the equipment's breaking down and they might die if they don't get this stuff fixed. I'm sort of the main character in a way that they follow me around and I'm slowly going insane watching other people go insane," Drozd said. "Wayne is this Martian character who transforms himself into Santa Claus and basically kind of saves the day."

The film touches on a couple of themes that Coyne seems preoccupied with.

"That's his ultimate fantasy, he gets to mix Martians and Santa Claus. And we've worked on it for a couple of years and then we started touring for this record so it was kind of put on hold but now we're working on it again.  We're hoping it will be done in time for Christmas this year," Drozd said.

Ah, yes, the perfect thing for everyone to gather around, drink some egg nog and have their hearts warmed, right?

"It's actually more just a bizarre sci-fi movie thing," Drozd said. "I think our intention might be to warm your heart in the end, but I'm not sure if it's going to go over that way.  It's just really a low budget, I mean some of the sets look great and we haven't written the ending yet, so I'm not sure what Wayne's wants to do with that."

"It's not a musical, but music is sort of underlying the whole movie," he said. "We are actually doing the music as we make the movie so we'll like shoot a scene and then we'll say hey let's get together and make say three minutes of music for the scene.  And so we've complied a good amount of music.  I'd think we'd actually release that separately as the soundtrack."

The next full Flaming Lips album is in process, but probably won't be ready until summer 2005 at the earliest.

Meanwhile, it's not merely the Christmas movie that has the Lips in a festive mood. From Coachella to Lollapalooza, the band is all over the festival circuit. Drozd applauded Coachella's lineup this year, talking about the mind-blowing Broken Social Scene set that dominated much of the conversation after the festival. He added that he was also excited to see fellow Sunday night main stage acts Belle and Sebastian, Air and the Cure.

Hopefully it's the beginning of a summer filled with similar experiences as the band is heading out as part of the expanded two-day Lollapalooza. This will be the second time the Flaming Lips have played Lollapalooza. The first time was in 1994, when the band shared the second stage with the likes of the Palace Brothers and Luscious Jackson.

"I get sick of the festivals, especially when they're not very well organized. This one's been great. And I think Lollapalooza's going to be very cool," Drozd said. "The travel schedule won't be too brutal."

This time out, Drozd said, he's interested to check out Modest Mouse, the Pixies Sonic Youth, and Broken Social Scene. Day Two headliners String Cheese Incident, however, give him pause.

"But I think we're playing the hippie/jam-band day, which is kind of weird. We'll see how that pans out," he said.