Here are some things you should know about the Flaming Lips' "Christmas On Mars" film: It took seven years to make (but not, you know, like, seven straight years), it is best viewed whilst under the influence of drugs and/or coitus, and it is designed to possibly kill you.

"Not everyone can say this, but I have a giant circus tent in my backyard, and we have a giant surround-sound system that we played around with for about a month, designing it, remixing the movie," Lips frontman Wayne Coyne laughed. "We wanted to design it to be about as loud as any human could stand, yet still watch it and be entertained by it, not tortured by it. That was the goal, at least."

Whether that goal was achieved is basically dependent on the strength of your at-home speaker system. Because after making the rounds at summer music fests and tiny indie theaters, the Lips' much-anticipated science-fiction/Christmas flick — which tells the story of a lonely star base, a borderline unstable astronaut and, well, a martian in a spacesuit — was finally foisted upon the world last week via DVD.

And, as to be expected for a guy who spent seven years making the film in and around his hometown of Oklahoma City ("It took longer than I thought it would. But we were interrupted by a lot of things. ... It took seven years, but I didn't work on it every day for seven years," Coyne explained), the Lips mastermind has some fairly specific suggestions to help maximize your at-home enjoyment of "Christmas."

"When you're at your house, you are more free. There's a thing that comes on before the DVD plays that says, 'You can smoke pot, you can have sex, you can do whatever while watching this film,' " he laughed. "So, I think in that sense, watching it at your own home, in your own space, at whatever volume you want it at, is pretty great already. We want people to bring their own weird, subjective beauty to it."

Totally. And though much of the film was done on the (super) cheap — many sets were built by Coyne and his brother in the backyard of his OKC home — Coyne maintains that it stands up to many of its sci-fi contemporaries. You know, except for the fact that it's not really a sci-fi film.

"I don't think my movie is necessarily sci-fi, but to me, whenever I would watch, say, 'Star Wars' or one of the 'Alien' movies or whatever, to me, I would see their ray guns or their little buttons they pushed and know they were just fake objects anyway. ... They're not the real things," he smiled. "And there's so many great little weird toys that I would see at the store, and say, 'Well, I'm just going to use that.' Through the use of your imagination, anything becomes what you want it to be.

"I know that if my movie plays to any audience out there, it's already kind of an arty audience. I do sometimes feel for the Steven Spielbergs of the world, because they're playing to people who are not using their imaginations," he continued. "I know our audience will do that. They're filling it full of all kinds of their own interpretations of what things could be. I want that. I think that makes any experience richer."

And in a lot of ways, that DIY ethos and childlike sense of wonderment has fueled Coyne creatively for more than 25 years now. And with a new Lips album tentatively due this summer ("It's ambitious, but not too ambitious," he laughed), he hopes to keep that spirit alive and well.

"In some sense, being in the Flaming Lips, I know we're a rock group, but we never really felt we were limited to just playing music and singing — really, we could do whatever we want. When I was especially young, that's why I thought you'd want to be in a rock group — you just did whatever you wanted, you know?" he said. "Even though we've been working on 'Christmas On Mars,' we still have songs. We want to play some new songs to the audience next summer. A new summer, I want to say new things."