Alex Winter Talks ‘Zappa’ Documentary And A Fourth ‘Bill & Ted’ Movie

“Documentaries are never going to be exactly what you had in your mind, especially when you have as much archival media as we had here,” explained filmmaker Alex Winter as we discussed his Frank Zappa documentary, Zappa.

“I knew that I had to follow what we found, but I also had a kind of narrative in my head about his life. I had a thesis about what it all meant, on a certain level, not in a didactic way but more just like making a movie about a human being is fascinating and complicated. What Mike Nichols, the editor, and I were able to do was be strict enough with ourselves about the story, so we didn’t even consider media that didn’t serve that. It gave us much easier parameters to work with.”

Courtesy of Zappa’s wife, Gail, Winter and his team had access to a gargantuan archive of content involving and created the legendary musician.

“The real gold mine that we found down there, funnily enough, was mostly what would be considered mundane to anyone else. It was hours and hours of video and audiotape of Frank speaking very intimately, and candidly, about his life and his beliefs. It mostly to journalists, who would then take one or two bites of that and stick it on KROQ or a Rolling Stone article,” he enthused. “There he was, sitting in an easy chair in his den over 30 years. We had stuff for him going back to the 60s, all the way up to right before he died in the early 90s. That helped us shape the narrative and gave us a sense of not only who he was emotionally and privately, but what the actual true arc of his life was.”

Winter said his journey with the legendary musician is over after a little over half a decade on the project.

He explained, “I’ve told the story that I was interested in telling. If I wanted to do some more expansive five or eight or ten-part series, I would have gone out and pitched that, but I wanted to make a film about this person that had mostly an emotional drive. It didn’t have to be driven by the sort of biographical circumstances of his life. I don’t want to keep going. I have some ancillary side project ideas around some of the media that we weren’t able to use, but that would be something else. It wouldn’t really be a film or even really a narrative, perhaps a VR project or something like that. This is not the last word, and I hope there are many more documentaries about Zappa, but I am very proud of this. I’m also very glad that it’s over, but I mean that in a very nice way.”

I first spoke with the actor and filmmaker about the project in 2016 when he was raising the money for archive preservation.

“When we first wanted to make it, and Gail gave us the rights, the very first thing I did was go out into the marketplace and say, ‘Hey, you want to make a Zappa movie?’ And everyone was the general response was, ‘Zappa is great. I love him. He’s my favorite artist but no.’ It was challenging,” he recalled. “The film was substantially more than a million dollars in the end. I’m not sure if I’m even allowed to talk about how much it was, but it wasn’t a gargantuan amount. It wasn’t as much as many other docs about big music artists, like the one about Kurt Cobain, or whoever. Zappa is still considered a kind of fringe artist, but it was more than a million dollars to make it.”

“Every cent of the money from the Kickstarter campaign went to preserving the archive. Absolutely zero of it went towards making a documentary. That was the agreement that we had with the backers. By the time I was done with the archival preservation mission, I had hundreds of drives filled with Zappa media that my editor and I were going through. No-one was paying us at that point. It took us another little bit of time to get the financing, but we never really stopped working on it. I was filming Gail on my own dime back in 2015. We just accepted that we were going to make it, we figured that the money would show up, and we kept going. Eventually, the money showed up. Thankfully.”

While Winter wanted fans to ultimately enjoy Zappa, he never let how he thought fans would receive it drive what he was doing.

“I think there are a few things that make documentary filmmakers documentary filmmakers, and one of them is them having to not care about that side of things. I don’t mean that in a cavalier, arrogant way,” he explained. “I never wanted to make a piece of fan service, but I didn’t want to piss them off either. I really wanted to make a good movie that would be entertaining, whether you were a Zappa fanatic, or you didn’t know who he was, or you knew who he was, and you profoundly disliked him.”

“I would not have committed six years of my life to a story if I didn’t feel that the story was so inherently interesting on its own terms, that it didn’t matter where you fit in that person’s world. Mike and I paid no attention to what we thought would be nuggets that are famous Zappa moments because they are all over YouTube. Sure, someone’s probably pissed off somewhere that a certain thing is not in our film, but they could pull it up online real easily and watch it all day. So I wasn’t worried about that.”

“Where I had some loyalty or obligation, to be honest, was that we had 10,000 backers who gave us money to help preserve the endangered materials. I did feel a certain loyalty and responsibility to them, even though they didn’t pay for the documentary. It meant a great deal to us that so many people came forward and contributed and allowed us to do this work, which was hard work, but it was crazy expensive. We would not have been able to do any of it without them. I was mindful of that.”

That was the polar opposite of Winter’s experience with another of his films released this year, Bill & Ted Face the Music. He reprised his role as Bill S. Preston opposite Keanu Reeves’ Ted Logan.

“This is kind of counterpoint to Zappa,” he revealed. “We only got Bill & Ted Face the Music financed because of the fans, and we were very mindful of the fans when we made the film. I mean, getting Bill & Ted Face the Music made was like a 12-year journey, but I didn’t write it, I didn’t finance it, I did produce it with the other guys, and we were on deck all the way through. The same goes for Keanu, who was very much with his sleeves rolled up and on deck throughout. We worked hard to make a movie that didn’t suck, really hard. Right up until it was released, we were still tinkering with it and putting in new ideas to make it work better. We didn’t want to let the fans down.”

The threequel landed with rave reviews in limited theaters and on PVOD, where it reportedly grossed an estimated $32 million in its first month of release.

“Talk about a movie that every studio said they wanted, but no-one would pay for,” he laughed. “We did not want to go back to the fans and say, ‘Sorry, but this film you’ve been waiting a dozen years for is going to be sitting on a shelf for another two years.’ We’re very grateful that we could put it out in a way that was safe for people so that we did not have to go back to the fans and say it wasn’t coming.”

“Zappa was supposed to world premiere at the South by Southwest Film Festival (SXSW), the week that the world shut down due to the pandemic. Press had already seen the movie, they’d written the reviews, we all of our tickets booked, I literally pulled out like a day before our screening, and then the whole world blew up,” Winter continued. “So we’ve been working in the trenches on dealing with the new landscape of media, on Zappa, Showbiz Kids for HBO, and very significantly on Bill & Ted Face the Music, which was going to do a huge theatrical global rollout. We were suddenly faced with a world with no movie theaters and a splintered constellation of exhibitors and distributors. Every one of them had different ideas about where the world needed to be going. So, I’m a tired person at this point.”

Would Winter return for a fourth Bill & Ted or his excellent adventure over?

“We make them, and we don’t know,” he mused. “Keanu and I wanted to do this one because we believed in the vision that Ed Solomon and Chris Matheson had for what the world was that we were returning to. That’s why we signed on. We believed in the director, Dean Parisot. None of it came easy. Keanu and I like working together a lot. It’s really fun. We like playing these characters. We honestly don’t know if anyone will come back and ask us to do another one. We both feel we would if someone asked us. I think we found ourselves on set, falling right back into these guys. It was like we’d never left.”

“Obviously, Keanu and I are friends, but we’re not these guys. We didn’t know if what we hoped would happen would actually happen. No-one did. They all looked at us before they went to shoot, and we were like, ‘Oh my God. What if you can’t do it? We’re just all screwed.’ We were very happy to be back in those shoes again. If someone wanted us to, we’d do it again, but if they don’t, we love where the movie ended, in a narrative way, so we’re going to be okay if this is the end. We would keep moving. If anyone asked us to.”

Zappa will be released on VOD on Friday, November 27th, 2020, following a special one-night-only theatrical event on Monday, November 23rd, 2020.