Bill's Excellent Adventure
Richard Middleton interviews the director and star of Freaked,
Alex Winter

Alex Winter is best known to the great unwashed as the other half of Bill and Ted. After his two stints as Bill and parts in the cult teen horror The Lost Boys and the independent Rosalie Goes Shopping, Alex dissapeared off the big screen, apparently destined for nothing more than periodic resurrection in “Whatever happened to...?” magazine articles. The truth is, however, that Alex simply stepped off the set and behind the camera, where he has happily been ever since, directing and starring in a hit series on MTV, The Idiot Box, and a feature film, Freaked, as well as directing numerous music videos and commercials.

RM : So, Alex, you’re a writer-producer-director-star...

AW: Not really, I've done all those things. I can end up sounding like a ridiculous hyphenate. I really only do two of those things these days, I write and direct. I produce when I absolutely have to, but I'm not aiming to be a Coppola or a Spike Lee or someone who produces a lot of their, own stuff, unless I have to out of necessity. It just takes up too much time. It's a fucking pain in the ass, to be honest ! And I haven't acted since the film Freaked, which I did a couple of years ago.

RM: Why not? You're known as an actor, having done The Lost Boys, Bill & Ted etc.

AW: Because before I did all that stuff I went to film school and my eye has always been on making films, so generally I don’t feel the need to go out on the boards and try to act when I can keep up shooting, which is what I want to do more than anything. It’s like you said at the beginning, there's a shitload of different things that I like to do, and there's two that I like to do the most, and that's write and direct. That's my focus. They're very hard things to get a chance to do in this climate, so I have ended up doing other things as well, and luckily having some luck with them.

RM: Although Freaked was a feature film, it's only been released on video. How do you feel about that?

AW: That's the most depressing aspect of what Fox did to us. The film is supposed to be an onslaught, and because I already feel that comedy doesn't go as far into things as it could or should, just by virtue of the medium, the film was meant to punch us through a certain wall, and it doesn't do that on video. You can laugh at the jokes, you can laugh at the story, you can laugh at the characters, but you're not getting the hammer hit to the head thatI wanted to deliver. Which is a drag.

RM: How did you pitch Freaked to Fox? As a ten million creature feature?

AW: Well, it wasn’t that much. It was about seven, I guess. Eight. Seven. Eight, seven, something like that. You can tell I did the budget ! I was in that position every day, seven.... eight, seven.... eight, nine..... shit ! It was really pretty straightforward. We went in and pitched it to the head of the studio, Joe Roth, and he's a really interesting guy, he's directed films himself, and he knows a lot about film. He greenlit Barton Fink and Naked Lunch and all this stuff, as well as crap like Toys and Home Alone, and we had illustrations that we’d done with our special effects guys already to help them understand the characters and how colourful they'd be. I mean we really had to sell it, because we didn't have a script, we just had a pitch, the monologue that you go and deliver, which is one of the more excruciating and humiliating aspects of my trade. You're telling the whole story the whole way through. With the comedy it’s more fun, especially because Tom Stem and I were partners and we were good at pitches, and it becomes more of a stand up comedy routine. You play off each other. We showed them the illustratlons, and they got it. Like right there, Joe got it. He's like, this is great, I really can see this working. He saw the picture exactly how we were going to do it.

Immediately we'd done the development deal we started storyboarding right off the bat to keep showing them how things were going to look. We went out and made the movie, which was exactly what we said it was going to be, it was right off the script, and everything was hunkydory. He knew how to market it because he has a real understanding of youth culture. Hardly anyone else in Hollywood does. He saw the movie, he says this is great, the next day he's been axed by Rupert Murdoch. So the guy who comes in is much more your typical studio chairman, basically, who's much more consistent with most Hollywood studio chairmen in that he doesn't have the slightest fucking idea what movies are all about. As far as I can tell he probably hasn't even seen too many or doesn't like them very much. I saw him come to a screening and he watched the screen in terror. On our first meeting I walked into the office and he said, you know the difference between me and Joe Roth is that I never would have greenlit Naked Lunch. And Tom and I looked at each other and we realised right then, we’re fucked. And that was the end of it. It was that simple. They buried it completely. They had a contract to release it on video that they could not abandon, so it came out on video in the States with no marketing, no advertising, no public awareness at all and it still managed to get into a bunch of top tens. Which was great. And in this country I felt that people would really be able to get the humour. I think a certain group got it in the US, and I think a wider group will get it in the UK, simple because of the nature of your humour. I think that you guys are more aware, I don't think that Americans understand the mechanics of drama weIl enough to go, oh yeah, they're screwing around with basic obvious mechanics of storytelling. I think you'll find those jokes funnier. America responds very weIl to the pop culture stuff, it responds very weIl to the sIime and the ooze, and to their credit to a lot of the more subtle jokes like the hammer flashback.

RM: Why do a creature feature? Why do something so effects heavy?

AW: Stupidity. Tom and I always set out to do way more than was humanly possible. It was basically saying, I'm in my midtwenties, I have a lot of youthful energy, my youthful energy could very weIl last me out until the end of my twenties or maybe even to my mid-thirties, but let's burnit out in six months ! Let's get the fuck rid of that youthful energy ! Because that's what I did. I mean I was ill for a solid year after I made that movie, I was really sick. I'd just blown my immune system to smithereens. And I had a great time doing it! It really was like fighting a war. It was like every day I would go home, because it took me five hours to get into makeup and two hours to get out of it, so every day I wouldn't get home before ten or eleven, I was exhausted, usually I was still in the makeup to try and speed up the time getting back into it the next day. I'd go to bed, I would close my eyes, the alarm would ring, I would open my eyes. I wouldn't have sIept or dreamt or done anything but four or five hours would have gone by, hit the alarm, go in, glue, glue, glue, look at the storyboard, day after day after day for three or four months. I did it without any reservation or trepidation at any point because I was just in that mode, until I was editing and got done with post-production process, which lasted about a year because it was sa complicated, and we realised that we needed to do same reshoots. It'd been four months or five months since I'd been in the makeup and it felt like a lifetime ago. I got back in, and he started to touch my face with that brush with the cold glue on it and it was like six in the morning and I just was like, no, I can't fucking do this anymore man ! You're not putting that shit on my face any more. I just freaked out.

Tom and I knew we had a golden opportunity, we knew we might not have another opportunity like that again, we said let’s push the fucking envelope as far as we can. Since this door opened and and accidentally let us in, let’s run the gamut, let’s at least know that he and I have done the absolute most that he and I at that age at that time with that money could possibly do. And I done a lot of films with effects and felt that they’d never really been used to their advantage. I’d been interested in latex and disguise since I’d been a little kid. I was a huge Peter Sellers fan, a huge Lon Chaney fan, a huge fan of almost the catharsis of abusing yourself to that point and forcing yourself into another identity. The biggest compromise I had to make was that in order to get the picture made I had to play the least interesting character, I think that comically that character has the least funny fun stuff to do. I would have loved to play Elijah, that was the character I really wanted to play. But of course it made little sense to a Hollywood studio to have me dress up in old age makeup when the Bill and Ted thing was such a factor. It was absurdly overambitious. And I have to say, and this is not all to our credit at all that we had an incredible crew, it worked. We pulled it off. We had a lot of help, we had the best makeup effects houses in town. That’s the thing that’s so funny about making a film like that and not getting it released is that every day I was going to some other effects house and these guys are fucking geniuses. You’ve been given the opportunity to give all this work to all these people who usually get to do such boring shit. You know, here we were building these giant phantasmagoric monsters and now we’ve got to go and Mrs fucking Doubtfire. It’s their imagination and their skill and their craft. To get started we had gone to Screaming Mad George, who’s a good friend of ours, very early on in the process when we were still working out the idea, and most of the initial designs for a lot of the early characters are his. Eye and Eye, Dogboy, Nosey.... well Robert Williams who did Zap! comics with Robert Crumb in the sixties, good friend of ours, he’d done one of the Zap’s with a character whose nose was upright. So a lot of the influences were like from Mad magazine, Basil Wolverton, Tales of the Unexpected, Creepy all the EC comics, all that fifties, sixties groosout comicbook psychedelia. Then we went to the effects guys with all of that art and all those guys are huge fans of that shit anyway, they just never get to do it. And we were like, this is the vibe, the more warts, the more pus ... and they would go away and come back and go, okay, well how about a duct so that it comes out of a wart here, and they’d come up with things like that.

RM: are you influenced by horror?

AW: Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Evil Dead, yeah I like anything that’s extreme. Literature, painting, music, film. I don’t like MOR anything. I tried to read books that are extreme, whether you’re talking about HP Lovecraft or Dostoyevsky, they are in their own way pushing some kind of envelope. Art is experiental, and it doesn’t become experiental unless you kick someone in the head with a hobnail boot. That’s what I’m interested in. I’m interested in punching past the pithiness of drama. My influences in film are usually older things, becasue film has really got to the point where it’s been totally pulled back from being extreme, where it started back in the early days of film. Any art will start there because that is what art is really about. Now it’s all parlour games for the most part. You go see a comedy and it’s kind of funny but it’s not too funny. You go see a drama and it’s very dramatic, but God forbid you actually do feel anything unless somebody just cries every five minutes. Usually things now tell you how to feel, like Forest Gump, it’s just soundtrack song after soundtrack song, he’s running and they sing a song about running, and he feels sad and they sing a song about feeling sad. In horror, the master is HP Lovecraft, I think, for me a lot of my influences come from that kind of imagination, Poe, Lovecraft, and things that came out of that and then grew. Lovecraft is definitely the unwitting influence of all the shit that goes on now, from Tobe Hooper to Stephen King, there's a shitload of Lovecraft in all the Raimi stuff, all the Book Of The Dead stuff and all that. There's a namelessness, a getting to the unknowable is what's so important in art. Even in comedy you try to get to that point. You try to create such a fever pitch that you end up putting someone in a headspace that they're not quite sure that they're going this way because of the drama or because of some funny line that got said but there's some X factor there, and that's what I'm really looking into playing with now with other genres; to get a sense of where I do it best. Dark Matter, the sci-fi film I wrote, is a horror film. In fact when I finished Freaked I was going to adapt The Haunter Of The Dark, an HP Lovecraft short story. But I thought, it should be up to date, I try to make films that are up to date so people can relate to them better, and also because I think they’ll be scarier. That's what's so great about the two great horror films of the last twenty years. John Carpenter's The Thing which I think is a masterpiece ...

RM: Critics are very ambivalent about The Thing.

AW: As soon as someone's ambivalent about something you know you've done something right. The first Alien is terrifying, and it’s also a great movie. Texas Chainsaw Masacre is a great movie, but all of those movies reached into some subconscious aspect of things. The Thing I think, is the most daring. The reason that I'd put it up at the top of the list is, best summed up in that scene with the dog, where the dog walks into the kennel and splits open. There’s no human beings in that scene, there's a feeling of such terror and complexity, you get a sense of how these animals feel, and that is beyond the bullshit of drama and a bunch of characters feeling like game over man ! That’s about such a deep seated terror of the unknown that animal, mineral, plant, it doesn't matter what you are, and I think that Carpenter hit on that better than any other film that I've ever seen. When that dog walks into that room and the other dogs are thinking this shit ain't right at all ! And then he goes from that extreme to the sheer primordial terror of his head coming off and just scuttling across the floor. It's hitting a level of subconscious that we know shit like this exists within our own universe and we don't want to think about it. We don't even try to contemplate it. So of course people are going to be ambivalent, because how are they going to react? They're going to say, well that's stupid ! Because that's what happened with us in our test screenings for Freaked, which is what turned the new administration off. They test screened our film to a bunch of thirteen, fourteen year old kids in the valley, who saw this film which on screen is an assault, and their reaction to it was, this is stupid. They were yelling at the screen sometimes, like, fuck you ! Because they felt assaulted. And the studio go, well, that's not good, you should go to a movie to be, you should sit down and you should be placated, and that's why Carpenter has made nothing but shit since The Thing. You can see that every filmmaker who has made that great movie has never been able to make it again. Coppola did it with Apocalypse Now.

RM: Freaked was not the flrst time one of your fllms had problems being released, was it?

AW: The Bill and Ted curse ! Each time we made one of those things the studio that made it would go bankrupt. That happened both times. The first time with DEG and the second time with Orion. We made Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, DEG went bankrupt, and the film sat until someone picked it up. It was an anachronism, that movie, and it's not terribly original, but the aspect of it that is original is the extremes, the sincere extremes, to which we took those characters. Here you had two characters, not just one, who were playing this ridiculous attitude to the hilt, and I think that there's some kind of giddy vibe that you get off it because it's so relentless, and Keanu and I made sure that we made those characters as extreme as possible. I love Wayne's World, and I think it's hilarious, especially the Saturday Night Live skits because the movies aren't so good, and the characters are funny but they are definitely arch and patronising, and they're definitely going, wink, wink we're not really stupid, we've just got wigs on and don't for a second think that we're dumb. I remember once when we were shooting Freaked that they were shooting the Wayne's World video on the same studio lot, and Tom went over and said, hi I'm Tom, I'm shooting Freaked and I'm a big fan of yours and by the way the guy I'm doing this with was in Bill & Ted, and they both said, which I thought was very illuminating, oh I thought that guy really was as stupid as he was in the film. Which is not really so much a complement to my acting as an illumination of their attitude towards that movie. Which I find very funny because they were so intent on not coming off stupid in their movie, which I think hurts them in a way.

RM: Did Bill come naturally?

AW: Frighteningly enough, he did. I think the reason that Keanu and I clicked together was that my attitude towards charader comedy is always to play it really genuine. When I did The Idiot Box, in which I play a range of about twenty or thirty characters, every character I played I tried to get inside their head and try to play with genuine feeling, however thin the characters. And Keanu is also a very genuine actor, that's where he comes from, so much so that I think he ends up getting made a fooI of sometimes where he takes the wrong role or whatever. He's going to play something all the way to the hilt even if it's a role he shouldn't be playing. Even if no-one should ever have let him play that role he' s going to do it with all the sincerity that he can muster up.

RM: What is your ambition?

AW: To make movies as effective as the movies that I love. I would say that if I were to enter into a genre at all it would feel more like the horror genre, in the sense that I am interested in getting into the disturbing undercurrents, because I think it's a very interesting place to be.

RM: Harking back to Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey, if you had to play a game against Death to save your life, what game would you choose?

AW: Russian roulette. Because if I lose, I lose anyway. If I win, I kill the motherfucker !