Alex Winter might be best known and loved as Bill in Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure and its two sequels opposite his longtime pal Keanu Reeves, but he is also a very gifted documentarian.

Winter has directed several critically acclaimed documentaries including Downloaded, The Panama Papers and Showbiz Kids (now playing on Crave TV in Canada.)

His latest documentary is a clear labour of love. ZAPPA takes an in-depth look into the life and work of musician Frank Zappa.

With unprecedented access to the Zappa family trust and all archival footage, ZAPPA explores the private life behind the mammoth musical career that never shied away from the political turbulence of its time. Alex Winter’s assembly features appearances by Frank’s widow Gail Zappa and several of Frank’s musical collaborators.

Bonnie Laufer caught up with Alex Winter via ZOOM to discuss the film and the surprise success of the recent Bill and Ted: Face The Music. (Now available on DVD and on Crave)

ZAPPA is available November 27 on the Apple TV app and everywhere you rent movies.

The film also opens in select theatres: November 27 in Ottawa, Waterloo and Montreal, November 28 in Vancouver and throughout the fall in other cities.

ORIGINAL-CIN: You literally had a treasure trove of material at your fingertips. Are you a huge Zappa fan and how did this initially come about?

ALEX WINTER: I am a big fan of Frank Zappa and his music, but to be honest I never expected the access that we got. I wanted to tell a story about Zappa’s life, it had never been done.

“I knew of Gail Zappa, his wife, and I knew she was a force of nature. Many people had approached her wanting access to Frank’s archives, but she flat out told them no. So when I got up the courage and the opportunity to pitch to her, I didn't really expect her to say yes.

“But, I had a very particular take and she just so happened to really like it. I think what she was looking for, and what she connected with, was that we didn't really want to make a standard music doc. Not an album-to-album legacy doc.

“We were intent on telling the story of an artist during a specific period of American history, who faced a lot of challenges in making his art and then became very engaged with the times around him, which is just a very unique story.

“I felt whether you like Zappa or not or whether you care about him or not, that's a very compelling story in itself.”

OC: Then an added bonus when Gail gives you carte blanche to Frank’s entire life.

WINTER: “She liked my idea so much she said, ‘Look, you can't do this without access to the vault. It's just not possible.’ So she gave me full access to the Zappa vault, which was an infinite storage of media going back to before he was born to after he died.

“Then we went about preserving a lot of that material and then we began making the film. The whole process began about five years ago, so it's a huge relief to have people get to see it now.”

O.C My God, you have such patience. There was so much stuff to go through. And as I'm watching this, I honestly felt like Frank was still alive and telling his story. Where and how did you even begin? It had to have been a pretty daunting experience.

WINTER: “I come from narrative and I was trained as a screenwriter. So I approach my docs in a very narrative way. I didn't ever intend to try to tell Zappa's entire story or focus on every single one of his albums. And that gave my editor Mike Nichols and I some very strict parameters about what kind of material we wanted to use, and that also excluded an enormous amount of what was down there.”

“We focused on material that really told Frank's story from an emotional standpoint and gave you a way into his inner life. If things didn't drive the story forward in that way we just didn't use them.”

O.C. “What surprised you about Frank Zappa that maybe you didn’t know until you started working on this?

WINTER: “Ha, have you got five years? I'll tell you everything. (Laughs).

“I think I learned something new about him every day. We would discover something about him that we didn't know and it was just gold. He was a really complicated person. He's extremely brilliant and problematic like any human being.

“As we dug beneath beneath the surface, there were many things that I discovered that I didn't know. I would say that one of the most striking was that I knew about his stand against censorship at the Senate hearings (about record labeling), and I knew he’d been at the forefront of voting rights and that he had voting registration booths set up at his concerts.

“However, I didn't realize how much he had gone out into the world and really became engaged with other governments and other cultures strictly to find out how to help create better trade, better interaction between nation-states. That was very impressive and he really took that seriously.”

“I found hours and hours of footage of him traveling to Russia or other places or just talking with friends and inquiring from other experts about how the world worked in half how we could make it work together in a better form.”

O.C. What was the reaction from Frank’s kids with you telling their dad's story like this?

WINTER: “To be honest, I don't really know. I didn't make the film with them at all.”

O.C: Really? Wow, I just assumed they were on board.

WINTER: “It was really important to me to make an independent film that wasn't hampered by any opinion or influence.

“Even with Gail while she was alive, she was the primary rights holder when we started. She ended up giving me all the rights. And then we have an independent company, so we took off and did our thing.

“Ahmet Zappa was involved when Gail died (in October, 2015 of lung cancer). He became my point person in her absence. I had the final cut and I was transparent with the Zappa business, as it were, about what I was doing. I was in no way making a film sort of beholden to them and that was very important to me.”

“I told Gail when I first met her that if there was any way I was going to be able to make the story work, I had to be able to tell the story the way we wanted to tell it. Otherwise, you end up making a two-hour commercial for somebody's brand.”

O.C: This easily could have been a 10-part mini-series. Did you ever consider something like that ?

WINTER: “You ask yourself that at the beginning of every project, especially in this day and age where everything is a series. I have tended to make every project a film. I don't have a prejudice against series, though I will say that a great many of them don't really have the bandwidth and would be better off as films. They usually run out of gas after a couple of episodes.”

“I wanted to make a classical narrative feature length movie about this guy. I really didn't want it to turn into more of an informational kind of info-doc, which someone should definitely do.

“Lord knows there is still a lot to be told about Frank Zappa and he deserves it, but that wasn't my interest. I had a very specific artistic agenda and that was to get in and out in two hours.”

O.C. Earlier this year I stumbled upon your documentary Showbiz Kids, about the highs and lows of children in show business, featuring interviews and examinations of the lives and careers of the most famous former child actors in the world. Especially for somebody like you, who grew up as a child actor, was it difficult getting subjects for that?

WINTER: “It's always difficult getting subjects, but it's always something that I love to do. You don't get all the people that you want, but you get the people you need. I know that sounds completely irrational, but it seems to work for me.

“I just wanted a very small ensemble of actors that would be honest and intimate, but spread across time. So we were very lucky to get Diana Serra Cary before she passed. She was 100 when I spoke to her. We were very lucky to get Cameron Boyce.”

O.C. His early passing (last year due to complications of epilepsy) just broke my heart.

WINTER: “That broke my heart too. I got to tell you I was absolutely gob-smacked when that happened, what a huge loss. But, I'm really happy with the subjects that we got, I thought they were absolutely incredibly brave. I think they knew that I had their back and I wasn't going to hang them out to dry. It was one of the most fulfilling projects. I've worked on having so much sympatico with the subjects, which is not common.”

O.C. I can't leave you today without mentioning Bill and Ted. I just want to thank you and Keanu for Face The Music. I had so much fun watching it. Did you both anticipate the growing anticipation for that movie?

WINTER: “We spent many years trying to get it made, and we put a lot of work into making it as good as we possibly could. We took it seriously without being ponderous or self-serious about it and we're really grateful for the response.

“To say the least, it's been a really tough year on a number of levels that don't need to be hyper-articulated at this point. And so I think it came as a kind of a bomb in a tough time and we certainly didn't make it with that in mind.

Bill and Ted: Face the Music was made with a lot of sincerity and we take those characters very seriously. We are beyond thrilled that everyone accepted it the way that they did.”

Original-Cin Q&A: ZAPPA director Alex Winter on why the doc is more about the man than the music

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