Conversation

A O Scott of the New York Times described Alex Winter’s urban thriller Fever as “an arresting example of what a talented filmmaker can accomplish with the sparest of means.” Set in New York City, the movie follows an anxious, struggling art instructor, Nick Parker (portrayed by Henry Thomas, of E.T. fame), through a string of disturbing events after the landlord of his tenement is murdered.
Winter is best known for his performance as Bill Preston in the 1989 teen farce Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure and its 1991 sequel. Winter also has appeared in the teen-vampire flick The Lost Boys, Death Wish 3, as well as acting on and off-Broadway since he was a child.

After his brush with fame following the Bill & Ted movies, Winters went into directing music videos and TV commercials, as well as creating the short-lived MTV hit “The Idiot Box.” Winters has also directed two other independent films, Squeal of Death and Freaked, a critically-acclaimed 1993 off-the-wall comedy starring Winter, along with Brooke Shields, Randy Quaid and Morgan Fairchild.
Fever will be screened in April at the Tinker Street Cinema in Woodstock. For more information call 679-6608.

I spoke with Winter at his home in Woodstock.

—Brian K Mahoney

Chronogram: You grew up in St. Louis.
Alex Winter: I primarily grew up in St. Louis, yes, and then I moved to the East Coast and went to high school and college here.
C: Where’d you go to high school?
AW: I went to college at NYU. I was doing theater all through high school. I was like a Broadway brat. I was in The King and I when I was 13, 14 and Peter Pan when I was 15 or 16 and I did some off-Broadway. Then, I knew I wanted to go to film school and make movies, so—
C: Acting has always been a means to an end?
AW: Always. Even in those days it was, yes. I started making movies when I was nine. Super-eights and eight-mils—I had a bunch of cameras and filmed all of the neighborhood, you know, like any dweeb [laughs] at that age. So yes, it was always a means to an end. Through college I did voiceovers and TV commercials to pay the rent.
C: At NYU you studied—
AW: Film. I was in the film school there. It was a really good school. I had my ups and downs there—I was really there just to shoot as much as possible. It was really expensive, and I was really ambitious. I had teamed up with another film student, a guy named Tom Stern, and we started making movies together, because we were spending all our money making movies separately and we had similar visions. So we started making movies there together to pool our resources and that became Squeal of Death and that became, basically… we left the school and started doing stuff together, which ended up being The Idiot Box and Freaked.
C: What’s Squeal of Death like?
AW: It’s a live-action Tex Avery comedy. I play about 15 characters in this film, but I play the main character and then his entire extended family. And the whole thing is shot—it’s like an acid trip. It moves at a hundred miles an hour, got a cast of thousands, it’s ridiculous. It was just absurdly ambitious. It was stupid.
C: How long is it?
AW: It’s a short. It’s only 16 minutes long. It’s a total cartoon. It’s basically taking the Bugs Bunny aesthetic and doing it live-action. And it moves at just a hundred miles an hour, it’s very cartoony, it’s got an enormous sound effects bed, and it did really well for us. We hooked up with Sam Raimi [director of the Evil Dead films] as a result of that and he was a big fan of it. It sort of made the circuit run—it was on cable TV and stuff like that. That got us a bunch of jobs in our early days in LA.
C: So, tell me about “The Idiot Box”—was this before or after Bill and Ted?
AW: “Idiot Box” was between Bill and Ted I and II. I’d done Bill and Ted I—Tom and I at that time had been writing spec scripts and shooting videos. We’ve done a ton of music videos.
C: Does that pay well, shooting music videos?
AW: It paid okay. We were living in a crummy, you know, we were living a pretty bohemian life.
C: In New York?
AW: In LA. I moved to LA after film school. Basically all the money from my acting was going back into shooting stuff, so we would do these sort of elaborate short films and throw a lot at whatever videos we were doing. In those days, actors didn’t make even—I mean, this was the mid-80s. Lost Boys and Bill and Ted just sort of happened after film school for me. I got in the car and drove to LA. And they didn’t make then what they do now—they made pretty good money, but I wasn’t making millions of dollars. A lot of my money was going back into just being able to shoot as much as possible. After Bill and Ted I became a hit, they came to me—MTV came to me—and asked if I wanted to do the whole VJ thing, what eventually became “Totally Pauly.” They wanted me to be Bill for the entire afternoon slot.
C: And they found Pauly Shore?
AW: Yeah, exactly. I said no. But I said, you know what, we had this anthology comedy script, which Sam Raimi was trying to produce for us, trying to get off the ground. This was right around the time he was doing Darkman. He couldn’t get it off the ground, so we said, no, I don’t want to do this “Valley Dude” MTV VJ thing, but, I do have this TV series idea, which basically became “The Idiot Box,” which was a very aggressive, over-the-top comedy series, which they went for.
C: I haven’t seen it. It was skit-based?
AW: It was a character-based skit comedy, more like a British comic show than an American one, I guess. There are shows in England called “The Fast Show,” things like that, which are very similar to what we did. It was real Python-esque, you know, it was just really weird, really violent, really absurd. It was an ensemble. We all played all the characters. It was really fun. We wrote it and directed it ourselves. It was a hit for MTV, but they paid no money at all, and at that point 20th-Century Fox had become interested in another script that we had. We went and did that instead of doing more “Idiot Box” episodes.
C: How long was “Idiot Box” on?
AW: “Idiot Box” was only on for six episodes. It was a really short run. We could have kept going, but my heart’s in features and so is Tom’s. We really sort of looked at that as a way to get into the features game. We went and made Freaked instead.
C: Let’s backtrack a little bit to Bill and Ted. How did you get involved in that?
AW: Essentially, I had done Lost Boys at Warner Brothers, and I just auditioned for it. I still had agents, stuff like that, from when I’d been a teen theater actor. Those were the guys who sent me out on commercials and all that. When I got out to LA after film school, I was looking for some acting gigs to pay the rent. So I got the Lost Boys job, which was a pretty big movie and ended up sort of putting you in a higher roster of people to look at. So then I auditioned for Bill and Ted and it was a long, drawn-out, arduous audition process.
C: Keanu Reeves wasn’t known then really, was he?
AW: No. He was about to break—he had done a bunch of movies that were in the can that hadn’t come out yet. In the industry, he was already thought of as someone who’s about to become pretty hot. I wasn’t anybody. I was just this kid from The Lost Boys as far as they were concerned. As far as I’m concerned, I was just some punk kid from Venice who was making weird movies on the weekend. I just auditioned for it…and eventually I just happened to get it. At the time, it wasn’t really anything—we shot and it sat on a shelf for a year because it was made at DeLaurentiis and DeLaurentiis went under. So the movie got canned for a year, during which time I just kept shooting. I was in Austin, Texas, shooting a Butthole Surfers movie, when someone called me and told me Bill and Ted came out and had made, like, 12 million dollars that weekend. It was pretty funny. I’d forgotten about it.
C: What was that like, to have this movie in which you’re portrayed as this kind of know-nothing, “dude this, dude that” guy come out and then suddenly it’s like, “Oh my god, this movie is big and I’m an idiot in it?” I’m not going to critique your acting, but the image of the characters in the movie—you and Keanu are dummies.
AW: Exactly. At the time—frankly, even now—it was really kind of fun and funny for me in an ironic way, and in a non-cynical way, because the film was really fun to make, and I enjoyed it—the writers are really bright guys, well aware of what they’re doing, and were very caustic and sharp guys. It wasn’t like I was in “The Mickey Mouse Club” and we had to pretend that this was really groovy. Everybody was in on the joke, so shooting it was really fun, for that reason. Clowning has always been something that I’ve loved, and that’s what Bill and Ted are. They’re just clowns. It isn’t really acting in the conventional sense—you’re just clowning. Clowning is a blast—I love to do that stuff, especially coming from a family of dancers. To me it was just like—it was not that disconnected from that world. As time went on, I found that most of the fans were pretty down-to-earth, normal people who really got that it was not to be taken too seriously. It’s kind of funny to me that some people just don’t have any clue, you know, and really do think that that’s who I am. But it’s kind of amusing. It doesn’t really bother me that much. It never really became that much of a stigma—I think, frankly, because Keanu was attacking acting with more vigor than I was, it became harder for him for a few years, because everyone just thought he was a raging moron, and he isn’t.
C: That’s what I was just going to ask you—if Keanu was a raging moron.
AW: And he isn’t. For that I feel kind of bad, because it’s taken him a long time to shake that image. He’s really good in the movie, and it just seems like that’s who he is, know what I mean? And he’s not. He’s a really well-read, really interesting and intelligent guy. He’s one of the only actors I’ve ever remained friends with, because he’s a really smart guy. But for me, it was a goof, so I had this total double life—I’d go and do this acting stuff, and even when I was a kid it was a double life when I would go and do my film work. I never really connected the two together. I guess it became a point after Bill and Ted II, where it was really becoming all-consuming. At that point I made Freaked, which was really very much a protest about teen comedies and movies and Hollywood in general, and then I left LA—I fired my agent and quit the business for about a year or so. (laughing) I guess it must have had some kind of impact.
C: Did you get recognized on the street as Bill?
AW: I still do. All the time. Anywhere.
C: Here in Woodstock?
AW: Oh sure. Anywhere. In London. In the middle of nowhere. In the middle of Southeast Asia, it happens to me. One of the funny things is, when I was shooting Freaked and I had this really radical makeup job, where my whole head was covered with this phantasmagoric makeup—and I was directing it as well, co-directing it with Tom, so I didn’t have any time to sleep, so I’d sleep in the makeup, which I could get away with for four days before it started to rot—and one morning I was in this dark underground parking lot, at this place where we were staying while we were shooting.
C: Where was this?
AW: This was in LA. This was a businessmen’s apartment complex, and there were a bunch of Korean businessmen going to their cars, and I was going to my car—and my whole head was covered in this monster makeup—when these Korean guys stop, and they look at me, and they point and go, “Bill and Ted!” That’s when I knew that I’d passed some kind of cultural boundary. My face had just become instantly recognizable.
C: What are your feelings about being so recognizable?
AW: It’s always been mixed. I like to act, it’s fun. I hate the recognition stuff. I hate being known. I like leading a fairly anonymous existence. Even here I kind of tend to hide, but not in terms of not being present in the community—I’m actually totally happy just roaming around the community—but just the whole idea, I don’t like dealing with that stuff. I see certain celebrities up here hanging out, and they’re like, “I’m the celebrity hanging out here today,” and that’s bullshit. It’s nothing that I’ve ever wanted to be part of. After the stuff started to get thick…it was a road that I ended up going down that I didn’t really intend to ever go down. I remember Neil Young—there was this great quote after he made Harvest and “Heart of Gold” became this huge hit—he said he suddenly became middle-of-the-road, so he decided to drive his car into a ditch, you know, to get out of the road. That’s kind of what I did after Bill and Ted II.
C: So what did you do after Bill and Ted II?
AW: I made Freaked, which as I said was very much a kind of protest to celebrity—I mean, it was absurdist, it wasn’t any kind of arch-political statement. It was fun. It was done in the spirit of the comedy that Tom and I were doing at the time. It was very much a statement about ‘80s-Hollywood and celebrity and youth culture celebrity. And then I split—I just bailed out of that life for awhile.
C: I saw that you do a lot of commercial work. Who have you filmed commercials for?
AW: Oh man, I’ve done them for everybody. I’ve done dozens and dozens. I just did a huge campaign here for Supercuts, which is coming out next week.
BM: Supercuts?
AW: It’s a chain of hair salons. And they’re really funny. I don’t do dogs-running-in-slow-motion-after-a-toilet-roll type ads. I do pretty creative, weird, comic ads. For me it’s a really fun way to stay short—I’ve always liked the short story format; it’s the kind of thing I used to do a lot of at NYU. Commercials are a way for me to kind of make little movies, sort of the equivalent of the Buster Keaton shorts. It’s the kind of thing you don’t have any outlet for today. If you choose carefully what scripts you want to do—I’ve done some really funny ads and some really inventive and creative ads. I don’t tend to have to do “sell this product” kind of stuff, and that’s one of the reasons I went to England, because their advertising is really far out. So I got to do some really far out stuff over there. Now I’m doing some far out stuff here. For me, I prefer to do it as a way to stay anonymous and keep shooting, rather than have to find some other way, between movies, to pay the bills—like being ridiculously celebrated again. [laughs]
C: I read the director’s notes on the Fever Web site [www.fever-movie.com] and you mention the influence of filmmakers like Lindsay Anderson, Luis Buñuel and Mizoguchi. How does it all come together for you? They seem like very different directors.
AW: The thing about movies is that there are so many different directors, so many different styles, and yet there are things with different kinds of people that you can pull out and that you end up referencing. The things that are similar between Buñuel, Misaguchi and Lindsay Andersen, and a lot of other directors as well, is that those guys were all making pretty dreamlike and intense—they’re using the medium to its fullest, in a way. They’re not filmmakers who could have written books instead of made movies. John Sayles, for instance, is a great director. His movies would often be just as good as books. He’s a great writer; he writes good short stories; he’s a really talented novelist and writer and sometimes you watch his movies and, yeah, it’s a great movie, but, I could also have read this. Sometimes, you see a movie, and you think, “this would be a great play.” I tend to gravitate toward moviemakers who are really cinematic; you look at the film and go, there’s no way you could do anything with other than make a movie out of it. I’d say it’s probably what binds most of the directors I like together—people who use the language in a really pure kind of way. The reason I was doing really extreme comedy for a while when I was younger is, it seemed to me at that age that that was a really good way to do something that was very kinetic, very intense, very visual, because comedy of course, plot-wise, is usually pretty intense.
C: Let’s talk about Fever. What did the New York Times call it? A “somber paranoid trip” or something? Where did the movie come from? There is a very dreamlike character to it. The dream is emphasized by everything being seen through the eyes of the main character, so you never know quite what to believe. It’s like the idea of the ‘unreliable narrator’ in fiction. Where did the concept come from?
AW: The concept came from the fact that I really wanted to do a thriller, that I wanted to tell a story about New York City. I wanted to tell an urban story. And I wanted to tell a story about people in the city who I thought weren’t being talked about. It started to branch out in a way—it became a bit more universal in my head—because I just thought that there were so many movies, and so many stories being told about the modern young person. And yet so few that really had anything to do with people who I actually knew, in what I considered to be really universal dilemmas for modern people of the 20-something, early 30-something set. Initially I really wanted to tell a story about what it’s like to be a young adult in these times—they’re really weird times, you know? Post-60s and now post-80s, post-Reaganite era, and there’s a lot of people who just don’t quite know where to go and how to fit into the modern world.
C: You’ve said that Fever a noir movie. What do you think makes noir tick?
AW: The thing about it that’s great—and comedy is like this too, in a lot of ways, and that’s why the two mediums are very similar—is noir is an existentialist medium. It always has been, and it’s always about existentialist themes. In fact, The Stranger was a total noir book, if you want to look at it that way. So was a lot of Dostoyevsky, you know. Noir grew out of that—the whole idea of the Notes From Underground, I think. Taxi Driver and Notes From Underground are so similar. I remember Truffaut asked Hitchcock why he never did Crime and Punishment, and it’s a funny thing to ask Hitchcock, you know? And yet I understand why he asked him that, because Hitchcock made these really noir stories, and noir and that kind of existentialism, I think, are very, very connected.
C: Why do you think noir and comedy are connected?
AW: I think because comedy—really extreme comedy—is about the absurdity of existence. If you look at anything from Keaton to Chaplin to Monty Python—if you look at The Meaning of Life or The Life of Brian or Modern Times (the Chaplin movie) or a really great Keaton movie—all these movies are about some poor bastard trying to figure out how to exist and failing, usually, on some level, and that’s funny and you laugh at it. Well, noir is the dark side of that same coin. You take a story where some guy has lost his identity and someone’s dead in his bedroom. He doesn’t know who it is, he doesn’t know who he is, and it’s almost funny if it wasn’t so damn tragic. That’s the difference between the two genres, I think. You’re talking about extreme sides of both genres, but noir is a fairly extreme genre, and comedy, at its best, is usually pretty tragic on some level or some aspect of it, and it’s tragic in an existentialist kind of way. It’s usually about existence and the trouble and the difficulties of existence.
I think there’s about to be a real resurgence in both of those genres. I found out that Steven Soderbergh, after Traffic, is going to do these noir movies, and Aranofsky just did Requiem for a Dream. We’re starting to get back into the courage to look at these issues again, and I have a feeling comedies are going to start to get more extreme. We’ve had a very light era the last 10 years—pretty shitty movies, for the most part, and I think we’re going to have another, kind of, Golden Age, because I think we’re getting more confident to address these kinds of issues, the complexities of living in these times. There have been directors who I feel have done that. I think that Lynch did that with Lost Highway; I think Kubrick did it with Eyes Wide Shut; I think Eyes Wide Shut is a really underrated and overlooked movie, and actually, he’s having a last laugh from the grave, because I think that film’s going to thematically usher in another era of a very noirish sort of stories.
C: You took Fever to Cannes.
AW: Yeah, we got accepted into Cannes. We were just finishing the movie, and frankly I had no idea—
C: Had you ever been?
AW: I’d never ever been to the festival, and I’d been out of the loop for a while. I made the movie on pretty innocent terms. We just wanted to go and make this movie our own way, and not worry about the market, and not worry about how we’d do with distributors and all that stuff. So we had pretty humble ambitions for it. When I found out they wanted it, I was pretty excited that we got into the Directors’ Fortnight, and it wasn’t done yet—we were still trying to get it done. The print that went there was not totally finished. It was pretty insane. It was a great experience.
C: What do you mean, insane?
AW: Cannes is not what it used to be. There are so many movies that get made in Europe now, and there’s so much financing that comes out of Europe for American movies, that Cannes is really now a heavily market-driven festival. It was really hard for me because it was an amazing year for movies. We’ve jut come out of a very bad year for movies, but that year was fantastic. It was ’99 and we had had some fantastic movies come out that year. All About My Mother was that year; The Straight Story was that year; Ghost Dog was that year. You just had these great filmmakers come out with great movies, and nobody was paying attention to the movies that were showing. It was all just a market. All day people were doing deals. It was like a feeding frenzy. So it was kind of depressing from that level. The gala screenings for our film and stuff like that, that stuff was great, it was really fun.The festival itself was a real indicator of where movies are right now and what a frenzied mess the whole thing is.
C: How much did Fever cost to make?
AW: Three million bucks.
C: Cheap.
AW: Cheap. [laughs]. We had made the movie with independent financiers. It’s almost like mortgaging a house. You get a bank loan from a bank, you have to pay them back, you don’t have a distributor on board. The whole thing was done with foreign independent financing.
We’re getting into a weird period with movies, because there are so many different forms of distribution because of the Internet and all this jazz now, that there are more and more options for how films get made then there ever have been before. We live in a time when there are so many movies being made, and distributors don’t have the ability to market them all. So what ends up getting marketed is generally pretty safe stuff.
There is an impulse right now, among certain filmmakers, to make a certain kind of a movie that the market has not caught up to.
C: Your more commercial work is in directing TV commercials and music videos. How do these forms relate to the development of your filmmaking style?
AW: I’ve been using the music video format and the TV commercial format in order to get the tools into my toolbox. The problems with features is that, if I had tried to do that with movies, if I had gotten a job on a mainstream commercial movie, there’s no way they would have let me do anything experimental or radical. You do a commercial or something like that, you get to experiment. You’re on, you’re off it, in three weeks to a month, as opposed to a year-and-a-half that it takes to make a movie. It gives you that forum to experiment, that I would just never have. I mean that’s why I still like to do it. I still like to shoot ads and videos because it means that I can get off a movie like this [Fever] and not have to go right on to some cheeseball commercial movie where I have to undo everything I’ve just spent all this time trying to do. And that’s been the trick.
C: What’s your next project?
AW: I’ve been writing another film for the past year, which I’m hopefully going to do in the next year. It takes place over the cusp of 1979-1980 in the Broadway world. It’s sort of using the death of Broadway and that side of New York City as a metaphor for the beginning of America as a sort of corporate, globalized, kind of culture.
C: What was happening on Broadway at that time?
AW: Well, I was there. I was on Broadway in ’79-’82 and that was when Times Square was demolished and rebuilt. All these old theatres got torn down and all these gigantic hotels were built.
It’s a story about an orphan living on the streets of New York City during this time period.
C: It’s a comedy?
AW: It’s a comedy with a lot of pathos. The 400 Blows meets All That Jazz.
C: Great. I look forward to seeing it. Thanks for talking with me. We’ve covered a lot of ground in the past hour, so this interview will not appear in full, I’m going to edit it down to some pithy fragments.
AW: Sure, it’ll read something like: “Al ‘Bill’ Winters says, ‘Excellent!’ to his new film career.”
[Laughter]
C: Exactly.