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Alex Winter, the ‘Bill and Ted’ actor who is himself a renowned director and producer, saw Frank Zappa’s story as an icon who embodied all things music and culture in the 1970s. At the same time, he wanted to capture the man behind the myth. With the blessing of Zappa’s wife, Gail, he and producer Glen Zipper set out to uncover the history of the famous envelope pusher, with access to the infamous legend vault. Winter spent years restoring the archival material in front of him, working to preserve the material that Zappa himself had gathered before his death in 1993.
Winter spoke Variety on the genesis of “Zappa,” released November 27, as well as the private life and politics of one of America’s most eccentric artists.
What was your relationship with Frank Zappa growing up and how did the idea for a doc come about?
I grew up in the 70s and he was this towering icon of both music and culture, but also politics, comedy and the sexual revolution. He embodied so many things. … I was struck by how there had never really been a thorough history that showed you who he was. It seemed like a fantastic documentary idea because he was such a paradoxical and contradictory person, and those types of topics are perfect for great documentaries. My producer Glen Zipper and I tried to get the rights to do it. We met Gail Zappa and spent a lot of time introducing her to her take, and we were very lucky that she liked the take and gave us access to her safe. We then spent two years of our lives doing preservation work before we could even start making a documentary.
How do you and Glen know each other?
Glen and I have been working together for some time. We had just released another movie together, “Deep Web,” one of at least four feature films at this point. He has an incredible history with making musical documentaries and I knew he would be fantastic as a partner – that he would understand that this story is also about politics, socio-politics and world culture.
What was it like being in the Zappa Vault you see in the documentary, having access to it and then having to work on restoring the material?
Gail said she was going to give me access to the vault, and I had heard of that vault, but I had no idea how big it was going to be. Frank was a smart man who often said one thing and meant the opposite. He always talked about how much he didn’t care about his heritage and what he left behind, and he always talked about how much he didn’t care about the press. These things turned out to be very far from reality. He had painstakingly rescued, gathered, and reoriented all the media that had to do with himself: his life, his music, his art, his movie and everything that dated back to before he was born, so it was just endless. It also required conservation.
We started a Kickstarter campaign and used all that money to preserve the endangered media out there. My business was turned into a film preservation company for about two years and that’s all we did day in and day out.
We were working on 8mm, 16mm and every video format imaginable. There were some weird audio formats that we had to cook, heat, and resurrect. I was making three-quarter audio tapes while I was working. But we ended up on the other end with a lot of media preserved.
With this wealth of archives, how did you choose the format of the film?
My editor, Mike Nichols, is awesome. I approach my documents in a very narrative way, and what helped me tremendously given the variety of media we had was that we had a very specific story that we wanted to tell, and it didn’t. was not too wide. It wasn’t about trying to tick all the boxes in Frank’s life or his biography. It wasn’t a standard music doc either, and it didn’t go from album to album. It was as if we were telling the story of a man and what marked him from his childhood until his death and the choices he made, and the consequences of those choices. That’s really what prompted us to tell the story. It also made it easy for me to get rid of anything that didn’t fit the story. If that doesn’t move the story forward and it doesn’t enlighten your character in any way, get rid of it, that’s what we did.
Frank tells the story. How did it go during the assembly?
It was the hardest thing we did. Mike Nichols is so awesome – not just for the pictures, but also for the audio and soundscapes of construction. We wanted the film to have an impressionistic feel. We wanted to convey Frank’s humor and convey his artistic style of cut and paste and mash-up. But we didn’t want to be so abstract that it completely detaches the viewer from the emotional line of the story.
Our editorial timeline resembled a Jackson Pollock painting. We were cheating everywhere. One of the very first pieces we use clearly shows that we cut from 1968 to 1992 while it tells the same story, so we’re all over time and we cut and paste Zappa’s words – not manipulating his process of thought, because that would be unethical but convey his words through time. … It took us years to get it right.
You open up with him by speaking in front of an audience and his reason for playing the guitar. How did you decide that this moment was going to be the way?
I was very interested in getting the movie to start in a way that conveys the whole movie thesis without really saying what the movie thesis was. Here is a man who had a huge popular success, you know, he filled a stadium and he had extremely frank political views. But the human face expresses so many things without saying anything. At that point, when Zappa goes in front of this crowd, they don’t know and no one knew – because he hasn’t told anyone yet – that he was going to die. He’s had a final diagnosis and he’s going on, greeting the fans and he’s going to play his guitar and just play. It’s the last time he puts on a guitar. He was dead shortly after. But you can see in his face that it’s the end, and it conveyed a subtextual emotional power.
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