Bill & Ted Face the Music came out on Friday, which found Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves slipping back into their iconic roles for the first time in nearly 30 years. It's a terrifically entertaining film, funny and sweet and very much in the spirit of the first two movies -- you can read our review here.
Keanu and Alex just were on Apple Music Radio talking about Face the Music and how music figures into it and their lives. When asked if the Bill & Ted soundtracks mirrored their own personal tastes, Keanu said, "Yeah, often times the music, for me, was like... Van Halen was kind of like the source for Bill and Ted. And often times the music, other than people who were on camera, the music and maybe Steve Vai. The music came after, when Alex and I were finished."
Winter added, "Sometimes they were talking about bands that didn't ever end up in the soundtrack. Now there's a spirit to the movies, a certain kind of rock and roll spirit, and the soundtracks tend to kind of imbue that spirit with the times, with whatever is kind of happening at that time...the references for us are Megadeth, Van Halen, sort of other kinds of pretty heavy, hard rock bands." He continued, "The soundtracks have never tended to really represent much of that kind of music. They tend to be a little poppier. I knew about Extreme. I actually directed a music video for Extreme, after Bill and Ted One. Keanu and I are very different than the characters. And we're not two guys from the Valley. We're not from the West Coast at all. And I think there's some crossover in our musical interests with some of the things that Bill and Ted like, but we're very different than them. So our own musical taste is quite different than Bill and Ted's musical taste."
The interview also hit on some of their formative musical experiences, like Alex Winter seeing KISS as a kid and being a member of the KISS Army. "I saw KISS at the St. Louis Checkerdome in 1977," he says. "It was an era when concerts were so loud that literally... and, we got to go on our own. I didn't have to go with my parents. My and my buddies on our own. KISS was so loud that none of us could hear for like two full days after the show. It was just like a ringing sound."
Winter is more of a director than an actor these days: his documentary Showbiz Kids recently premiered on HBO, and he also directed an upcoming documentary on Frank Zappa which he spent six years making and was supposed to premiere at SXSW this year till COVID-19 got in the way. "I pitched this thing to Gail, to Frank's widow, as a film that would hopefully really convey who he was as an artist, and the time that he lived in. And we get into the history of music, we get into the sexual revolution, and the MTV revolution, and the Czechoslovakia revolution. And Frank was at the middle of the center of all of these things. So it's just an extraordinary life. And I'm really, really grateful we got to make it. So hopefully folks will like it." The film will be out in November via Magnolia Pictures.
Apple Music also asked Keanu about his '90s band Dogstar and how there's a possibility of new music. "I still play bass. I jam with the drummer and then I guess the past year, Bret Domrose and Robert Mailhouse, who I played in Dogstar with, we've gotten back together and started playing the old songs and starting to try to write some new stuff. So, I mean, we hadn't played together for 12 years or something like that, but it's been fun." Stay tuned.
You can watch the Bill & Ted Face the Music trailer below.
