Director Alex Winter on Making ‘Zappa,’ the Definitive Frank Zappa Documentary

While the average moviegoer probably knows Alex Winter as Bill from the Bill and Ted films, he has been creating quite a career behind the camera as well — particularly in the area of documentaries. Some of Winter’s acclaimed docs include Deep Web, The Panama Papers, and from earlier this year, Showbiz Kids.

Now comes Winter’s most ambitious effort yet: Zappa, a full-fledged attempt at capturing one of the most complex and challenging artists of the 20th century, Frank Zappa. There’s no straight line to a true iconoclast like Zappa, no way to capture such an unconventional personality in a conventional way. The great news is Winter’s terrific film gets to the heart of what made Zappa tick.

In our conversation, we discuss the challenge of going through countless hours of media to assemble what Winter hoped would be an all-encompassing look at this most unusual life.

Awards Daily: What drew you to this project?

Alex Winter: I’ve always been a big Zappa fan and there had never been a definitive, expansive look at his life, and it really felt like that was needed. It was important to us to try. We didn’t know if we were going to get the sign off to do it, but we were very grateful that Gail Zappa, his widow, liked our take, let us run with it, and gave us all this access to the vault.

AD: Because Zappa self-recorded so much of his work, did that along with all the regular media coverage you had to draw from, was it challenging to assemble this film? In the sense that there’s almost too much footage to choose from.

AW: It was, without a doubt, the hardest thing I’ve done. There was an enormous amount of media to go through, a very complicated story to get right, but we were really up for it and grateful to be doing it. The material was so inspiring — everyday we were finding extraordinary nuggets (of information) that we didn’t know about him , or that world, or that era. But it was very hard.

AD: In the film, one of his band members, Ruth Underwood states that ‘he was consistent in his contradictions.’ Your movie is trying to pin down a very enigmatic character. What was it like trying to find him through all this footage and all of these interviews with people who knew him?

AW: I like making documentaries about people like that. I kind of seek them out. It’s a challenge as a doc filmmaker to humanize and find the integrity and the essence of somebody who is that paradoxical. I didn’t expect it to be easy. I had no illusions about that.

AD: I found him to be a very honest guy, but almost entirely unsentimental. The fact that he kept certain band members on staff for long periods of time was sort of their compliment. At the same time, the band members that you spoke to still seemed very attached to him despite his aloof, and perhaps prickly, persona.

AW: What I was looking for from the interview subjects, what I fully expected to find, was that people would have had an impression of him despite his contradictions, that they wouldn’t fall hard on one side or the other, that they would have a multi-faceted response. That’s really what we got. We got the sense from people that they loved him very deeply, and they were grateful for the time they got to spend with him, and at the same time, he was a real pain in the ass. (Laughs). A lot of people are like that. That’s part of the human condition. Zappa may be a more extreme version of it then some, but that’s really who we all are on a certain level. I think that was conveyed through the interview subjects. I think they very genuinely shared the personally contradictory ways they felt about him.

AD: Oddly enough, the artist who came to my mind in terms of the desire for perfection and productivity, and the difficulty of his personality, was Prince. Both of them were insanely prolific and willing to try anything and could also be very hard on their band and those around them. I think if you wanted to do the Prince documentary, you’d be well-qualified after this movie.

AW: [Laughs] I’m now that guy who can wade through infinite stores of musical vaults. I actually think there are great similarities in many ways between Zappa and Prince. Most obvious is their work ethic and their actual work process — very, very similar. Many albums going at the same time, things happening on multi-tracks that would get used on other projects, vast archives of musical elements that could get pulled in at any point, and then just making more records than anyone around them. They are uniquely similar.

AD: In the film, there aren’t a lot of talking head interviews. Was that planned, or does that go back to the plethora of footage that you had which allowed Frank to often tell his own story?

AW: I was hoping to do it (that way). I didn’t realize we were going to find so much visual and audio first-person perspective from Frank that had never been seen or heard before — there was hours and hours and hours of it. That allowed us to build the architecture of the narrative. It also guided us in terms of what we needed from the (interview) subjects. I would go to the subjects specifically to get things that I didn’t think I was able to get from Zappa. I didn’t necessarily wat to make a movie that was devoid of other people talking, because I really felt like it was important to have some outside perspective on Frank’s interior life, so it wasn’t just the unreliable narrator. No one is often less qualified to tell their story than the first person. I did want the counterpoint, but I didn’t want a lot of it.

AD: Some of what’s uncovered in this film is really novel. Like I had no idea that he was once a greeting card artist. As I was watching, I was thinking, ‘Who paid him to make these greeting cards? They are very strange.’ [Laughs]

AW: It was a strange era though. You could do weird counter-cultural things for a mainstream organization because they wanted to appeal to a wider audience. I knew he had done the greeting card thing, the biographical details of it, I didn’t know he was such a great artist — that he was such a great draftsman. Those were extraordinary skills to have on top of his musical abilities.

AD: In terms of his musical abilities, I think the thing that stuck with most through the film, is how diverse his output was: Rock, blues, jazz, orchestral — it’s all in there, but at the end of the day, he’s basically a genre unto himself. It’s just Zappa music. 

AW: I agree with you. And I think he did that intentionally. I think that above all, he was an avant-garde composer who used different genres to create his own brand of music. If you have to classify him, I think you would classify him as an avant-garde composer, I would definitely not classify him as a rock and roll musician.

AD: There’s a lot of Frank’s politics in the film. That’s actually how I got to know him back in the ’80s when he was challenging the PMRC. What’s interesting about his politics is that I think in general. you would say he was pretty liberal, but there were other strains of his perspective – particularly on work ethic and the idea that you can build yourself up on your own, that are more typically thought of as conservative traits. What do you think of his political viewpoints, and do you wonder what he’d have to say about our current political climate?

AW: I’m bemused by the commentary out in the Zappa universe right now. Every political corner is claiming Zappa for their own with 100% assuredness. The far left believes because the Constitution is being threatened and voting rights are being threatened that Zappa would be out there pounding on the causes of the left. The libertarians firmly believe that he would be a libertarian, and the conservative right absolutely believes he would be a Trump Republican in this day and age. That tells you a lot about how uninterested Zappa was in being assigned to or accepted by any particular movement, I can’t begin to say what his response would be to today’s (politics), other than what I do know about Zappa, what was a constant, is that he was very anti-fascism and very pro-voting rights. I think that tells you a lot of what he might say about now.

AD: One of the complications about getting into Frank Zappa and his music is simply where to start. There are just so many albums and recordings. On top of that, he wasn’t played on the radio often, and when he was, the songs that made the airwaves could be considered novelties (Don’t Eat The Yellow Snow, Valley Girl), which wasn’t the bulk of his work – even though a strong sense of humor can be found on many of his records. Is there a part of you that wanted to make sure you pleased the die-hard Zappa fans, while also allowing the movie to provide an introduction to the unaffiliated?

AW: Of course I did. I didn’t make the film with an agenda towards a particular audience. I really wanted to make a great movie about a fascinating person that worked on its own. That being said, I wanted people to come away with as deep an appreciation for him as I have, and I’m not a Zappa fanatic. The film is made for people who don’t like Zappa at all, people who don’t know Zappa at all, and people who love Zappa. That’s genuinely who we made it for without trying to exclude anyone, or make a piece of fan service. That’s something we were not doing.

AD: We talked earlier about what a mercurial person he was. When you finished the film after going through all this footage, did you feel like that was what I was hoping I’d have at the end of the day?

AW: I think so. There was a lot that was a surprise and a lot that was revelatory. This happens with any documentary, even if you don’t have limitless archival footage, which we kind of did on this one. We knew we had a story to tell and we looked for material that would really speak to his inner life and we focused on that material. That gave us boundaries. Within those boundaries we found absolutely amazing stuff  that shaped the story that sent us in different directions.

AD: It’s a very moving film about a person who isn’t that easy to reach. 

AW: I firmly believe that anyone who is viewed as cold and aloof has a heart and has deep emotion running through them, because all human beings do. I went into this film not with a desire to “crack Zappa” in some arrogant way, but certainly to find and convey his humanness, and we found it in spades. The mandate that Mike Nichols, the editor, and I had was what drives the story forward from an emotional standpoint? That was at the very forefront of our thinking with every editorial decision.

Magnolia Pictures’ Zappa will release in theaters and on demand November 27.