BILL AND TED FACE THE MUSIC
NEARLY THREE DECADES AFTER EMBARKING ON AN EXCELLENT ADVENTURE AND A BOGUS JOURNEY, BILL AND TED ARE PREPARING TO FACE THE MUSIC. CREATORS CHRIS MATHESON AND ED SOLOMON TALK ABOUT THEIR RETURN TO SAN DIMAS
The most excellent slacker icons return (again) to save us all from gnarliness.
BOWLING AVERAGES were supposed to be way up, mini-golf averages were supposed to be way down. Alas, you only have to look at the news to see that the utopian future ushered in by the music of Bill S Preston, Esq, and Ted “Theodore” Logan has yet to come to pass. Turns out there’s a good reason for that…
When we catch up with the duo also known as Wyld Stallyns some three decades after their Bogus Journey, history hasn’t quite panned out as they expected. They’re still best friends, of course – Bill without Ted is like Kirk without Spock – but they’re yet to write the song that will bring the planets into universal harmony. Instead, in long-awaited threequel Bill & Ted Face The Music, original stars Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves are back as a pair of fiftysomething guys trying to work out why life hasn’t gone to plan.
“We knew that comedically that had to be the case,” Bill and Ted co-creator/Face The Music co-writer Chris Matheson tells SFX. “If they had written the song, well, we kind of had an idea of where that would go and we didn’t think it was funny.”
“I remember the idea that Alex and Keanu responded to was, ‘What would happen if it didn’t happen?’” adds Ed Solomon, the co-screenwriting Ted to Matheson’s Bill. “‘If this destiny that you heard as teenagers hadn’t fulfilled itself and you’re middle-aged now, what would that be like?’ I think it also led to the movie being more about where we are as people right now.
“When you’re a teenager you have a certain type of idea of what a fulfilment of your life dream would be, and everything is hopeful. But when you’ve been through a large chunk of your life and some things have gone well and some things are huge disappointments, it’s a denser, richer place to start a movie from.”
CHRIS & ED
Bill and Ted began when Matheson and Solomon played early versions of the characters in an improv class at UCLA in the early ’80s. As such, having the duo script Face The Music would seem something of a no-brainer, especially as they’d been working on an idea with Winter and Reeves since 2008. Unfortunately, the reality didn’t prove quite so straightforward – when they started writing a script on spec, they didn’t actually have the rights to the franchise.
Bill and Ted are very close and they have been for every day of the 30 years we’ve been away
“It was an extremely boneheaded thing to do!” laughs Matheson. “You would never recommend anyone to do that. If you write something on spec that somebody else owns, it’s like remodelling an apartment that you’re renting. It just makes no sense.”
“There was only one rights holder, so it wasn’t like we could shop it around town,” continues Solomon. “We found out after we wrote the script that they were interested in doing a Bill and Ted reboot, starting from scratch with a young Bill and Ted. That was kind of a bummer that we had to fight past. Then, as Keanu started to have this ‘Keanaissance’ as they call it, and audiences started hearing rumours, the possibility of a Bill & Ted 3 started trending in various social media places. The people who put up money for movies started to see that there was more of an audience for a Bill and Ted movie with the original cast than they’d realised.”
THEA & BILLIE
Wyld Stallyns haven’t quite lived up to the rock legend future promised by the newspaper reports in Bogus Journey’s end credits.
“I don’t think we wrote those,” admits Matheson. “We’ve tried to thread the needle by acknowledging those things, but for us those were not binding!” Nevertheless, Bill and Ted still live by their endearing “be excellent to each other” ethos.
“I think if they had made it, the only angle would have been that on some level they turned bad, or turned against each other,” says Matheson. “Then they’d have to find their way back to their true selves.”
“But in that scenario,” adds Solomon, “we would have broken key fundamental rules about Bill and Ted – they would never turn against each other, ever, ever. Because of that, the scenario would never hold up.
Life has kind of beaten the shit out of them [in Face The Music], yet they are still positive. But one of the things that makes this movie very different from Excellent Adventure is that the pressure has weighed on them. They’re the same inside, but time and disappointment have really challenged their
Bill and Tedn-ess.”
They’re also no longer quite so defined by their friendship with each other. Their relationships with their daughters, Thea Preston (Samara Weaving) and Billie Logan (Brigette Lundy-Paine), are just as fundamental to the men they’ve become. “Bill and Ted are very, very close and they have been for every day of the 30 years we’ve been away from them,” explains Matheson. “They live right next door to each other, like the Flintstones and the Rubbles, but they’ve grown up. They love their wives, they love their daughters – and they’re not still 17. But with regard to their music, they’ve gotten to the point where kind of nobody likes it. They essentially have two fans left on Earth – their daughters.”
This time the stakes are much higher than simply passing a high school history project. In Face The Music the whole of existence is on the line – and Bill and Ted only have 75 minutes (conveniently close to the running time of a comedy film) to save all of time and space.
“We approached this movie without thinking about the big stakes at all,” says Solomon. “It was the personal emotional stakes that we wanted to deal with, the pressure and getting their Bill and Tedness back. Over the course of a few drafts the stakes kind of grew into the movie. It evolved like Excellent Adventure did. That was really about Bill and Ted passing a history test so Ted doesn’t get sent to military school and they don’t get separated. Then after we wrote our rough draft, we came up with this other idea which made us laugh, which was what if their music was going to save the world.”
Beyond Winter and Reeves, Face The Music will bring back other familiar faces from San Dimas’ history, including Ted’s authoritarian dad (Hal Landon Jr) and the Twister-playing Grim Reaper (William Sadler).
“To the degree that there’s an antagonist in the first movie, I guess it’s Ted’s dad, and it’s not like he thinks any more highly of his son 30 years later!” says Matheson. “With Death,
we definitely wanted to find a way to get him in. Among other things he’s just super-fun to write. He’s just so insecure and pathetic and needy, while trying to act like he’s cruel. He’s just foolish and great.”
GEORGE & KELLY
Sadly there’s one of the key players in Bill and Ted’s world who won’t be back to face the music. Iconic comedian George Carlin – who played Rufus, the hapless duo’s guide from the future – died in 2008, leaving a big gap in the circuits of time. The writers confim, however, that the new movie will pay tribute.
“We talked a lot about how to honour George,” says Solomon. “When we realised that the theme of the movie is about family – and in particular fathers and daughters – that made it clear to us how we would go with the emissary from the future. George’s real-life daughter is named Kelly – she played a character from the future in the first movie, and has a brief cameo in this movie as well – so we named the character played by Kristen Schaal, who arrives from the future, Kelly.
“There’s also a brief moment with George. We at one point had this whole big scene, a bigger interaction, we were going to do, but we ended up not able to make it work for a variety of reasons.”
Being faithful to the franchise’s history seems key to the writers’ ethos, so don’t expect to see Bill and Ted trying too hard to appeal to a generation who weren’t even born when they first travelled through time.
“We’ve tried to make the version of Bill and Ted that feels true to us and makes us laugh,” says Matheson. “We love these characters and want to do right by them. And if you extrapolate from that, you’d say we want to do right by the people who love them too. We want to do a good job. Wouldn’t you agree with that, Ed?”
“At the end of the day I just hope that the people for whom these characters mean something are happy they have a chance to interact with them again.”
Bill & Ted Face The Music is released in cinemas on 28 August.