ALEX WINTER’S MOST EXCELLENT 12 MONTHS

Four high points of a totally non-heinous year for the actor-turnedfilmmaker

SAVING ZAPPA’S VAULT

When he’s not in the Wyld Stallyns, Alex Winter is an award-winning documentary filmmaker. His upcoming doc Zappa, about the musical visonary Frank Zappa, raised a record $1.1 million on Kickstarter. “My team and I spent two years just [digitising] the vault,” says Winter of Zappa’s archives. “It was painstaking. Then I had to find the money to make the movie, which was a completely separate effort.”

GOING BACK TO BILL & TED

Almost three decades after the air guitars of their last triumphant adventure, Winter and Keanu Reeves made their long-awaited return as the titular time-travellers in Bill & Ted Face The Music in 2020. “We’d been working on that film for ten years, so we put a lot of care into it,” says Winter. “I’ve been most gratified by people really enjoying the film who haven’t even seen the first two. That defies my wildest hopes.”

REVISITING CHILD STARDOM

For his documentary Showbiz Kids, also released in 2020, Winter interviewed a galaxy of former child stars — finding solidarity in stories all the way back to Diana Serra Cary, who received over a million pieces of fan mail in 1922 alone. “I was quite moved to be sitting across from Diana, who was 100 years old at the time, finding myself completely relating to what she had to say,” says Winter, a former child star himself.

FINDING THE LOST BOY

In the horror doc In Search Of Darkness, which arrived last summer, Winter relived his time on 1987’s The Lost Boys with the late director Joel Schumacher. “[Schumacher] had a very specific idea of what that film was,” says Winter. “A ’50s biker rebel movie combined with the garishness of the ’80s, plus the vampire aspect, and a teen comedy on top.”