“When I was young and I went from acting to directing and people would always say, ‘Oh, are you doing that so you have more control?’ ” remembers Alex Winter. “I’m like, ‘Are you kidding? Directors have more bosses than anybody — you’re delusional!’ “
Best known onscreen as one half of Bill & Ted (he’s Bill), Winter has built a directorial career that has included everything from features to docs, television and music videos. His latest feature, Adulthood, revolves around a brother and sister, played by Josh Gad and Kaya Scodelario, who are taking care of their elderly mother after a stroke when they discover a long-buried body in the basement of the family home. The film, which is set to screen at Toronto before heading into a limited theatrical release Sept. 19 via Republic Pictures, also marks Winter’s return to narrative filmmaking after a prolific string of award-winning docs with subjects that run the gamut from child stardom to Frank Zappa.
Winter will soon appear onstage opposite his Bill & Ted co-star Keanu Reeves in the Broadway revival of Waiting for Godot, but he took some time off from rehearsals to talk Adulthood, leaving NYU film school to work with Joel Schumacher and pulling off his biggest set piece: “I’m sure my cast was ready to kill themselves and me.”
How did Adulthood come together?
It was something that I built from the ground up. I’ve always been an indie filmmaker. That’s how I even started making the docs. I had a feature based around Napster at Paramount that went into turnaround and spent so much time writing the script and meeting everyone that it was kind of easy to convert it into a doc [2013’s Downloaded]. But my producing partner, Russell Hollander, and I knew [screenwriter] Michael Galvin. I was looking to do a potent but relatively low-budget, character-driven crime drama with comedy. I had a really specific genre in mind, one I knew I could keep to a relatively modest price so that I could get it made and have creative control. I built the movie completely independently. I went directly to cast and attached the cast, and then we went after financing. We did it old school. I really built it like I would have an independent movie of any stripe going back to the ’90s. People are like, “Dude, how did you get a movie made in this climate?” I wanted to make a narrative film, it had been a long time, and I thought, “Screw it!” I’m going to do it the way I always did it. And I built it the same way I built my movie Fever in 1997, which was foreign presales, keep the budget low and find the North American piece.
What was it about the story that interested you?
The docs that I’ve made have all been topical in some way or another. They’re either outwardly political or sneakily political. Zappa had political elements, but it’s not outwardly so. This movie, to me, is about the impossibility of adulthood in the modern era, for anyone. The middle class is over — there is a facade of having a normal life when everyone is one [bad break] away from financial calamity. It’s really Kaya’s story. The amount of inner tension that is required to hold together what is the most seemingly normal, regular middle-class existence with a working husband and two jobs and kids and a house and a crazy brother and your elderly mom, and, obviously, the skeleton in the proverbial closet. It really is very much about the present-day conundrum that everyone faces — especially for women.
How does having your background as an actor influence your directing?
I was doing both from a young age. I was making films when I was little, and then I was on Broadway all through my teens. But I was shooting films then and saving up money to go to film school, which is what I wanted to do. I left Peter Pan [the Broadway production], which I’d been in for years, and went to NYU film school. I dropped out of NYU to do Lost Boys because Joel Schumacher was like, “You could go to your senior year or you could star in a movie for Warner Bros.”
When you put it like that …
That’s kind of how I felt, but I think my mom had a different idea. “You’re doing what for what!?” I came out to L.A. and was immediately shooting commercials and music videos. Especially having been a child actor, I had a really set idea of how I wanted to be spoken to by directors, and it helped me a lot to work with actors as I started directing. The acting has been just enormously helpful in getting cast and having them trust me and know that I have their back. All movies are hard, but making a super ambitious movie like this — it was fucking hard.
Was there one sequence or set piece or shot that you weren’t sure you would be able to pull off?
There is a sequence on a bridge in the movie. That sequence I had storyboarded three years before I made the film, and it was incredibly ambitious — too ambitious, frankly — for the movie. Chris [Mably, the cinematographer] looked at my boards and also had a ton of ideas that were also too ambitious for the movie. We both decided that, like a Hitchcock movie, I knew the film needed a huge, grand exterior centerpiece. It is really important for a noir, and the story needed it. I really focused my energies on being able to pull that sequence off. We had high-powered drones. We had cameras 400 feet in the air. We’re shooting on the largest walking bridge in North America in ridiculous heat. I’m sure my cast was ready to kill themselves and me, but it’s my favorite sequence in the movie.
Noir seems like a difficult genre to make independently.
And we’re not going to get reshoots. It’s not like Fatal Attraction, where we have the money to go test it and go, “Oh shit, our ending doesn’t work. Let’s reshoot the ending.” You don’t have that. You’ve got one shot at it.
Is having that pressure ever beneficial for you as a filmmaker?
We’re doing this play right now, and Jamie Lloyd, the director, and Keanu were talking about this today: What’s the difference between making a film and making a play? With the play, you have the freedom to get onstage and do whatever you want for that two hours, but it also has to work. You don’t get another shot at it. If you screw that up, you’ve blown the play for the night. It’s similar in indie [filmmaking]. There’s this weird combination of it being liberating and incredibly restrictive. And I like that. I like that challenge of having that liberation but also having to get it right, and knowing that you don’t get to go back. It’s funny, when I do docs people sometimes ask me in Q&As, “How do you know when it’s over?” I’m like, “It’s over when I fucking run out of money!”
This story appeared in the Sep. 3 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
