Interviews
William Sadler On Reviving Death For ‘Bill & Ted Face the Music’ [Interview]
At the conclusion of Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey, Death (William Sadler) joined the Wyld Stallyns band after aiding Bill (Alex Winter) and Ted (Keanu Reeves) in their bid to return to Earth and defeat their evil robot counterparts. An integral role in saving the day, a series of news and magazine headlines over the end credits indicated the Wyld Stallyns had achieved massive fame, and that eventually Death, the bassist, had a major falling out and went solo. Bill & Ted Face the Music picks up twenty-nine years later, with Bill and Ted still as yet to achieve their destiny. As time is of the essence, you can expect Death to pop up once more on their latest journey.
Speaking with Sadler about his return to the franchise, he revealed, “I don’t think it’s been an easy 29 years for him. His musical career has gone down the toilet, and God is pissed off at him for bringing the guys back to life in the first place. You’re not supposed to do that, apparently. When we meet the Reaper in this movie, he’s in a pretty dark place. I don’t want to give away a plot point, but his solo career didn’t go well.”
That passage of time may have been a punishing crawl for Death, but slipping back into his character wasn’t so difficult for the veteran actor. With a laugh, Sadler jokes, “The robes are very slimming. No, I was surprised! I watched the first two movies again before I went to work on the third one, just to remind myself what I had done. I was really surprised at how easy it was to fall right back into this guy. He’s so much fun to play. He’s big, and he’s petulant, and his ego gets bruised really easy.” As for that earworm accent, that came easy too. “That’s how I get into the character. It’s Czechoslovakian; I think because I stole it directly from a Czech actor named Jan Triska, who I worked with in theater back in the ‘80s in New York. It’s this beautiful mutilation of the accent. Traditionally Death is the thing you’re most frightened of, but I thought if I gave him that accent, I could make him funny.”
The biggest hurdle in reviving Death for the sequel turned out to be the makeup. It wasn’t just the makeup process that altered a bit, but the actor’s response to it. “It took about the same length of time; it took three hours to get it all on. The technique is different now; they use airbrushes now instead of makeup brushes, sponges, and things. So, that was pretty much the same. What was different is that in the intervening years, I developed an allergy to makeups. My face started to burn and swell up. I would do it for a couple of days, then one night they’d take it off, and I’d wake up the next morning with my eyes swollen shut. We’d call the makeup team and tell them we needed to try something else. They’d try this, they’d try that, and finally, I was on prednisone to keep the swelling down. That part wasn’t fun, but the makeup is part of the transformation, and the transformation is a lot of fun.”
Because of his extensive career full of noteworthy films featuring ensemble casts, from Bill & Ted to Demon Knight to The Shawshank Redemption, it sparked a question of whether story or casting drives Sadler in choosing his projects. He explained, “Somehow, these projects pick me. I don’t do a lot of picking and choosing. If they come along and they’re interesting, I get involved. Like VFW, as soon as they started telling me who else was in it, I said ‘yeah, of course.’ Any time you can gather really talented professionals together and give them something that they can sink their teeth into, it’s just fun. It doesn’t get any better than that. I think that’s why VFW was so much fun for audiences because we all knew each other beforehand. The same thing happened with Shawshank. That was deliberate. That was Frank Darabont and Niki Marvin, when they put together the cast for Shawshank, there was a moment when they were talking to Tom Cruise to play Tim Robbins’ role. They even did table reads at Castle Rock. Frank didn’t want to use Tom Cruise because he didn’t want it to be a star vehicle; he wanted it to be an ensemble. They deliberately cast people who had strong theater backgrounds who create individual characters but play as a team. I’m pretty sure that’s why it worked as well as it did.”
We’ll have to wait for the release of Bill & Ted Face the Music to see if the Wyld Stallyns finally fulfill their destiny and create the music that saves the world. But we did ask the musically inclined Sadler if music or movies were the greater unifiers. Without hesitation, he answers, “Music. Music is just such a universal language. You don’t have to speak the same language; you don’t even need any equipment besides a human voice. The music that underpins the movies that we do is just as important. I hear the James Bond theme music, and my spirit starts to rise.”
Bill & Ted Face the Music releases on PVOD and in theaters August 28, 2020.
Interviews
‘Rubberhead’ Director Nick Taylor on FX Maverick Steve Johnson, Practical Effects, and Seven-Year Journey
Horror journalist, producer, and podcast host Nick Taylor moves into the director’s seat for his feature debut with illuminating documentary Rubberhead: The Life & Monsters of Steve Johnson.
It chronicles the wild life and career of SFX maverick Steve Johnson, based on the multi-volume book series Rubberhead: Sex, Drugs and Special FX, and those familiar likely already know Rubberhead isn’t your standard horror documentary.
Johnson is responsible for so many memorable movie monsters, having worked on Fright Night, Poltergeist II, An American Werewolf in London, A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master and Night of the Demons, to name a few. He’s also extremely candid in ways that feel atypical in this industry, open about his failures as much as his successes.
“It was a natural progression for sure,” Nick Taylor tells Bloody Disgusting of his transition into filmmaking ahead of Rubberhead‘s world premiere next week at the Fantasia Film Festival on July 23. “I think with my podcast, I got adept at interviewing people and pulling creative lessons out of them, which was the point of my podcast. I wanted this movie to be sort of a creativity pill for artists where if they’re starting a project or feel creatively stuck, they could watch this movie and be inspired and get actual practical creative lessons.”
Taylor’s background in PR and marketing also organically led him down this path.
He charts the course from book promo to documentary director: “But also Bloody Disgusting had a lot to do with this movie because in the very beginning when I first met Steve, I was helping him promote his book and I said, ‘Hey, I got a marketing background and a journalism background. Let me help you promote this book. I’ll just pitch stories from your life to the media, and we’ll see what happens.’ And John Squires wrote an article about Steve making Slimer under the influence of tons and tons of cocaine, and that went fairly viral.”
“For a week, it was story time with Steve,” Taylor continues. “He would tell me a story from his life, and every story was about a major movie, a major director, lots of drugs and alcohol and insanity. I would write them up, and I think John published about three or four of them. So huge shout out to John Squires because that was really great. So yeah, there were definitely a lot of outgrowths of my journalism background that definitely contributed to this movie.”
Rubberhead condenses the multi-book series into a cohesive feature film with a breezy runtime, sparking the obvious question as to how Taylor approached condensing Johnson’s life down to an under 2-hour documentary film.
“That was one of the more difficult parts of all of this, because we had enough for a series or an epically long six-hour fan documentary,” he answers. “But from day one, I did not want to make a fan documentary. I love them. They’re a lot of fun, but I did want the movie to stand on its own two feet as a character-driven portrait of an artist and a time period and a technology, that being practical effects. I did want to be objective. I didn’t want to make this too long. I wanted to make it re-watchable. So I think we just really had to focus on what the narratives were that we wanted to tell. So there were some basically almost cliché archetypical mythic narratives present in Steve’s life. We could have made this way longer, but we wanted to keep it short. But luckily that’s why you have special features.”
Johnson quickly proves to be an engaging subject thanks to his self-effacing wit and frank self-reflections; expect no shortage of stories about how drugs factored into the height of his career or the failures it wrought.
That rare quality was an asset for Rubberhead, Taylor confirms. “He does not shy away from anything about the drugs, the addiction, the bridges burned, the mistakes made, the lessons learned. He just is honest about all of it. He’s had a lot of time for reflection, and he’s done a lot of reflection, so he doesn’t shy away from any of it, which is huge because it’s very refreshing. I don’t think a lot of people are that way, at least in this industry from what I can see. So I think it was hugely beneficial. We wanted to lean into that, and we wanted to make this sort of a gonzo Hunter S. Thompson sort of wild tale through Steve’s overall life.“
Condensing his life into this doc was a slow and steady process for Taylor, too. “It’s been almost seven years. It’s been a labor of love. We’ve been as indie as it gets. We would shoot what we could when we could, and then we would edit when we could. Then after a while it all came together.”
In a way, making Rubberhead brings Taylor’s horror fandom full circle. It turns out that the very film that sparked his interest in the genre and practical effects also comes with an amusing Steve Johnson anecdote.
Taylor explains, “My gateway for sure was Beetlejuice. I saw that at a very young age; I think I was four or five. I felt somebody had shown me, my soul. I get a little emotional thinking about it. There was something about that movie that felt so strange and unusual, but also felt so familiar. It was spooky, but it was fun, and it was lighthearted, and it had humor, but it also had this macabre celebration to it that I just really got into as a kid. I felt somebody had shown me my own soul. And funny story, Steve got fired from Beetlejuice because Tim Burton gave him his hand-drawn designs and Steve’s like, ‘Oh my God, these look like kids did them. This is not what you want. I know what you want. I’m going to redesign these for you.’ And Tim Burton was like, ‘Yeah, no, you’re not.’ So yeah, funny story.”
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