Back in the late 1980s, Ed Solomon and Chris Matheson were 20-something screenwriters hoping to get their script about a pair of time-traveling teenagers turned into a feature film. More than three decades later, Bill & Ted is a beloved comedy trilogy, with the long-awaited final installment, Bill & Ted Face the Music, finally releasing to glowing reviews and strong VOD results.
Part of the magic of Bill & Ted Face the Music rests with the continued creative guidance of the original writing team of Solomon and Matheson, who wrote all three entries in the trilogy, as well as returning actors Alex Winter, Keanu Reeves, and William Sadler reprising their roles from prior entries. Even 30 years on from their last adventure, Face the Music never loses sight of the endearing purity of the series and its characters. Bill & Ted are lovable dorks who want nothing more than to "be excellent to each other and party on, dudes!" That positive message continues into the new film, which sees the eponymous duo go on one last adventure to unite the world through the righteous power of rock and roll music.
While promoting recent release of Bill & Ted Face the Music, co-writer Ed Solomon spoke to Screen Rant about his work on the film and the long road they had to walk in order to make a movie of which they could be proud. He talks about the difficulty of making a sequel with actors over the age of 50 while the rest of Hollywood was more interested in a reboot starring young YouTube stars "new" Bill & Ted, and the stressful journey of raising the funds to make the movie. He also shares his dissatisfaction towards the ill-fated animated and live-action television adaptations of the franchise. Finally, he discusses the process of writing the breakout new character, Dennis Caleb McCoy.
I'm still pinching myself that this movie exists at all, and especially that it's so good.
Dude, I can't tell you how much I appreciate that, thank you.
I didn't see the first two movies until I was high school. I think a big thing about Bill & Ted is how the fandom has just continued to grow over the past three decades.
It's funny. When we first started this, when Chris and I were throwing ideas around, we didn't think people would even read the script, let alone that it would land somewhere, and let alone that people like you would find it and enjoy it. It's the reason we fought so damn hard to get Face the Music made. It was really hard to get it made. You know, once I realized that there were people who actually cared, I wanted to badly to have something for them that was worthy of their patience and affection. You never know how these things will land. You never know what people will think. I was nervous, hoping it would work for people.
It totally works! From the very beginning, the Bill & Ted series never carried even a drop of cynicism. It's so sincere and so... I don't know if it's the intended effect, but at the end, spoilers are on the table since the movie's been out for a little while, but I was crying like a baby during the performance of the big song at the end!
I'm glad! That was the trickiest thing in the whole movie to get right. Like, how do we make that reveal? Well, let me ask you a question, Zak: did you know that was coming?
I knew they were going to have to pull something out of their hat, but I wasn't quite sure what it would be.
In terms of the reveal, we weren't thinking that it was going to be a giant surprise for people. That made it even more complicated to try and make it have emotional power. I attribute that to Dean Parisot and Don Zimmerman, the director and editor. They had to work and rework and rework that sequence to get it to be as cogent as they could. And we were hampered, unfortunately, as many other people were, by Covid. It made it so that a couple of scenes we had planned to shoot, we originally planned... We wanted to cut the ending, the last 25-minutes of the movie, and then see what targeted re-shooting we might need. Well, I shouldn't say reshooting, but "targeted additional footage" we might need.
And by "cut," you mean assemble an edit, not remove from the film. Just making sure I'm on the same page.
And we had written a few scenes on set where the intention was, we don't know if we'll need them or not, but if we do, we'll make sure we save the money and time so we can go in and shoot some stuff. But we didn't have the ability to do that once the Covid situation hit. And our editing room got shut down, and people were working remotely from their houses. We lost a lot of time and manpower in many sad ways. But that was something I would really give the credit to Dean and Don, and Don's son Dave, that editing team.
It took years and years to get this movie into development, and then in the home stretch, Covid hits while you're still shooting. And now you're not getting the typical "victory lap" of red carpet premieres and parties with the guys who carry hors d'oeuvres on the plates with toothpicks and stuff... With this current experience, how have you been able to find out how people are responding to Face the Music?
I went to the opening of the film, kind of like a base runner trying to steal home, praying, hoping I'd get in under the tag, and knowing we had a lot of eyes on us. I was really unsure as to whether we'd hit our goal, which was to make a movie for ourselves that we were really proud of, and that would dignify the fans. That was the reason we fought so hard to get this thing made when it kept falling apart. I mean, it was falling apart up until two weeks before we shot. We lost a gigantic part of our funding, and we had to fight like crazy to not shut down. And the post-production process was slowed by such an extent that we were just... As opposed to being finished four months early, we were finishing a few weeks before we were releasing! So we didn't really know what we had. We didn't have the opportunity to do a series of test screenings. We did one test screening with an extremely rough cut to an audience of people who didn't know what they were going to see. It wasn't Bill & Ted fans. It was just random people who didn't know what the movie was. And we did notes based on that, but that was it. We couldn't do any more tests. We didn't know what people would think, we didn't know what people would take from it, and we didn't know what critics would say. So often, critics are... I'll use the word "disdainful," regarding Bill & Ted. So I just didn't know. That's a long-winded way of saying we didn't have time or the desire to do a victory lap. For me, I just felt a relief that it landed okay, and a sense of pride knowing that while not everybody likes Bill & Ted movies, and it's never been the case that Bill & Ted has been universally loved; it's polarized people, usually! There are people who love it a lot, and people who just can't stand it and never will ! (Laughs) And if you don't like the other two movies, you're not going to like this one, I guarantee you! That should be the one-sheet. I'm gonna call MGM and tell them, "This is your new slogan: If you hated Bill & Ted 1 and 2, you're gonna really hate Bill & Ted 3!" That's what I think will sell the movie. No, they won't want me to say that...
But that's so rock and roll. Like, we have the people who love this series, why would we do anything to push them away in favor of a different audience, like, for their parents or whatever?
Chris and I, the first thing we wanted to do, was telling a movie that's truthful to ourselves. Meaning it felt real and a natural extension. Like, where would Bill & Ted be right now? How do we make sure we don't cover old territory in a bad way? We didn't want to make a rehash. But at the same time, we wanted to honor the legacy of it in terms of what people might be expecting. So that was a somewhat tricky line to walk: how to make it emotionally truthful and make it fresh, and to make the fact that we're coming back 30 years later feel meaningful as opposed to lame. For us, we decided to not talk about what we think they would be; let's just see where we feel they are.
Yeah, in-universe it's 25 years later, and there's a lot of ways to approach that, and I'm glad you went in that particular direction.
Chris, myself, and Alex and Keanu were all on the same page there. We also didn't want to dress them up like they were then, to just have older Alex and Keanu acting like younger Bill & Ted, that felt lame. Then we got the notion of, "What if it never happened for them? What if they're still struggling to figure it out? What if that pressure that's put on them to fulfill some destiny they were given when they were teenagers, that they've been scraping and clawing to try to fulfill, what if that pressure has weighed on them so heavily that they've lost their essential, for lack of a batter word, Bill-&-Ted-ness, quote unquote?" And what if this movie is about getting that back? And what if getting that back means realizing that their adolescent fantasy, which is to have a rock band that saves the world and they get princess babes, is just an adolescent fantasy? As middle-aged adults, the most meaningful thing they can leave behind is the next generation. They give the world to them and let them make the most of it. I often wonder if people who don't have kids can understand, in a deep way, when Bill & Ted realize what they realize at the end. That they've been misguided. I don't know if people who don't have kids can understand that, I don't know.
I think I got it, and I don't have kids!
Well, you don't have kids that you know about. There's that person in Phoenix that I need to tell you about... You have a son. He's seven. You're gonna meet him really soon, he's a lovely boy! (Laughs) You owe a lot of back child support, by the way. No, but the original idea, from the very first meeting we had at Alex's house back in 2008, I think it was, between me, Chris, Keanu, and Alex... The original idea that Alex and Keanu sparked to was, "What if this movie is about relieving the pressure they've felt for not having lived up to what they thought they would be by the time they were this age?" That was the moment where we all went, "Aha!" That's what this movie is. From there, Chris and I were asked by Alex and Keanu to throw some ideas around and meet up again when we can, and advance it further. And then, once we knew that Alex and Keanu were actually open to it, Chris and I suddenly went, "Holy s***, are we going to do another Bill & Ted movie?" And, if we are, how do we make sure it's worthy of doing?
Yeah, I'm thinking about it right now, and thinking about how much happier they are having two amazing daughters than they are with the idea of having to write a song that's going to change the world. They clearly love their kids and their kids really love them back, it's obviously more important to them. It's almost like they're past saving the world, in a way.
There were a few things we were trying to avoid. One, that whatever the song is, it's not because of the quality of the song that the world is united. We knew we couldn't set it up and go, "Here's the greatest song ever written," and then have it in the movie and have the audience think it's the greatest song that's ever been written. That was a no-win. So we knew we needed to get ourselves out of that one. So it became not about the notion of the song itself, but the idea of getting everyone to play along. The other thing is, it's kind of a crowd-sourced song. It's not written by a single individual. It's about listening to others and incorporating their points-of-view. It's about, at the end of the day, everybody playing together. The other thing we wanted to avoid was "Bill & Ted are bad dads because they're focused on their work." That's not just a movie trope and a cliche, but it didn't feel right to us. I think Bill & Ted have a great relationship with their daughters. They love and trust their daughters, and their daughters have love and faith in their parents. That's not the crux of the drama.
There's none of that, "You don't get me, dad!" that we've seen a million times before.
Yeah, exactly. I like that the girls are different. I like that they're aficionados. They're the same as Bill & Ted in that they embody a benevolent spirit and they live in that, and I also love that they respect everyone they come across, and they're very insulated in that they've got each other, but probably not a whole lot of other friends. But they're different in that they're brilliant. They have a deep wellspring of knowledge. They really admire what came before them, and they respect that. They were fun to write once we figured that out about their characters. They became much more fun to write than when we were toiling originally with young Bill & Ted being very much like Bill & Ted. It felt very old and stale.
It doesn't miss a beat in 30 years, but it also doesn't feel like a nostalgia play. That could have been cheap and easy, compared to what you actually did here.
When we were writing it, I didn't go back and watch the original movies again. And I'm glad I didn't because they have a tone that's very unique to them, but I think I would have been trying to copy it. I think, not having watched them allowed us to make the tone of this movie, for better or worse, unique to itself and unique to where we were in our lives when we were writing it, as opposed to trying to mimic something that was of a different era and of a different part of their life and a different part of our life.
You said, back in 2008 was the first real progress on the movie. Before that, in the wake of Bogus Journey and the animated cartoon and live-action prime-time version... Wait, did you work on that at all?
GOD NO.
(Laughs)
Not even slightly.
Fair enough!
When we found out they were going to do a live-action TV show, I remember meeting with someone, I don't remember the guy's name, but we were like, "Okay, this is what you don't want to do with a Bill & Ted TV show." And he was like, "Wait, no, that's exactly what we want to do!" And then we were like, "Okay, but you're not going to do this lame blah-blah-blah, right?" And they were like, "No, that is what we should do!" Anyway, they did not hire us. It was not even offered to us. They didn't want us to have anything to do with either of the shows. I didn't see the cartoon or the live-action show. I didn't see either of them. You know, we didn't work on it and I didn't think it would be a pleasant experience for me to watch, so I didn't bother. I have a hard enough time watching stuff that I've written that I like! So watching something I didn't write that's based on something I really cared deeply about, that was not going to be a great experience for me.
So, post-Bogus Journey, was there ever a thought to doing an immediate Bill & Ted 3?
No. I don't think anybody thought we'd do another one. I don't think Bogus Journey did well enough. Excellent Adventure did barely well enough to warrant a sequel, and then Bogus Journey didn't do well enough for us to do another movie. We thought it was over. We were certain it was over after that, and Chris and I figured, hey, Bill & Ted is a manifestation of where we were as young adult writers, and that's okay. That's where they'll live. We both kind of moved on. It wasn't until closer to... I want to say the early 2000s, maybe 2003 or 2004... Keanu and Alex both kept getting asked if there was going to be another Bill & Ted movie. We started asking ourselves, "Is it possible?" But basically, Keanu would always brush it off. And Keanu's managers at the time were adamant, you know, "There will NEVER be another Bill & Ted!" I remember meeting with his manager, a guy named Erwin Stoff, and I remember sitting down... Oh, and here's why: there was an interview, maybe a red carpet somewhere, and somebody asked Keanu, "Would you ever be up for doing another Bill & Ted movie?" And Keanu said something like, "I wouldn't rule it out completely," And Chris and I went, "Wait a minute, did he just not completely blow it off but actually affirm that it's not utterly impossible?" So I met with Keanu's manager, this guy Erwin, and I asked, "Do you think this is something that's possible?" And he just said, "Look at me. Read my lips. Keanu will never be Ted again." And he basically kicked me out of his office.
S***!
For deigning to waste his time on this! So I thought, "Oh well, I guess that's where we are, then." Then, they kept getting questions about it, and Keanu kept saying it wasn't definitive. This led to a conversation in 2007 with Alex, where we were like, "Can we talk about it? If we had an idea we all thought was good, would it be worth it? Can we do it justice?" And we had dinner, we had a BBQ at Alex's house in 2008, the four of us, and that's where we threw these ideas around and started talking about it seriously. Keanu's attitude, I actually asked him at that dinner. I remember saying, "I had this meeting with one of your managers," and Keanu has since fired the guy, and Keanu basically let it be clear that if Keanu wants to do it, his managers are going to fall in line. They work for him, he doesn't work for them. It's not exactly what he said, but that was the implication. So I was like, "Alright, let's try!" I know he and Alex are both men of their word, but my fear was, "Are we going to spend time working on this and fall in love with it, only to find that Keanu or Alex have changed their mind?" But once they said, "We're in until we get it right," They were in. They were incredible partners, creatively and in business. They really stood with us, they worked a lot with us, they worked on the original idea with us. Chris and I started writing it on spec, and they read drafts, gave us notes... They were partners the whole way through.
There was never the thought of doing "The Adventures of Bill & Jim," or "The Adventures of Bob & Ted," was there?
Oh God, no! No, no, no. It was only ever going to be the original Bill & Ted or nothing. And we wrote the spec script, and when we finally got the guys behind it, and we did a couple of rewrites for them, and we brought it in very proudly to MGM, who owned the rights. What we did was potentially a very stupid move, writing a spec script for characters you don't own. And we brought it into MGM, certain they'd be thrilled, but instead, they were like, "We were going to do a Bill & Ted movie. In fact, we already have a script written. It's young Bill & Ted, we're doing a reboot!
Ew, barf!
And we were like, wait, what? I never read that script, and I'm glad I didn't. We were never going to do anything other than a movie starring Alex and Keanu, period.
How did you stop them from doing their s****y reboot? Or, like, their reboot that I'm sure would have been fine or whatever?
I didn't read the script, so I can't comment on whether or not it was any good or not, but... We stopped them by luck. I don't know. Somehow, they chose not to make the other one. When we were talking about whether or not there might be another movie after Bogus Journey, I mean, truthfully, one of the reasons we didn't think so was because Bogus Journey did "fine," but not great, as we were saying. But that those numbers don't reflect is that over the next 20 years, people like yourself would start to discover the films, and the audience would grow in a way that you can't account for. Alex and Keanu, and myself and Chris, the four of us would hear, wherever we went, about people who were interested and wanted to see another movie. But it was only anecdotal, and we couldn't convince any money people. The people at MGM who had the rights, they thought, "Well, you know, we could start again with a young Bill & Ted," and I was told they time traveled with a cell phone and all the typical things that you would obviously do in an obvious way to update it. I just am grateful they didn't do it. If they had, our movie would have died.
Or something like having Bill & Ted show up for five-minute bookends.
Yeah. I cannot tell you the amount of trolling I would get from people who hadn't seen the movie and were convinced that's all it was. They would get so mad. They were like, "Don't make it this Hollywood 'woke' propaganda where it's girls and not boys, and it's gonna be a total bait-and-switch where Alex and Keanu show up and then the whole movie is about the daughters!" I was just like, "First of all, what's wrong with you that you think it's worse if their daughters are in it, what's your problem?
Who hurt you?
Exactly! "Who hurt you?" Chris has said that! "Who hurt you?" Why do you care? And by the way, not only is there no Hollywood "agenda," Hollywood doesn't even want to make this movie! MGM turned it down, and they owned the rights. But they did give us permission to take it around town, which I really appreciated. It was a really good thing they did. They didn't have to do that, but they did. And we're all super grateful that they did. But every studio passed, multiple times. Nobody wanted to do it because of what I was saying about the numbers. The numbers just didn't support the idea of another movie. And we couldn't get anyone to finance it. We did have several studios who said, "If the rights to Bill & Ted are available, we'd be happy to do a reboot with young Bill & Ted played by hip YouTube stars."
Ugh, no.
And we were like, "God, that is just not what we want to do. That is the opposite of what we're trying to do here!" That took years. Years of trying and rewriting the script and trying again. It looked like we were going to get set up at a studio called STX. They optioned it briefly, but then they dumped it. Then it looked like we were going to set it up at Lionsgate, but that fell apart. It kept almost happening and then not happening. Finally, this guy, Alex Lebovici and his company, Hammerstone Studios... Alex had been a Bill & Ted fan. He's young, he's a millennial, but he had been a Bill & Ted fan, and he optioned it and fought like crazy to get financing. But it was very hard to put it together, and it almost fell apart many times, and in fact it did fall apart two weeks before we started shooting. There was just this giant scramble, and I really thought, "Oh crap, this thing just isn't going to happen, is it?" But it did.
Geez, the movie gods really like to cut it close...
We pulled it together on a business level. The money finally came through within a week of... We really got lucky. Everything leading up to production was about as stressful as anything I'd ever been involved with in my life. It was the most stressful thing I've ever been involved with, up to production. But once Dean Parisot called action and it was all about the creative side of it, it was a joy. Working with the cast was a joy, and the crew was a joy. Bizarrely, once we started rolling, we were shielded from the stresses and it became a set where you could play and have fun. There was a lot of physical pressure to move quickly because we didn't have much money, but Dean created an environment that was safe and protected, and we were able to truly have fun on set. It was an incredible contrast to the incredible pressure we were feeling when we were trying to get the movie set up and made, which was quite extreme.
That's an uphill climb, but I've seen the movie, and I'm still in awe at how much joy it brought me.
Dude, I cannot tell you how much I appreciate that. Truly. Honestly, what you're saying is what makes it worthwhile. Literally, you. People exactly like you. My fear was, I might let people like you down. And my great relief is that I didn't. Certainly, there are people who will never like it, and that's to be expected, but I know... What happened to Bill & Ted, it started out as an adolescent lark designed to make us laugh. It was written in my early-20s. I was 23 when Chris and I came up with the characters. I'm gonna be 60 in four days. It's spanned that much of my life. That's a very different and very profound thing for me, and I never expected Bill & Ted to be that. I think it's probably the same for Alex, Keanu, and Chris.
I got to interview William Sadler, and he has such a deep-rooted love for his character, Death, the Grim Reaper. Did you have a contingency for what to do with the hell portions of the film, or did you always assume he'd be 100% game to return?
We never wanted to even give air to the idea that Billy wouldn't be back. I mean, I guess, in any movie, there are so many moving parts that you always have to have a contingency, but... We knew we wanted it to be Bill Sadler. We were talking with him, "Hey, we wrote a script, hey, we wrote the part for you, hey, we can't wait for you do it, hey, we hope the scheduling works out!" So we never really wanted anyone other than Bill to do it. Once we were able to get it together, we knew he was in. There were some ideas if he wasn't going to be available, but none that we liked as much as having him, of course, and we're glad he did it.
It was great to talk to him. There's a real love of him towards that character, and it shows on screen. He's clearly having a great time.
One of the scenes with him was a late rewrite. The idea that they had a falling out as a band, that they weren't speaking to each other, that kind of came up the week before we started shooting. We revised it to be that. We wanted there to be more conflict there. We wanted it to be more of a challenge to get Death to join with them. We rewrote the scene kinda last minute, but I'm glad we did. In the original scene, he was a little bit more insecure and pathetic, it was a little one-note. But then we said, "Let's make him an antagonist at this point," and I think it was much more fun to write and it played well for everybody.
Awesome. Okay, there's one more character I want to ask you about. America has fallen in love with Dennis Caleb McCoy.
(Laughs)
He's such an absurd character, but he also feels, to me, like a jolly microcosm of the whole series in that he's silly, but he feels real and you love him.
Chris and I both knew we needed someone who was going to kill everybody. And we wanted it to be a comedic character. I don't think De Nomolos really worked in Bogus Journey because he wasn't really a funny concept. I don't think we got him right. And Death was so fun to write in Bogus Journey because he was utterly arrogant and threatening, but at his core, incredibly pure. For me and Chris, that's just so fun. It's so fun to write those kinds of characters who are threatening and terrifying, but when you coax them a little bit, they're just blubbering balls of insecurity.
That's what it's like for most real-life wannabe tough guys, right? Being tough and scary and macho and all that, it's all a facade.
For sure. For sure. Absolutely. So in Face the Music, we already neutered Death as a threat, so that wouldn't really work. So we were trying to think, "What would be fun to write?" Then we had a notion of a killer robot who was designed to be kind of human, but he isn't really completed. We initially had, in the scene where we introduce the robot, we actually had a longer explanation, dialogue of "he's not quite ready, there was a bit of a malfunction," "Oh, what do you mean?" "He's just a little bit... Neurotic." "What?" "Nothing, nothing, nevermind!" But Dean's idea was to not telegraph it, because then people will just be waiting for it. He thought we should just let everyone think he's just this fearsome robot and a killing machine, and then surprise people with it. That was Dean's idea, and he really saved the presentation of that concept. So we trimmed out the hints at the beginning that he was anything other than fearsome.
I think it was the right choice, I mean, those first moments where you're like, "Wait, what's his deal?" are so special.
But I have to say, much of what is great about Dennis Caleb McCoy is the performance by Anthony Carrigan. I think the concept is on paper, of claiming he has a name, it's on the paper, but Anthony's performance was pure genius, in my opinion. It elevated it beyond what we ever expected. He also ad-libbed some great stuff. One of my very favorite lines in the whole movie, and one of the times when I spontaneously laughed viewing it... I don't laugh a lot watching stuff I already know is going to happen. But one time where I spontaneously laughed the first time I saw it was when they're in Hell and Bill & Ted walk up to look out over the hellscape, and it's like, "What are we gonna do, dude?" and then Dennis is like, "I know, dude!" Whatever it is that he says there, that was an ad-lib from him. It just came out of the moment. We just cracked up. It's one of those things where you almost ruin the take because it's so funny that you start laughing. People were laughing into their hands and into their shirts, trying desperately to not ruin the whole take. And Anthony was full of those things. I can't say enough good things about him. He was really fun to work with, and really open to try new stuff left and right and change it on the moment to try and keep making it funnier. And he also was performing in 104 degree weather in whatever that robot costume was made of! It was incredibly difficult to put on and take off. I have to say, he's a pro, and a great addition to the movie.