PERFECTLY FRANK ZAPPA

Towards the end of last year, a new documentary on the life and times of Frank Zappa was premiered in the United States and now, after a few months’ wait, Zappa is available for fans to stream in the UK. We go behind the scenes and speak about the man and his music with the film’s director, Alex Winter, and producer Ahmet Zappa, as well as former Zappa band guitarists Steve Vai and Mike Keneally

- David Mead

It was well overdue. Since Zappa’s death in 1993 there has been a yawning gap where a film about his life should be, and actor/ director Alex Winter found it hard to believe that nothing had been done to fill that space so far. “It seemed striking to me that there had yet to be a definitive, all-access documentary on the life and times of Frank Zappa,” he said. “We set out to make that film, to tell a story that is not a music doc, or a conventional biopic, but the dramatic saga of a great American artist and thinker – a film that would set out to convey the scope of Zappa’s prodigious and varied creative output, and the breadth of his extraordinary personal life. First and foremost, I wanted to make a very human, universal cinematic experience about an extraordinary individual.”

Alex was granted access to Zappa’s famed vault, a multimedia archive containing more than 1,000 hours of largely unseen and unheard footage. Biographical in nature, the 129-minute film accompanies Zappa from the formative years of the original Mothers Of Invention through to his final performance on guitar in Prague in 1991. It’s a rare treat and one that every Zappa fan will treasure.

THE CENTRAL SCRUTINIZERS

ALEX WINTER

The documentary’s director and lifelong Zappa fan, Alex Winter, is probably better known to the world as Bill S Preston, Esq from the Bill & Ted movies. Zappa was a labour of love that took years to complete, and two key elements to its existence were a successful fundraising campaign and, more crucially, unlimited access to Zappa’s infamous vault – an enormous autobiographical archive of film, video and audio.