Original subtitles

Hi. Welcome to the future.

San Dimas California, 2688,

and I'm telling you, it's great here.

The air is clean, the water is clean,

even the dirt is clean.

Bowling averages are way up,

mini golf scores are way down,

and we have more excellent water slides

than any other planet we communicate with.

I'm telling you, this place is great.

But it almost wasn't.

You see, 700 years ago,

the two great ones

ran into a few problems,

so now I have to travel back in time to help them out.

If I should fail to keep these two on the correct path,

the basis of our society will be in danger.

Don't worry, it will all make sense.

Led by the charmingly air-headed double act

of Bill S. Preston Esq.,

and Ted "Theodore" Logan,

Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure is a teen comedy

taken to gloriously absurd heights.

They are played respectively

by Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves,

though even the actors had trouble remembering

who was exactly who,

and that is half the fun.

I'm Bill S. Preston Esquire.

And I'm Ted "The..." Woah.

Bill, here, you take it.

OK.

And I'm Ted "Theodore" Logan.

Yeah!

And we're Wyld Stallyns!

How would you describe the legendary comic duo Bill & Ted?

Bill and Ted are, I would say,

dim-witted, good-hearted,

remarkably ambitious,

incredibly talentless,

would-be heavy metal musicians,

who are trying to form a garage band

whilst going to high school in San Dimas, California.

They are incredibly affectionate towards each other

in a charming way,

but they are, at that particular point it was filmed in,

in the late '80s, they are very much the loser vibe;

they are slackers, they dress in the heavy metal

kind of loose-fitting clothing style,

they speak like surfer dudes.

And if you had come across them in a John Hughes movie

earlier on in the decade, they would be at the edge of the picture,

they would be the ones who would be the laughing stock.

Right here, they're bang in the centre of the film,

and it's their affectionate

comedic love of each other which drives us on.

Excellent!

Oh-oh, we're late. For what?

School, dude. Oh, yeah.

It is the simplest, weirdest,

most wonderful concept.

Underperforming San Dimas teens Bill and Ted

have one day to mount a history project

or flunk out of high school.

Enter George Carlin's future dude Rufus,

in a time-travelling phone box,

with the unexpected news that the befuddled teens

will need to head into the past

in order to save the future.

Among the historical figures

dropped off in a Californian mall,

are Socrates, or "So-crates,"

Napoleon, Joan of Arc,

Billy the Kid, and Sigmund Freud.

The screenplay went through a lot of different drafts

before it ended up being the finished product

that we see on the screen, and the time travel element

even included Hitler at one point before they thought better of it.

So it's fascinating really

that apparently it was considered a bit of a hot property

and a hot screenplay around Hollywood.

It landed on director Stephen Herek's desk.

He had only made one other film, which was Critters,

but he had some commercial success in Hollywood. He loved it.

A lot of people had good things to say about it,

but apparently none of the major studios wanted to pick it up,

and it ended up being Dino De Laurentiis of all people,

who supplied most of the $10 million budget for it in the end.

Written by Chris Matheson and Ed Solomon,

and directed by Stephen Herek,

the entire wacky enterprise

is tuned into the genuine sweetness

and wide-eyed enthusiasm of the title characters.

Bill and Ted aren't stupid,

so much as under-educated.

They possess an enchanting,

child-like sense of wonder,

resisting the bogus demands of growing up.

What do we know of the origins of the project?

It began with two writers, Ed Solomon and Chris Matheson.

How did they come up with Bill and Ted?

Yeah. Ed Solomon and Chris Matheson met in screenwriting class.

They hit it off almost immediately

because they found that they had a very similar sense of humour,

slightly sort of off beat, slightly absurd.

And so they started just playing around with gags,

because one of the things that a lot of writers at that time,

young writers, could see an avenue for, is stand up.

And it was a way of honing their sort of craft,

especially if they were writing comedy.

And they basically hired a theatre every now and then

with some of their classmates,

and frankly just threw around gags.

They tried out gags with each other,

to see which were the funniest.

Listen to this.

Express to the class

how an important historical figure from each of your time periods

would view the world of San Dimas, 1988.

We are in danger of flunking most heinously tomorrow, Ted.

Hi, Bill, want a ride?

Sure, Missy.

I mean Mom.

Your stepmom is cute. Shut up, Ted.

You know when she was a senior and we were freshmen-Shut up, Ted!

These characters they're always referred to, obviously Bill and Ted,

but is there a way we can tell them apart?

What makes Bill Bill, and Ted Ted?

Well Bill is, it's hard to say brighter, he's sharper.

Bill is the one who thinks things through, perhaps,

and has the ideas.

Whereas Ted is the one who feels things empathically,

and can sometimes arrive at the right conclusion

just instinctively in the moment.

So they are kind of... they're not quite law and chaos,

but they have elements of the classic double act in them,

even though they are remarkably similar.

One gives the clarity and one gives the emotion.

OK. The lady in that car over there

said that Marco Polo was in the year 1275,

so it's not just a water sport. I knew it.

Excuse me, when did the Mongols rule China?

I don't know, I just work here.

And the film, you know, while it's set up as a teen comedy,

it messes around with all sorts of genres, doesn't it?

Yeah, it's kind of at its base it's a high school slacker comedy,

but it's also a Sci-fi time-travel movie.

It's also a classic buddy movie, and then throughout the film,

it will open up into so many different kinds of genres.

It will pastiche so many different genres that, you know,

you can almost count lose count.

But those are the three core ones, I would say.

High school, Sci-fi, buddy movie.

Whoa!

Not bad.

Greetings, my excellent friends.

Do you sense what influences the film,

and to a sense, the degree to which it satirises other films?

Yeah. I mean, there are... There had been a few time...

you know, time-travel films before,

one thinks of Peggy Sue Got Married, for example,

or The Terminator, which isn't exactly a comedy,

but you know, it has comic elements in it actually.

And of course, you know, Time Bandits.

So there... there was a precedent for this,

but not quite in this sort of mode.

I mean, basically what Solomon and Matheson were creating,

was an entirely new genre

by colliding science fiction

with teenage slacker movies.

You guys are going to go back in time.

Yeah! You are going to have

the most excellent adventure through history.

Their oddly formal sophomore dialect,

has entered common usage;

Excellent, bodacious, party on, dudes.

To coin another Bill and Ted-ism,

this quirky, loveable,

wildly inventive comedy,

is most triumphant.

If you guys are really us...

...what number are we thinking of?

69, dudes!

Whoa.

Catch you later, Bill and Ted.

Dude, are you sure we should be doing this?

Ted, you and I have witnessed many things,

but nothing as bodacious as what just happened.

Bill and Ted began as an improv routine

between writers Chris Matheson, and Ed Solomon,

in which they answered audience questions

as a pair of amiable but witless teens.

They originally conceived of a sketch-style movie,

but Matheson's father, famous genre-author Richard Matheson,

convinced them to centre it on time travel,

which they imagined along the rough and ready lines of Monty Python,

or Terry Gilliam's Time Bandits.

It was sort of darker to begin with, wasn't it?

Yes, it's a little darker.

Also, Bill and Ted actually were much younger.

They were in their sort of about 14 and 15,

and they weren't as innocent,

I think, as Bill and Ted eventually became.

They had a sort of slightly sort of you know,

sleazy character through them.

But the character of Rufus,

because it was called there, the original title was

Bill and Ted's Time Ban,

Rufus was a 23-year-old sophomore student,

who had this van, and they borrowed it,

and that was what took them through time.

So, of course there were other elements in it as well,

but they were the sort of key things that were there

and needed changing, that it evolved into a film.

They were in character, weren't they, as they performed?

They were in character, but they were sort of like

quite younger versions of the Bill and Ted that we came to know.

And the idea behind it was that

they would discuss topics of the day.

This wasn't about history or anything like that at this stage,

it was just topics of the day

from a point of view of knowing absolutely nothing about them.

Chris's father was Richard Matheson,

who was a celebrated science fiction writer,

wrote I Am Legend, amongst many other things.

And he had watched them and he had seen the stuff

that they were working on, and he had an idea

that it might make a good film script.

So this is supposed to be, rumour has it, it was The Black List,

which is the hottest script in Hollywood list,

but it took a while for anyone to pick it up,

and I don't know why Dino De Laurentiis ended up with it.

What was the story behind that?

I guess a lot of studios didn't really respond to it,

and because it was such a hybrid of various genres,

and it is kind of one of the post-modern films of its age,

that maybe people just didn't get it

in spite of it having this great kind of talk

around it in the industry.

And so Dino De Laurentiis

ends up giving most of the $10 million budget for this film,

even though purportedly he didn't really get the humour,

but he had all this amazing access to locations in Europe,

and he then gives that to director Stephen Herek for the production,

and for all the Ancient Greece and Rome scenes,

where they can film these amazing locations.

...Socrates.

Socrates?

Hey, we know that name.

Yeah. Hey, look him up.

Oh, it's under "So-crates."

Oh, yeah.

The producers saw hundreds of possible Bills and hundreds of Teds.

It was all about chemistry,

locating that codified frequency between best friends.

And they noticed that at all the casting call backs,

Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter

would gravitate together in the waiting room.

After that, the entire script was reorientated

around their instant connection.

Bill and Ted came naturally.

It was a nightmare, I gather, it took them hundreds of auditions

and they searched endlessly for the perfect...

it's not just the perfect Bill and the perfect Ted,

it's the combination, the chemistry. It was the combination, the chemistry,

and Keanu Reeves was the one who was cast first,

and that basically all the many of the rest of the casting,

was to find someone who would work with him,

and find that chemistry.

And when Alex Winter went in, he just thought he was going to another audition.

- It was in the waiting rooms, wasn't it? - Yes!

They would spot them, the producers spotted them together

just riffing already. Exactly.

Because they just sort of liked each other.

Well they liked each other and had common interests.

They both loved motorcycles and they both loved bass guitars.

So that was a sort of, you know, it gave them

the chemistry that they needed, that little alchemy,

and they still interviewed other people,

but they were the two clearly.

And wasn't the script, you know, once they could see them together,

they changed the script around

their natural sort of bonhomie and natural chemistry.

Exactly. In fact, there is a wonderful story;

Solomon and Matheson, who were...

they were just starting production of the film,

and they were in a queue in a burger bar,

and a few sort of people ahead of them were these two guys.

And Solomon turned to Chris and he said look at those guys,

he said, imagine them playing Bill and Ted.

And they got close to them, and it was Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter.

And they were... they were in character already,

and that's how they behaved.

This has been a most unusual day.

So, the director, Stephen Herek, made one film previous.

Prior to Bill and Ted, he made Critters,

which was a big commercial success in Hollywood,

and he would go on to have a string of other successful films

like The Mighty Ducks and The Three Musketeers.

So I think he always had an eye for

what was going to connect to audiences.

I think he also did the Roger Corman School of Filmmaking, didn't he?

After he graduated, before he did Critters,

he'd had the education of the Roger Corman School,

who produced all the great sort of '70s and '80s adventures.

You could see that in the film, can't you?

You can see the way he adapts to the lack of budget,

and he's very inventive.

Yeah. And-And...

What he does have, though, I think, is the casting,

which is, of course it's critical,

but I mean, it's phenomenal,

partly because in Keanu Reeves, he changes cinema.

But I guess this is how do you pull together two people like that

and make that chemistry work so well?

And what is it about Keanu Reeves that's so perfect for Ted,

and what is it about Alex Winter that makes Bill so great?

I think on the one hand, they are very, very attractive men,

they're very beautiful to look at.

They're very, very loving and very charming,

but they also have this sort of masculinity

that undermines the conventional heroic masculinity.

If you look at the way that Bill is dressed, he's wearing a crop top.

And the way that Keanu Reeves is with his hair and looking up,

they're very, very unconventional heroes,

and they both work in that way to draw you in

and give you this completely different view

of what it takes to be a hero travelling across time and space.

They're recognisable in a way. They are... They are...

the cute kids at your school, they're absolutely recognisable.

But really at the same time, beautiful.

I mean, the thing is, as we all know, that Keanu Reeves,

both in real life and throughout his career,

is known for being a really nice person,

and especially in Hollywood, that means something, I think.

But even when he was just being cast in this role,

there was something about his line delivery, the director said,

where he would have a line reading and then he'd have a sort of

quizzical look on his face afterwards, he was mildly confused.

And it was not just perfect for that role,

but something that we all recognise now.

What happened in that audition is something that we kind of

recognise as something famous about Reeves and what he does on screen.

He is loveable because he's earnest. You know, we believe it.

They call it puppy dog, puppy-dog enthusiasm.

The direction after each scene was a little bit more puppy dog.

That's it exactly, and in fact if you were to

characterise them as dogs, I would say that

Winter is a spaniel,

and Reeves is a Labrador.

That is as good a definition as I've heard, yeah.

This must be the princesses you told yourself about at Circle K.

We've got to go, this is a history report, not a babe report.

Apparently Alex Winter also was living in Venice Beach at the time,

so a lot of the inspiration for the look of the characters

and the way they spoke, even though it is quite unique

and quite high end and not really necessarily

a natural way of speaking, but the language of like bodacious

and all of this, definitely came directly from stoner culture,

from surfer culture, from metal-head culture,

and so it is very much a film of 1989 in that way,

and specifically of 1989 California.

And that's really important, isn't it, this musical culture

they aspire to, this heavy-metal world they're very into.

Yeah, I mean the language they're playing with,

they are, if you like, mixing that slang

with an almost Shakespearian construct.

So they're saying strange things are afoot at Circle K,

or this is most beautiful, this is most heinous.

And so there is something which sounds incredibly educated

and artistic about the way they're speaking,

but at the same time, it comes from beaches and bikes.

They have a particular technique where they,

when something good has happened, they pretend to throw a chord.

And over the little track pad over the top.

So everything about them is infused with this desire

to be heavy metal musicians, despite their inability to do so.

I think it's that sort of ornate vocabulary,

that rather sort of elaborate style of speaking,

which actually changes the syntax as well as these words,

that attracted... that first of all attracted the director immediately,

because the one thing

that Warner Brothers and various other studios

who looked at it and thought, do...

Do these guys really speak like this?

Does anybody speak like this? And the answer is of course, no.

But they did after the film came out

because it became kind of...

it became, you know, a part of the sort of jargon.

It became... It actually went into the language of young, you know,

young teenage cultures.

So Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves

were both quite young coming into Bill and Ted.

They both had a bit of experience under their belts,

but this would be the film that would make both of their careers

in a major, major way, particularly Keanu Reeves.

So Reeves was Canadian by birth,

he had been on a Canadian television show,

he had been in some supporting roles,

but this was really the big thing for him.

For Alex Winter, he had been a child actor,

he had worked on Broadway,

often in much more kind of serious dramas,

and he made his way to Hollywood,

studied in film school at NYU, came to Hollywood,

was in films like The Lost Boys as a young actor,

so he had a little bit more experience under his belt.

But the pair had things in common in that

there was a certain seriousness to them both

as young jobbing actors in Hollywood.

They both had kind of quasi intellectual families

who were interested in theatre, and Alex Winter later said

that they both had this kind of almost method attitude,

even though the roles they were playing were very silly,

they wanted to be completely sincere and earnest

in the way that they played them. You can see that depth, can't you?

If they were playing them as cartoon characters,

it would be very Beavis and Butt-head,

but actually they're playing them with a real

sort of integrity and emotion. Absolutely.

And I think you're right, in that they did that.

I mean, they did that in the course of...

They didn't change the language because they loved the dialogue,

but what they did, they brought the greater depth of sincerity,

and empathy, and friendship to each other,

that humanised them, gave them real flesh and blood.

On one level, it's about America, isn't it?

Yes, it is.

I mean in the sense that exactly that,

that you've got a... you know, this is 19...

it's made in 1988, '89,

so it is Reagan America,

glasnost and detente,

all sorts of things are going on,

which are unpicking the old order,

the old authoritarian order.

And so there is a sort of sense of optimism,

and yet there's still that sort of throwback,

there's that sort of old guard,

like you know, Bill and Ted's father, Captain Logan,

like the history teacher, who want to cling on to the old ways.

And yet, society is already making seismic shifts.

The world is changing, and you had better change with it

because Bill and Ted are the future.

They're not just the present, they're the future.

Whoa. Whoa!

Satirising both '80s high school comedies

and time-travel hits such as The Terminator

and Back to the Future, Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure

is deceptively clever.

The future Bill and Teds are always coming to the assistance

of their present-day selves.

Once the likes of Napoleon and Freud are brought back to San Dimas,

it also finds room for some raucous

fish-out-of-water comedy.

But it is at heart,

a film about the power of friendship.

And we should talk about time travel,

because it's at the heart of the film.

And it has been described as deceptively well written.

So, how clever is Bill and Ted?

I think the great thing about Bill and Ted is it almost,

even though it was being worked on independently of

and there was no awareness of Back to the Future in the early drafts,

the sense that a lot of films previously had taken

the concept of time travel quite seriously,

and the screenwriters really felt that they had to create

a logic that made sense.

Whereas with Bill and Ted,

the attitude is almost of its characters,

which is like, whatever, we're here now man,

like it's very loose

in terms of its understanding of the way that time travel

could or should work.

It doesn't really care about those things.

But it has enough logic to it that there is a satisfying structure.

I think that one thing is though, there is a science podcast on this

which says you can actually justify this entire film's

time travel theory and it does actually work.

What is unusual about them is that they evolve the idea that

you can say right now in the future

I'm going to come back and do something.

There's a moment where they say, we can't get into this.

Well, what if in the future we go and steal the keys

and put them just there? And suddenly the keys are there.

What if, as they're being chased by Ted's dad,

what if we drop a bin on his head in the future?

And so there's this whole second group of imaginary characters,

who are future Bill and Ted,

who are helping them with all their problems.

After the report, we'll time travel back to two days ago,

steal your dad's keys and leave them here!

Where?

I don't know. How about behind that sign?

That way, when we get here now, they'll be waiting for us.

See? Whoa, yeah!

It's sort of playing on conventions, isn't it?

- Oh, totally. - It's playing aroundwith the concept of time travel.

Yes, I think the idea of Rufus bringing back Bill and Ted,

the other Bill and Teds from the future,

to assure the current Bill and Teds

that everything is going to be OK,

so you've got, you know, present Bill and Ted,

future Bill and Ted meeting, and they go,

"Hello Bill, hello Ted."

And one of the things about this film which is really funny actually,

and it sort of cements what's going on,

is that they always call each other by their own names.

Most friends never say you know,

"Stephen, hi, you know, and Ian."

They'll just say hi, hi, hi,

but they're constantly calling each other by their names.

It's almost to remind us exactly who they are,

but it sort of gives them an extra link, somehow,

it gives them an extra sort of bond.

I don't understand American high schools 100%,

but they are about to flunk history...

- We should explain the plot, shouldn't we, Stephen? - Yes.

So I'm probably...

Well, they are not that smart,

they're in their history class, and there's a wonderful line

where they're being quizzed on who...

At one point, the teacher is quizzing Ted

on who is Noah's wife, and he says Joan of Arc?

And that's when they start to realise that,

the teacher realises they've got no hope of passing this test.

If they're going to flunk the test, Ted's dad is going to send Ted to military school,

and then they're never going to form Wyld Stallyns.

And that's been set up for us

at the very beginning by the character Rufus,

George Carlin's character, as a catastrophe for the world,

because their music at some point,

will align the planets in harmony,

allow extra-terrestrial contact,

and bring all the peoples of the world together, with just one song.

So then they have to set off on this adventure,

and it's critical that the... that's why old, you know,

future Bill and Ted have to persuade past Bill and Ted,

because if they decide not to go, then the world will be

a far, far worse place than it is.

No matter what happens, you must get to that report. Got it?

All right, amigos,

that book will give you the number of any place you want to go.

Now, most important,

no matter what you do, no matter where you go,

that clock, the clock in San Dimas,

is always running. Got it?

- But who is Rufus? Let's explain Rufus. - Yes.

Rufus is... Well, he's the inciting incident.

First of all, he explains what's going to happen.

At the end, he explains why it hasn't quite worked out

how we think it is, but they will get better.

But really, he is from the future,

and he has been sent back by the wisest people in all of the world,

who know that Bill and Ted, why they happen to know

at this particular point in the future is unclear,

but they know that Bill and Ted are just about to flunk their exam.

And if they flunk their exam, the time stream splits,

they don't stay together, they don't form a band,

and they don't form Wyld Stallyns.

But then they're looking for someone to play that part.

And so, I mean...

David Lee Roth, Sean Connery was mentioned.

I don't know how they were ever going to afford these people, I don't know.

Eddie Van Halen, they couldn't actually get through to, I think.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But then George Carlin is this very interesting figure in comedy.

He was a long established comedian

who had his career in the '60s where he was very respectable,

and then he became wilder and wilder as he got older and older,

and so by the time he reaches this film,

he's reached pretty much every generation of Americans,

and Keanu Reeves used to watch him on TV

and think he was just this crazy wild dude.

But when they ask him to do it,

he plays the part absolutely dead straight,

and incredibly restrained. Perfect.

I mean, he has this wonderful reputation I think still

as a very straight-talking dead-pan comedian,

and he was often calling out the hypocrisies of American society

when he was doing his stand-up routines.

So he's so well placed to play this all-knowing

but quite cynical and wise-talking narrator of events throughout.

I just can't really imagine anyone else doing...

He's like the only adult in the film, isn't he?

There were lots of other adults, all the historical figures

are like children, the parents are like children,

Rufus is the only one you can say, well he's a grown up.

And you need to trust that person, and I personally would trust

George Carlin, you know, with that responsibility. Absolutely.

Essentially, how he was cast because they were

already in production, they still hadn't cast Rufus,

and Scott Kroopf, the producer,

was just coming off Outrageous Fortune,

in which George Carlin had a role, and he said,

come, walk this way, and walked straight into Rufus,

and he did, he said yeah, sure, OK.

And so he was almost the last man in.

And there is something really wonderful about the love of music

being central to it as well, right?

It's a very teenage idea, this Utopian idea that actually,

you're going to form a band and your music will save the world.

Exactly. I think that you have a really interesting point there

because that is something that goes through a tremendous

amount of those kind of films,

and it's certainly that kind of age, that era,

that rock and roll will save the world.

And you can go, it's still prevalent as a theme,

even up to including Tom Stoppard,

with his play Rock 'n' Roll,

which is when he went back into his teenage years

in the '60s in Czechoslovakia,

and you know, basically collided politics with rock and roll,

and then came to the conclusion that rock and roll will never let you down.

He didn't admittedly align all the planets in perfect harmony

and allow for extra-terrestrial contact... No. No.

...but then he didn't have the phrase "be excellent to each other,

party on, dude", which is their greeting

which kind of knits the whole of future, past and present, together.

Be excellent to each other.

Party on, dude.

OK. So how do they pass their history test?

They abduct a series of important historical figures,

from Abraham Lincoln to Joan of Arc,

to Billy the Kid. Napoleon is the first one,

they're not the biggest fan of that one,

and it turns into a fish-out-of-water story

in both directions because we then have these historical figures

that are put in '80s California,

in a shopping mall, or a water park.

That's the great ingenuity of the screenplay, isn't it?

It's not only about Bill and Ted going back in time,

it's about bringing Sigmund Freud, or "Frood Dude,"

Socrates, and Napoleon, as you were saying,

and it's throwing them into modern day as it were, Californian culture.

Because the task is to say what would...

The task literally is to ask what these people in the past

would think of modern California

and they have to present their paper based on this answer.

And so they get them, they bring them back,

they experience modern California,

and then they give their answers on the stage at the end.

How are the historical figures portrayed?

You know, are they accurate?

I don't think accuracy is necessarily what

was being looked for here primarily,

but I think the thing about Bill and Ted that's great

is it's showing this very kind of closed-minded history teacher,

who is kind of quite pinched and very adult

and you know, for instance the father figure as well,

the sergeant who wants his child to go to military school,

and that's the only way that he will become successful,

so the adults of contemporary California,

are Reagan-ite, they're kind of...

they have one idea what adulthood should look like

and what success should look like.

And that's not Bill and Ted's idea.

And actually, when they go to the past and start speaking to Socrates

and all these other figures, they realise that

actually there is wisdom to be found there

and they learn something from those figures.

So it's really more about the interchange

of knowledge across time,

and about what real success and real wisdom looks like,

rather than whatever this kind of phoney California version is.

And the '80s mall is, you know, an icon of teen movies,

everyone gathering in the mall, and what the historical figures do

is they go into the mall and they change it to suit themselves.

So Beethoven ends up... I know!

...playing stacks of keyboards and doing something amazing.

Joan of Arc ends up, for some reason,

this is the weirdest one, she ends up leading an aerobics class.

It's Jane Fonda.

Jane Fonda with a broad sword.

I'm not sure about Genghis Khan. Yes!

Because he takes a baseball bat, doesn't he?

Yeah, and he smashes up the sports shop, you know.

Also, the critical one is Sigmund Freud because

even though Ted has escaped from his father's jail,

we still know that Ted's father

wants to send Ted to military school, that's already written.

And then Sigmund Freud's moment on stage

is to psychoanalyse Ted and say to him,

well the reason you feel this way is because

your father has this enormous fear of failure,

which he's put onto you.

And suddenly Ted gets up and Ted's father gets up

and that's changed everything, now they're going to stay.

So, with its great play on time travel motifs,

how do future Bill and Teds

save present-day Bill and Teds?

Well, future Bill and Teds, first of all,

are the ones who assure present Bill and Teds

that they ought to get into

this time travel thing and trust Rufus,

but then future Bill and Teds are basically creating

their path for them at certain key points.

They remove obstacles.

It's also critical to note that they arrive at their

school presentation directly from the police station, but they haven't had time.

They've gone from the police station to school,

and what they find is there are lights, there's cameras,

there's smoke, there's music,

and what's happened is future Bill and Teds

have gone and dressed the set for them and arranged everything

so that they can perform the most incredible

class presentation of all time. It's a brilliant idea, isn't it?

That the so-called idiots Bill and Ted come up with.

They realise that they can help themselves out.

This is why I don't think they're idiots. This is the critical thing.

I think that what they are

is they are unwritten pages, they are very pure,

and they aren't idiots, they are just unwritten.

They are waiting for the knowledge to arrive.

And by the end, they've absorbed that knowledge that they love,

and then they're very smart.

What's beautiful about that sequence is Keanu Reeves'

slow motion, "Whoa!" Yeah.

You know, it defines his career, I think, that moment.

It echoes down the decades.

Therefore, Ted's father's own fear of failure

has caused him to make his son

the embodiment of all of his own deepest

anxieties about himself.

And hence, his aggression transference onto Ted.

Whoa!

Baffled studio executives had wanted to shelve it,

but the film was hugely successful.

The duo's extra-dimensional travels

expanded into a franchise,

with two sequels, a TV show,

and an animated series.

The likes of Wayne's World, Dumb and Dumber,

and every Jack Black comedy, owes it a huge debt.

Alex and Keanu could never quite escape the roles,

even adding air guitars to a Broadway production

of Beckett's absurdist classic, Waiting for Godot.

Bill and Ted have become totally iconic.

How successful was Bill and Ted generally?

Did it work at the Box Office?

Because I think still at the point they finished it,

the executives were like, we want to shelve this,

what is this? We don't understand it.

They didn't know what they had.

No. I think much like the studios that turned down

the screenplay to begin with, the studio saw what they had

and were a little baffled by it,

as they often are when something new is presented to them.

And then additionally, there was the issue of money.

So, Dino De Laurentiis actually went bankrupt

before the film was completely finished,

and so it was shelved for...

from what I understand, about a year.

And the director had despaired,

he thought that was the end of his career,

you know, he thought it would be a complete failure at that point,

or never even see release.

Then when it finally did get picked back up

by a company called Nelson Entertainment,

it started screening for audiences in Pasadena, around California,

and people seemed to love it.

And so it became this little sleeper hit,

and it ended up earning something like $44 million

from the 10 million it cost.

How's it going?

I'm Billy the Kid.

I'd like you all to put your hands together.

And now, my good friends...

...Bill S. Preston Esquire,

and Ted "Theodore" Logan.

Yee-haw! Thank you!

Hello, San Dimas High.

So how did Bill and Ted go on to become a franchise?

Well, I mean, it was an enormously successful film,

it was 44 million out of 10 million, but also there was the worldwide,

and by the time a couple of years had passed,

they had made 80 million out of this 8 to 10 million dollar movie.

And so people thought, well let's do this again.

The two actors love each other,

they have continued to work together whenever they can.

They worked together on Broadway,

so it wasn't hard to get them back in.

And it's a darker project.

It's about Bill and Ted really at the heart of it, they die,

and they go to hell and they deal with that situation,

which starts with my favourite reference to a Bergman film,

which is The Seventh Seal,

where and Bill and Ted play Death for their lives.

And instead of chess, they play Twister,

they play... Cluedo... Cluedo.

Battleships. Yeah.

And by the time they get to the third film, in 2020,

if you read online, the people writing about

Bill and Ted ahead of that, there's this need amongst people,

a lot of the pieces preparing for the release of that film

are why we need Bill and Ted right now.

Because it's 2019,

the world is a much, much darker place

than it was in 1989,

and they, that innocence,

that sort of curious optimism,

that belief that genuinely we should all be excellent to each other,

is missing from the world.

Be excellent to each other.

Party on, dudes!

Good one, Ted.

It's almost got this quality, I think, Bill and Ted have,

a stopped clock is right twice a day,

where they're supposed to be these kind of silly guys,

and you know, don't know anything.

But actually, through that there's a purity

where they say these things like "be excellent to each other,"

and you really believe it, you take it to heart

because there's some odd kind of wisdom.

And they're wonderfully deadpan in the sense

they don't react to anything with fear,

they don't react to anything with surprise,

they go back in time and meet Freud and Napoleon

and all these incredible people,

yet they're just kind of rather kind of charmed and nonplussed by it all.

OK, this is what happens. Yeah, yeah.

The only things they react to

are when Bill thinks that Ted is dead,

he is absolutely heartbroken... Yes.

...and has a huge reaction.

And also when Ted is teasing Bill

about the fact that his father has married a schoolmate of theirs

who is much, much younger,

and he's "Shut up, Ted, shut up Ted" all the way down the stairs.

Those are the two very modern emotions.

They don't deal with the emotions when they're in the past, they're just there.

Your stepmom is cute though. Shut up, Ted.

Remember when I asked her to the prom?

Shut up, Ted!

We often talk about Keanu Reeves in a certain way,

but Alex Winter has also had a really interesting

and sort of quite varied career, really.

He has written for the stage,

he, immediately after Bill and Ted,

moved to MTV and started writing a show for MTV.

He is, I think, has continually shown himself to be

really interested in putting Bill and Ted to one side,

whilst always loving the attention and being really generous

with fans and audience members who want to talk about Bill and Ted.

He also has tried to carve out something a little bit more serious,

a little bit more intellectual for his career.

And all throughout, he has also maintained

this beautiful relationship with Keanu Reeves,

which has culminated in this stage production

of a Samuel Beckett play, which is not what you would expect.

Well it is kind of perfect, isn't it?

In the sense that they kind of know they're echoing Bill and Ted

by playing the lead characters in Waiting for Godot.

I went to see it on Broadway,

and you can't quite shake Bill and Ted.

And that's not to the show's detriment,

you love how they're doing it.

Because it's about two guys who are a bit lost in the world,

but devoted to one another, the two characters.

And there is a moment in the show where they stand back to back

and are going "Why are we always together?"

And they do the guitars.

And I tell you, the audience just loves it,

they just scream with laughter.

And it doesn't spoil the show. It doesn't spoil Beckett.

In fact, don't you agree, it's kind of fitting

that Bill and Ted would be Beckett? Yeah, totally.

We travelled through time.

I mean, we met lots of great leaders,

and we got an A+ on our history report.

And look at us.

Nothing's different.

Maybe it's time we did Eddie Van Halen.

Maybe we should start learning how to play.

Maybe you're right, Ted.

So what do we think is the great legacy

of the characters of Bill and Ted?

Well, the legacy in terms of the way

it's changed popular culture, I think, is very clear.

But what I think is also the case

is the way that it affected a generation.

And I think that's... that's...

as I was saying when they were discussing the desire

for Bill and Ted 3,

there is a group of people who were touched by that film

in a way that really mattered.

There was Generation X who sort of,

they love them, genuinely love those characters.

And so, it is perhaps a little trite,

but it's true nonetheless,

to say that there were a bunch of people who saw that film,

and thought what's wrong with the philosophy

be excellent to each other and just party on?

That seems like a good way to live your life.

One. Two.

One, two, three, four.

They do get better.

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