SLIFF 2015 Interview: Alex Winter – Actor and Director of DEEP WEB

By Tom Stockman | November 2, 2015

Director Alex Winter’s DEEP WEB screens at The St. Louis International Film Festival Thursday, November 5th at 7:30. Winter will be in attendance and will receive a Lifetime Achievement Award. Ticket information for that event can be found HERE. Alex Winter will also attend a screening of BILL AND TED’S EXCELLENT ADVENTURE, the 1989 comedy which he co-starred in along with Keanu Reeves and George Carlin at The Tivoli Theater Friday, November 6th at 9:30. Ticket information for that event can be found HERE. Finally, Winter will attend a screening of his 2013 documentary DOWNLOADED Saturday November 7th at 4:30 pm at The Tivoli Theater. Ticket information for that event can be found HERE.

Winter is coming to St. Louis! The ST. Louis International Film Festival honors former St. Louisan Alex Winter, whose varied career includes acting on stage and in film, and directing both narratives and documentaries. Winter’s new film DEEP WEB, the first of three Winter-related programs, kicks off the fest Thursday night, November 5th. Narrated by Keanu Reeves, DEEP WEB gives the inside story of one of the most important and riveting digital crime sagas of the century — the arrest of Ross William Ulbricht, the convicted 30-year-old entrepreneur accused of being “Dread Pirate Roberts,” creator and operator of online black market Silk Road. The film explores how the brightest minds and thought leaders behind the so-called Deep Web are now caught in the crosshairs of the battle for control of a future inextricably linked to technology, with our digital rights hanging in the balance. The only film with exclusive access to the Ulbricht family, DEEP WEB also features the core architects of the Deep Web: the anarchistic cryptographers who developed the Deep Web’s tools for the military in the early 1990s; the dissident journalists and whistleblowers who immediately sought refuge in this seemingly secure environment; and the figures behind the rise of Silk Road. Variety describes DEEP WEB as “equal parts eye-opening backgrounder, cautionary chronicle and impassioned plea for the defense.”

Alex Winter took the time to talk to We Are Movie Geeks about DEEP WEB and his other films as well as what it was like working with Charles Bronson and Vincent Price and about the first time he saw Tod Browning’s FREAKS.

Interview conducted by Tom Stockman October 29th, 2015

We Are Movie Geeks: I watched DEEP WEB recently and thought it was really outstanding.

Alex Winter: Thank you.

WAMG: A couple of weeks ago at the Tivoli here they showed ELECTRIC BOOGALOO: THE WILD, UNTOLD STORY OF CANNON FILMS and there you were. You were in DEATH WISH 3. Was that the only Cannon film you were in?

AW: No I was HAUNTED SUMMER as well.

WAMG: Charles Bronson is my favorite actor of all time. What was it like working with him on DEATH WISH 3?

AW: He was quiet and reserved, very much of a gentleman. But he was very internal. I believe this was around the time that his wife Jill Ireland was dying and he was very preoccupied about that, so I don’t think that was one of the happier times in his life but I found him very affable. I got killed by Ed Lauter in that movie. I had my gun trained on Bronson but Ed Lauter shoots me off the roof.

WAMG: DEATH WISH 3 showed at the Hi-Pointe Theater here in St. Louis at midnight just a few months ago.

AW: I attended a screening of it at the Music Box in Chicago a couple of months ago. That was a lot of fun.

WAMG: DEATH WISH 3 has developed quite a cult reputation.

AW: Yeah, it’s so weird, One of the weirder genre movies from that era. It’s kind of a hodgepodge, it barely works, but it’s so incredibly entertaining.

WAMG: It is. I love the way Bronson is holding a machine gun by the barrel. That thing would get to be about a thousand degrees and burn his hand right off. But not Bronson!.

AW: Too tough!

WAMG: What years did you live in St. Louis?

AW: I moved there with my family when I was four years old and lived there until I was about 12. So those are very formative years and I’ve always considered St. Louis my hometown.

WAMG: You were on stage with Vincent Price in Oliver when you were 10. What was that like?

AW: Yes that was at the Muni Opera. That was my first theater gig. They have such a gigantic stage there and it was a pretty fun induction. I was thrilled to work with Vincent Price. I was such a movie fanatic when I was very very young. I was way into the Roger Corman films and the Hammer films, so I was very aware of who Vincent Price was. I loved him and everything that he had done such as THE RAVEN with Boris Karloff and others.  I was very starstruck and excited to be working with him. I was just in the chorus. It was a touring national company. A lot of companies would come through cities like St. Louis and the Muni and pick up the choruses locally. I played a workhouse boy and we sang the great songs like ‘Food Glorious Food’ and the other songs from Oliver. I had a lot of time to hang out and to talk with Vincent Price. He was really lovely and accessible so that was really like a dream come true for me. My first professional job in the industry was a Kentucky Fried Chicken commercial that I filmed with Colonel Sanders under the arch. That must’ve been around 1976. That was a very surreal experience

WAMG: Do you like to do autograph shows and movie conventions?

AW: I do when I can. I’ve been in this business a long time and I love connecting with audiences. I’ve been touring all over the world with DEEP WEB. When you’re in the movie business, you’re really isolated from your audience, unlike theater. The conventions and the documentary festivals really give me a great opportunity to connect directly to people and I love to do that.

WAMG: DEEP WEB kicks off this this year’s St. Louis international film Festival next Thursday night and you will be receiving a lifetime achievement award from Cinema St. Louis so congratulations on that.

AW: Thanks.

WAMG: Why were you so interested in this Silk Road website and the story of Ross Ulbricht?

AW: I’ve been interested in emerging technologies for almost 30 years. I first got online in the 80s and was very active on the Internet in the late 80s. This was before the modern Internet, the usernet era. I was very interested in where technology was going and how these evolving online communities we’re going to change the world and the implications of that. So that’s always been an interest. My last movie, before DEEP WEB, was called DOWNLOADED. That was about the rise of Napster.  It was more about what Napster really was, as opposed to the way it was portrayed in the media. Certainly file sharing was a part of it and the controversy around file sharing was a big part of it but I was more interested in what Napster’s real contribution to technology was. It was the very first large-scale online community. There had never been 100 million people connected on one server before.  That was a very big watershed in the evolution of the digital age.  That was interesting to me on a number of levels. So with the Silk Road project, I was watching bitcoin happen, and I realized that Silk Road was going to be the next evolution in online communities. It was the first large-scale anonymous community. And that’s a very big deal if you think about what the implications are. I knew that, like Napster, this would be the beginning of a movement, not the end of one when it was shut down. That’s why I thought it was worth making a movie about.

WAMG: Were their people that you wanted to contact for this documentary that simply did not want to talk to you? 

AW: Not really. I didn’t start making the film until I knew that I had the access that I wanted. The access was twofold. I had exclusive access to all of the core architects of the Silk Road which I was able to get because of my relationship within the technology world and having an interest in these communities going back so many years. I knew my way around encryption and how to get ahold of these types of people. That was most important to me. Then I was able to meet the family of Ross Ulbricht and gain exclusive access to them. That was very critical. My relationship to Andy Greenberg, the Wired reporter who was the only one to interview the Dread Pirate Roberts was important because I really wanted to get someone deep inside that world and follow them along this journey. There were people here and there that wouldn’t talk to me, but whenever you’re making a documentary you expect that, but there wasn’t anybody that I could not get ahold of that I felt I couldn’t tell the story without.

WAMG: What was it like following Ross Ulbricht’s parents around? How sad was that?

AW: It was incredibly sad. That part was by far the most emotionally taxing project I’ve ever worked on. It’s extremely grim to be on the inside of a federal criminal trial where someone is actually convicted and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.  It doesn’t get worse than that. Some people consider that to be more grave than the death penalty. That’s not fun to watch up close.

WAMG: You’ve taken a somewhat unusual approach with DEEP WEB because in some ways this case was so recent that you were making the documentary as the case was unfolding as opposed to waiting until the dust settled. What sort of challenges were there making a documentary while the events were happening?

AW: It was extremely challenging but it was also very exciting.  It was the opposite of what I had done with DOWNLOADED which was made 13 years after the end of the story.  In this case I knew that I was interested in doing the opposite. I knew that from a narrative standpoint and from a filmmaking standpoint, I was interested and telling a digital revolution story in real time as it was unfolding. That was my agenda. It was very challenging. The movie is primarily about two different people. It’s about Ross Ulbricht’s mom and about Andy Greenberg.  The movie is not about me trying to unravel the story as it is happening. It’s about these two people caught up in this thing trying to untangle the knots. So I knew I would be OK from a narrative standpoint because I wasn’t going to pretend like I was ahead of the story.  I was making it about two people who were stuck inside the store with only as much information as anyone else had.

WAMG: I assume you’re going to follow the story with the various appeals etc. Do you plan on updating your film, perhaps for the DVD?

AW: I like my movie as it stands. I knew that I was making a movie that took place in a very specific period of time. I would never go back and alter the movie. I am not going to pull a STAR WARS on it and stick new things in it. I’m very satisfied with the narrative as it stands and I like the unfinished nature of the narrative because that is what the movie is about. It’s about a story that doesn’t end. I mean the Napster story still hasn’t ended either. The repercussions of Napster in many ways are just beginning. And that’s certainly the case with Silk Road. The Silk Road is about the beginning of something so I’m very satisfied with that. If some major event occurs in Ross Ulbricht’s s story, that’s not to say I wouldn’t go back and make a whole new movie around it but I wouldn’t monkey around with The film I made.

WAMG: It’s a terrific film Alex and I think it’s going to be well received at the St. Louis film Festival next week.

AW: Thank you.

WAMG: The other film that they’re showing at the St. Louis International Film Festival is BILL AND TED’S EXCELLENT ADVENTURE. Why do you think that movie has held up so well? I just showed it to my teenage daughter or year or so ago and she loved it.

AW: Who knows? (Laughs) I think there are a lot of factors. I think the film’s tone is the predominant reason that it’s hung on. Tonally it’s very sincere. At its root, it’s really about friendship. It’s not cynical. It’s not winking at the audience. It’s not a pair of older comedians with a kind of contempt for these characters and looking down on them. It’s not like the John Hughes era where kids were written like they were adults. Bill and Ted were just kids. They were naïve and they were sincere and innocent and sweet. I think that’s infectious.

WAMG: Speaking of older comedians, what was it like to work with George Carlin on that project?

AW: It was really amazing. He was one of my idols growing up politically as well as as a performer and a comedian. The thing about George, which is the thing about a lot of comedians of that nature who just kind of explode on stage, is that they’re actually very shy and reserved offstage. George was a very soft-spoken and gentle guy, not a rhetorical machine gun like he was on stage.

WAMG: I know the Cinema St. Louis guys wanted to show your film FREAKED at this year’s festival but I understand they had some problems setting up a screening.

AW: Yes I fought hard to try to get that to happen but we couldn’t work it out.

 WAMG: I’m hosting an event at the festival that is a tribute to Todd Browning. Are you a fan of Browning’s FREAKS?

AW: FREAKS was one of the first movies that I saw that made me want to make movies. My mom used to teach at Washington University and I used to go see all the movies that played there at Brown Hall. My mom let me pretty much watch everything. So I saw FREAKS at Washington University when I was about seven years old. I remember they opened with some of the original Fritz Frelang’s Popeye cartoons. There was something about a mash-up of what are arguably the greatest animated cartoons ever made and FREAKS. I’m a huge Fritz Frelang fan. That mixed with the genius of Browning, it was like an anvil to my head. It really struck me what you could do with cinema and with comedy and genre film in general. Years later, when Tom Stern (Winter’s FREAKED co-director) and I met at NYU, he was also a big fan of Popeye cartoons and FREAKS so we really connected with that very kind of weird mix of extreme horror,, though I might not call FREAKS horror, and extreme comedy surrealism which is what Frelang and great animators like Tex Avery we’re doing. So yes, Todd Browning’s FREAKS had a huge influence on my filmmaking even beyond something as obvious as FREAKED. FREAKED was a literal mash up of our love of Browning’s film and animation.

WAMG: Did you ever consider using actual circus freaks in FREAKED?

AW: No, the whole idea was that Elijah was creating freaks from real people so conceptually it was different.

WAMG: That’s funny, the first time I saw FREAKS was also at Washington University. It would’ve been around 1973 and it would’ve been a 16mm print and it was double feature with the 1932 version of DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE with Frederick March.

AW: Where did you see that double feature?

WAMG: It was in Wohl Hall Center at Washington University. It was not in Brown Hall.

AW: Was Wohl Hall more like a classroom type environment?

WAMG: I remember it being more like a student union with a snack bar. I remember sitting on the floor watching it. I would’ve been about 12 years old.

AW: We saw the same screening then! I remember that DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE was with it. I think the Popeye cartoons opened the program. That’s hysterical! We were at the same screening of FREAKS so long ago!

WAMG: We were there, dude! We’re also showing a 35mm print of Browning’s THE UNKNOWN which stars Lon Chaney and Joan Crawford.

AW: Oh, that’s a great one. I love Lon Chaney!

WAMG: Yes we’re showing that with a live orchestra.

AW: Oh that will be great.

WAMG: Well Alex I really enjoyed talking to you. Good luck with DEEP WEB and all your future projects and I’ll see you in St. Louis next week.

AW: Sounds good. Thanks a lot.