-30 years ago, our first guests introduced us to Bill and Ted.
Gosh, has it been 30 years?
Who were trying to pass their history class
and write a song that would save the world.
Now they've reunited for a third film
called "Bill & Ted Face the Music,"
which is currently available on demand and on Blu-ray.
Here are Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter.
Yeah!
Welcome to the show. Come on.
This is so cool to have you both here.
This is awesome. -Thank you, sir.
-People have been waiting for this movie for so long.
First, it was "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure,"
then "Bogus Journey," "Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey,"
which ended with them having to write
the most important song in history.
Where do this one pick up?
-Well, we haven't written the song yet, Jimmy.
[ Laughter ]
-Yeah, we kind of blew it. -Yeah, okay. Yeah.
-So it's like all those years later, decades later,
they're still trying to write the song,
but they haven't written the song yet.
And that's put some pressures on their wives,
the family, the daughters.
And then at the same time,
the future comes back
and has a little wom-dinger for us.
-Yeah, they're not happy with us in the future anymore.
We've lost our cred.
-Wow. -And so they've asked us --
They've said, like, now it's you have to write the song
in order to save the world,
and all of reality as we know it.
[ Laughter ] By a certain amount --
By a certain moment in a certain location.
-Yeah. Keanu's gotten really good at that Zoom closeup,
by the way. -Yeah, I can't even do that.
Oh, it's fantastic. You've nailed it.
I thought it was so fun and so cool.
Kristen Schaal was great.
How did it feel... -Thank you.
...for you guys to get into the characters again?
Do you remember the day that you were officially like,
"We've got to do the characters?"
I think I'm kind of getting into it now.
-Kind of, yeah. I mean, it took a long time
to get the film made.
Chris Matheson and Ed Solomon wrote a draft,
we worked on it for years,
worked on getting financing together for years,
bringing Dean Parisot, who's so amazing, on to direct
and Scott Kroopf who produced. -Oh, yeah.
-It was a long process.
And in that process, rehearsing and doing script work...
-Fitting the puzzle pieces together.
-And never did we actually do the voices.
-Yeah, we wouldn't do the voices.
We would work on the script.
And so we had some script readings,
and Dean the director would be like, "So..."
We'd be like, "No."
-The writers would be looking at us like,
"Are they going to do it?
Are they gonna actually do the thing?"
-"Are they gonna do it? They gonna --" Yeah.
-So Keanu came over to my house in New Orleans,
like pretty much the night before We started shooting.
And we were rehearsing, which we would do,
and he looked at me as he was about to leave.
I was like, "What?" He's like,
"You want to just try the characters,
you know, before we, like, shoot at 6:00 in the morning?
-It's just great. I just was so happy
to see you guys come back together.
Did you guys meet auditioning for this movie
or were you friends before this film?
-No, we met on the first --
earlier auditions we met for the first time
and became friends pretty instantaneously.
I mean, we both rode motorcycles,
so we both walked in with motorcycle helmets.
And the auditions went on for months and months
and they kept pairing us off with different people
and changing our roles.
And we became friends over the arduous
"Bill & Ted" audition gauntlet
without assuming we were actually going to be cast.
-Wow! -And they did something
very unusual, where they had different actors, artists,
all audition-- like ten people,
and like two would go into a room
and then two would come out.
And then another two would go in, and then one would come out.
And we were both playing Bill and Ted,
and it was a kind of like --
it was like an audition gladiatorial gauntlet
of Bill and Ted. -Torture event, yes.
-I always disliked auditioning.
I thought it was the worst part of the whole business.
It's so kind of -- -Yeah.
-They just -- -There's a fun to it, too.
Like, Keanu and I actually had fun
in the auditions playing the characters.
It was funny, because we -- A lot of time has gone by.
We'd forgotten about the early auditions
and the specifics of them.
And we thought we brought all this stuff to our characters
way later once we'd had time to really think about it
on a deep level, and then someone showed us our audition,
and we literally walked in on day one as Bill and Ted,
like, just, like, no method. It's like --
-You just nailed it.
-I've got my shirt tied around my waist, like --
-I got shorts. -He's got shorts and a jacket.
We're like ripping -- it's like the whole thing
is literally there on day one.
-It was meant to be.
-There you go with that Zoom, you nailed it.
-I'm not even gonna try to compete with that closeup.
It's so good. -It's that confidence of youth,
but I love it.
Obviously it exploded,
became part of not just -- I mean, just making a movie
is so hard enough.
But when the movie is a hit, that's another thing.
But then when it becomes part of pop culture
and people start saying "Be excellent"
and then doing air guitar and saying, like,
"San Dimas High School Football rules!" and like --
You must have been -- -The best --
-I know. Do people -- I mean, you're probably like,
"Don't say that again," and people are yelling it to you,
and you're like -- oh, my gosh.
But then you became toys, action figures.
You were a cartoon, you were a video game.
It was pop culture at its most.
What was the craziest Bill and Ted thing that you saw?
Could it have been...
the breakfast cereal? -Ah!
-I've got PTSD now.
-What, you've got a cereal?
Where did you get that?
-Yeah. -Wow.
-Cinnamon oat squares and marshmallow notes.
It sounds pretty good actually.
-Yeah, please don't eat that. Please. We care about you.
-It's vintage, yeah, I will not eat this.
-It's not. -But how cool is that?
You were a breakfast cereal.
-Yeah, I lived in a weird part of L.A. foe a while,
and I remember walking to the grocery store
at like 1:00 in the morning to get eggs or something
and seeing both our faces on a cereal --
'Cause they never told us anything.
Like, they never said, "Oh, on Thursday,
a cereal will come out." They didn't pay us, either.
But they didn't tell us any of that stuff,
so you would find out about it when everyone else did.
-And so you walked into your deli --
-So you walked into the store and there in front of you
was a Bill and Ted cereal? -Yeah.
And it was like 1:00 in the morning.
-Whomp, whomp, whomp. -I thought I was, like,
you know, having flashbacks. -In the Twilight Zone?
Yeah, Rod Serling's gonna come out and be like,
"Could you imagine? Space and time..."
I mean, that is so cool, man.
I have to ask because I started with comedy,
so George Carlin -- what was it like working with him?
Was it -- did you -- were you a fan of his going in?
Obviously you probably were.
-Look how he's looking at us. [ Laughter ]
-He's like -- -Deep respect and admiration.
-Deep respect and admiration. [ Laughter ]
-He's like, "I'm eating lunch in my trailer by myself today."
-Oh, God. -He was -- I mean,
for both of us it was such an honor.
I mean, we just were such huge fans of his
and familiar with his work and...
And though he gave us that look, he was acting.
-Yeah. -And...
-He was really nice to us, right?
-He was. He was a much gentler person
than you would expect from the kind of razor --
the barbed nature of his standup,
which was, you know, coming up in our era, was it, right?
He was a cultural titan. -Yeah.
-So we were pretty starstruck, I think,
and grateful that he was as sweet to us as he was.
And, you know, he was a gentle guy.
We would bump into him even after the second movie
out and about.
He was always very lovely.
-Yeah, I love it when those casts come together
and it's like, there's no one else that could do it
besides you three.
-No, amazing. -It just worked out.