Alex Winter: ‘Michael Winner was the most erudite sociopath I’ve ever met’ — SkimNews
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- Alex Winter called Michael Winner 'the most erudite sociopath I've ever met,' recalling that Winner directed him in Death Wish 3 when Winter was 19, followed by nights drinking in a private Brixton club owned by someone 'involved in some criminal activity.'
- Winter said he and Keanu Reeves 'would love' to make Bill & Ted 4 but that 'the stars have to align,' adding he opposes a reboot: 'I don't really want anyone else to play Bill, because I am Bill. That would be a disaster.'
- Winter named 'the hasty, greed-oriented rush into the AI space' as the internet development that scares him most, specifically warning of a 'tech oligarch takeover' across business, politics and civic culture.
- Winter said he met his wife while directing the live-action Ben 10 series; she was running Cartoon Network studios at the time, and he chose Heatblast as his favorite Omnitrix alien.
- Winter recommended Frank Zappa's Hot Rats as the entry-point album for skeptics and praised the late-career classical-jazz record The Yellow Shark, noting he made his Zappa documentary less as a fan than as a lens on American artistic culture.
- Winter said he'd most like to 'melvin' or 'wedgie' Elon Musk, observed that the slang is regional ('coastal thing'), and said his favorite historical destinations would be ancient Greece to meet Euripides or Aeschylus, or Shakespeare's era.
Why it matters: Winter's remarks put a prominent 1980s/90s cultural figure on record on three live debates: AI governance, the future of a franchise worth a fourth installment, and the cultural legacy of the late Michael Winner — and the AI warning lands at a moment when tech-oligarch concerns are driving policy scrutiny, while his anti-reboot stance effectively forecloses any studio succession plan for the Bill & Ted characters.
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