There are revolutionaries who hail this former advertising executive as their own. There are record company executives who regard him as one of the most cunning capitalists in the business. There are musicians who consider him a fine composer – composers who rate him a superb musician.

Me? I think he is one of the greatest satirists of our time.

We are probably all wrong, or, at least, only partly right. Each of our do-it-yourself Frank Zappa kits only reveals more of what we want to believe' than it does of Zappa himself.

He is the distorting mirror in which we look at our twisted selves and the cock-eyed, unfair society we have constructed. (read more)

I was starting to ask about the way he's approached making the movie. He's explained at length before what the film was about how it showed that touring makes you crazy, but presumably he'd seen other pop films and he had ideas about how to do it himself. He immediately picked up on the phrase "pop films".

"I'm not an avid fan of pop films, but you get dumped into that category by virtue of the fact that the film revolves around a group of people who happen to be musicians. I think I would use the same people whether they were musicians or not. I happen to be interested in making a musical film, but a lot of the music in it is not pop. In a way that's unfortunate because it's not like one of those regular rock and roll movies."

"But as far as the ideas for the technical things went, I had seen many examples of the special effects you can get, and I had some idea of the capabilities of video technique. 99% of the effects in the movie happen live while you're working, which means you can see how they're going to turn out at the time, and you don't have to send them away to a lab and get them to do it for you. If you don't like it you just erase it and do it again. It was extremely appropriate for this film." (read more)