When the world sees you as something, it can be difficult to be seen as anything else. Nobody knows this as well as Alex Winter, best known as Bill S. Preston, Esq. from the beloved 1989 film Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure. Even 20 years later, some people can’t see Winter as anything but the dim-witted, time-travelling Bill, but he hasn’t let that stop him from trying new things.

Now, Winter has found a new life behind the camera, directing the live-action adaptations of the popular Cartoon Network series Ben 10. After the first made-for-television movie, Ben 10: Race Against Time, attracted an impressive 4 million US viewers, the network brought Winter back for the sequel, Ben 10: Alien Swarm (airing Nov. 28 on Teletoon). Set five years after the first film, Alien Swarm follows the now 15-year-old Ben Tennyson and his tech-savvy friends as they fight against alien technology that threatens to take over the bodies and minds of every human on earth.

This is the second live-action Ben 10 movie you’ve directed. What did you want to accomplish with Alien Swarm?

I think we wanted to tell a story that was focused on the new Ben 10 show, Alien Force. We wanted to set up an entirely new story and kind of wipe the slate clean. The kids are five years older and they’re working as a team; it’s quite a different world, as far as where their heads are at, and what they’re doing is quite different. So I just wanted to make a really great Alien Force movie, first and foremost, and having already made a Ben 10 movie already, I wanted to take lessons I learned from the first one and make a better one. Because these are very challenging movies.

Was it difficult to make the second movie with an entirely new set of actors, when they’re playing the same characters from the first film?

No, because like I said, it’s five years forward, so they’re not really the same characters. The characters in the Alien Force show are radically different – radically, radically different from the characters in the first one. So I was not really following the old show at all; I was following the new show and those characters. Kids change so much from 10 to 15 that I was diving into the interests and conflicts and challenges that kids that age face.

What was the audition process like to find the new cast? You got to start fresh but you still had to find actors who the audience would accept in these roles.

Yeah, you have to find actors that feel like the characters in the new show, which was absolutely a mandate. That’s what I set out to do. I know Ben 10: Alien Force so well and I love it, so it was a semi-exhaustive process to find a cast that had chops and the looks and all the things necessary. With Ben in particular, you have to find someone who’s witty and can handle the action and can handle the drama, and that’s tricky. Finding Ben is always tricky.

Did you know right away that you wanted Ryan Kelley to play Ben?

Yeah, I did. I actually knew who I had right away, and then I had to convince everybody else. I kind know immediately after they walk in the room and give their first line. I’m a little notorious for having really quick auditions because I tend to know within the first line or two if someone’s what I’m looking for. In this case, we just saw a lot of kids.

You said you were a fan of the Ben 10 cartoon series, but how did you get involved in directing the Ben 10 movies?

I knew they were looking to do an adaptation – they were initially talking about doing a live-action pilot at the time. I do a lot of effects-driven work and a lot of effects-driven work with kids, and it’s a world I know pretty well, so I pitched them a way to get it done and make it work. We all seemed to see eye-to-eye.

Is it easier or harder to get younger actors to work with special effects, especially when they’re computer-generated elements that won’t be added in until post-production?

There are certain tricks you have to do to help them along. The things I like to do, if at all possible, is not shoot on a green-screen stage, but shoot on live, practical locations and insert the effects into those locations later. That makes a huge difference. And then you’ll also have things for them to work with – you’ll have other characters there or other people or things for them to look at and interact with, so they’re not just staring into space. Actors just need a person to work off of, even if it doesn’t have wings or a giant head, like it’s going to eventually. They’ll have a much easier time with it.

Alien Swarm has a pretty big budget for a made-for-television movie - $5 million US – but that’s still fairly small when compared to effects-driven, big studio films. How did you manage with that?

Yeah, these actually are pretty big budget movies for TV. What I tend to do is keep the effects compartmentalized in a way so that I can spend all the money I need to on the effects that I need, rather than trying to pretend we have the money that Spider-Man does and have as many effects as Spider-Man and have them all be kind of low-quality. And for these movies, first of all, they’re a lot shorter – they’re about half the length. So that makes a lot of difference, financially, because our movies are way, way shorter. So I go into those shots, break out the effects sequences and don’t try to bite off more than I can chew. It’s really important to me that the effects are cinema quality, and the only way to do that is to have a little bit less than them.

The first movie, Ben 10: Race Against Time, did extremely well in the ratings. Were you expecting it to do so well?

That’s such a hard question. I was happy with it, but I never know what things are going to do. I didn’t assume that kids wouldn’t like it, because we were pretty exhaustive and so many kids are involved in the making of it. I have boys and they are deeply involved in this, from the design stages on. If they and all their friends are watching stuff and they’re groovin’, I have a pretty good feeling that other kids will, too. But in terms of numbers, I just never know what numbers are going to be. It’s some kind of weird voodoo that I’m not privy to.

How do your kids feel about you starring in Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure?

They really don’t care all that much, to be honest. I think they’re far more impressed with the fact that I got to direct the Ben 10 movies.

Ben 10: Alien Swarm airs Saturday, Nov. 28 at 7 p.m. ET on Teletoon. Ben 10: Alien Force airs Sundays at 10 a.m. on Teletoon.

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