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Creating Static: Matt Zane’s Fight to Tell the Wayne Static Story


Filmmaker Matt Zane has spent his career pushing at the edges—of performance, of film, of art—to both cheers and jeers.  Still, you wouldn’t call his work boring.  Offensive?  To some.  Sensationalistic? Without a doubt.  But never boring.  His latest project in development, a documentary chronicling the relationship between the late Wayne Static of Static X and wife Tera Wray, has met with resistance from both family and band.


Screamer Magazine spoke with Matt Zane as he was continuing preproduction even with cease and desist orders in place.


Zane isn’t one to shy away from controversial subject matter.  In the Zane produced film Everyone Dies, an uncensored chronicle of his career, you see an artist relentlessly ripping at the fabric of established norms…and taking everyone along for the ride.  “It seems like everything I do tends to gravitate towards [controversy], but it’s not always conscious,” he admits.  Speaking from his home studio, Zane is wary of being marked as a particular type of producer.  “I have a fourth movie in mind after this one,” he says with some force, “involving somebody very famous that’s not controversial whatsoever!  So it’s not always conscious, but it tends to go in that direction sometimes.  This current project is causing massive drama already…”.  The sensitivity towards his current subject is understandable.  Wayne Static died of an apparent drug overdose in 2016 after years of reported struggles with addiction.   Static’s wife Tara Wray reportedly died by suicide in January of 2018.  The families have been cautious of how their lives, and the lifestyle they believe led to their deaths, are presented.


With a career like Zane’s, though, it can be difficult to filter out the noise of behind the scenes excess.  He was and is a prolific chronicler.  Within the rise of nu-metal and the festival scene of the early 2000s, he shot everything: backstage, centerstage, on the bus and in the dressing room.  Zane was an influencer long before it was a thing.  And, he has an established track record behind the camera.  “I’m a filmmaker.  I made Everyone Dies.  The Altered Noise, which won an award.  Was hired to make Evil Disco the official Static-X doc, made over 200 music videos.  Commercials for Zach Wilde and John Five,” he says of his work and intimate contact within the industry.  “I was just a kid that grew up in the 80s who loved film, music, and shock rock.  All my influences from Iggy Pop to GG Allin, King Diamond, David Lee Roth…You mix it all up together and you get where I’m at now as a 51-year-old dude.”  The showmanship, that ringmaster ethos, is a throughline from his idols to his productions.


It shows up in films and videos that brought backroom adult content into mainstream viewership, and then, merged it with the music scene.  “I started in the adult [film] industry when I was really young…I was the youngest director in the world to get into adult films,” he says.  “What set me apart was that I didn’t make typical porn.  I would combine rock stars into my movies…Because I made this hybrid, I was taken more seriously as a filmmaker.”  Tera Wray had worked with Zane, hosting his adult oriented music series Radium.   “When I switched to music videos, it was an easier bridge to cross. Wayne Static was the guy who really gave me my first shot with the Pig Hammer [Static’s solo project] promo and Assassins of Youth music video.”  The later video, produced by Zane in 2011,  is named by the estate in its media release halting his current project.


At the center of Zane’s work, there is pulling back of the curtain, of getting the audience passed the bouncers and into the party, into the roped off area of his subjects’ lives.  “I think every filmmaker has a different process, and it depends on how close you are to the project.  Every project I’ve taken on has had a personal element,” he says.  “I’ve had a general idea of the narrative I wanted to get across.  For Everyone Dies, it was about me and my band, so I didn’t need much research.  It was more about finding materials to back up the claims I was making.”  Of the Static and Wray film, Zane claims much footage is already in his possession.  His process of documenting everything has led, in part, to a concern over what might be said or shown.



 
 
 

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