Writer and director John Waters

INTERVIEW | Serena Donadoni

John Waters called his first collection of essays Shock Value: A Tasteful Book About Bad Taste (1981), and the title perfectly captures the very specific niche this maverick has carved out for himself. As a filmmaker, Waters was gross-out before gross-out was cool (or commercial) and his freak show aesthetic made him the king of white trash cinema long before the rise of talk shows and reality TV took fame-seeking and public humiliation to new heights (and lows). It's difficult to image the midnight movie circuit or the pre-video heyday of repertory cinema without shockers like 1972's Pink Flamingos, the X-rated sleazefest starring Waters' favorite leading lady, the arresting Harris Glenn Milstead — aka Divine — as "the filthiest person alive." While Waters was scraping the barnacles off America's underbelly on film, he was also developing his public persona as a dapper connoisseur of the low-brow: a wry commentator on trash culture who could always be counted on for a potent quip accentuated by a slight curl of his trademark pencil-thin mustache.

When John Waters received the snarky nickname, Cecil B. DeMented (as in the Cecil B. DeMille of schlock), he embraced it and bestowed this moniker on a cinema revolutionary who kidnaps a Hollywood icon to star in his penultimate guerilla production. In Cecil B. DeMented (2000), Waters reintroduces the hopped-up sexual deviants of his earlier films — like Female Trouble (1974) and Desperate Living (1977) — but this time he gives his criminals a mission: make a movie by any means necessary. This interview was conducted by phone, while Waters was being driven around Washington, D.C. (which did not trigger a terror alert at the time) on a whirlwind press tour.

In 2000, it looked as if this underground icon had begun to find his place in the mainstream. He would soon become the favorite host of the Independent Spirit Awards (the AlternaOscars) and Hairspray (1988), the Baltimore native's ode to local teen dance party, The Buddy Deane Show (1957-64), was transformed into a hugely successful stage musical that would sweep the 2003 Tony Awards (and be remade into a big-budget Hollywood film with John Travolta stepping into Divine's shoes). But in 2004, the newly safe John Waters hadn't lost his ability to cause outrage. His latest comedy, the all-you-can-eat sexual smorgasbord, A Dirty Shame, received the scarlet letter from the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA): an NC-17 rating for "pervasive sexual content." Further proof that bad taste may come cheap, but true shock value is priceless.

THE CINEMA GIRL: First of all, I'd like to thank you for contributing to my sense of humor.

JOHN WATERS: Thanks for having one.

TCG: How much of the kidnapping experience in Cecil B. DeMented was based on Patty Hearst?

JW: It was a tiny bit based on her, certainly. It was also based on everything from the Manson family, from Warhol to the Weathermen in the 60s to the Black Panthers to the SDS to my early career. It was millions of different things put into one fantasy that if everybody's taste in movies was so strong that it became political.

TCG: In Crackpot: The Confessions Of John Waters (1987), you wrote about visiting the scene of the Symbionese Liberation Army's shoot-out in Watts, and how you hoped to meet Patty Hearst one day. Now she's appearing in your movies.

JW: She's been in my last four movies [Cry-Baby (1990), Serial Mom (1994), Pecker (1998), Cecil B. DeMented (2000)]. She was with us last night, we had the American premiere in Baltimore. She's great, she looks on it, maybe her playing the mother of a terrorist is her review of the California judicial system.

TCG: Having watched your movies in the 1980s — when the social and political landscape was so much more conservative — and seeing them now, it seems like you're in the mainstream.

JW: It's okay, that's fine with me, it makes it easier to get my movies made. I certainly agree that things that I started out doing a long time ago are now on regular television shows, as my mother says, 'At eight o'clock yet!' Things have changed. My mother, last night after watching this movie, said, 'Well, I got used to the bad language, but how do you get people to do those things?' Which I felt was a good review from my mom.

TCG: How do you get them to do those things?

JW: My agent calls their agent (laughing), and then we have a meeting. Nobody had to do anything, Melanie didn't really have to set her hair on fire. In the old days, I probably would have asked her to do it for real.

TCG: How strange is it for you to do this kind of movie, where the theme is guerilla cinema — do anything for your art — and you're setting it up by having your agent calling their agents?

JW: There's irony involved, certainly. I'm not the real Cecil B. DeMented. Right now, I'm riding in a limo on a press tour. If I were the real Cecil B. DeMented, I'd be hitch-hiking or pulling a carjack to get to my next interview.

TCG: So many of your movies have been about criminals, or if not criminals, at least transgressors.

JW: Well, Cecil's a criminal certainly, he's a criminal director.

TCG: Do criminals have more fun?

JW: They look better. They certainly dress better, even a jail uniform is a good look, basically. Let's just say that criminals have an inherent sense of style, especially in movies. I don't know about in real life.

TCG: What is it that keeps you making movies about people who bypass the social code?

JW: Well, because I always root for the outsider and when you make a movie you don't have to be completely realistic. So I always choose subject matter that's sometimes not funny in real life to make a comedy, and at the same time, all the people that lose in real life win in a John Waters movie.

TCG: Do you think that's the appeal?

JW: The appeal of my movies? I think my audience has two things in common with me: they have a really good sense of humor about themselves, and a basic hatred of authority.

TCG: When you reached a point in your career when people came to expect a certain thing from a John Waters movie, did you ever feel obliged to shock your audience?

JW: No, I never try to do that, I never even think of that. I mean, I'm trying to surprise them certainly, but I'm not involved in the battle of film that's going on now. It makes me laugh, with all the movies trying to out-gross each other. I still won. Nobody thought what happened to Cameron Diaz in There's Something About Mary (1998) was real. Everybody knows the end of Pink Flamingos [Divine eating fresh dog feces] was real. So I've still won that battle. So I've gracefully retired from the gross-out wars 25 years ago, basically, to me. But it's true, American humor has gotten a lot closer to what I started out doing.

TCG: Your sensibility is definitely out there, in the culture at large.

JW: That's good, it makes it easier the next time when I do pitch a movie and I say some outrageous idea. They used to say, 'You can't have that!' And now they say, 'Make it weirder!'

TCG: Were there any parts of Cecil B. DeMented where someone said, 'Make it weirder'?

JW: Yes, actually this was the first time ever on this movie where I got studio notes from the script that said, 'Make it weirder.' I felt like falling to my knees. That never ever happened on another movie ever. Maybe that's because this was all French money [from television giant Canal+]. You know, the French like it weird.

TCG: What did they want weirder?

JW: There was one note, and I rewrote the whole scene of Alicia Witt's backstory about the trauma in her family. That was the result of that note, when she goes into that tirade of recovered memory.

TCG: In addition to the idealism of Cecil's criminal cinema band, the Sprocket Holes, I thought you were so optimistic in portraying so many kinds of theaters open and running in Baltimore.

JW: I know, because a lot aren't. Some are. The Senator, the fancy art deco theater, is where we really had the premiere last night, that most definitely is open. The Apex, the porno theater, is open and it's at peace with the neighborhood. The Backseat Drive-in in Baltimore is still open. The big difference is when I was young, the Backseat Drive-in showed Herschell Gordon Lewis gore movies [like 1963's Blood Feast], today it shows all family movies. The karate theater, the Paterson, is not still open, and many of the other ones are not still open. But a few are. The porno, the drive-in, the Senator and the Charles — the art theater — are still open.

TCG: As a former usher, your movie really caught some of my fantasies.

JW: It's one of the slogans in it: 'An usher's job is never done, put down the flashlight, pick up the gun.' They don't even have ushers anymore in most theaters. I liked it in the old days when they would make ushers get dressed up in ridiculous costumes to promote the movie. The humiliation of ushers.

TCG: It feels like you still have a real connection to what it's like to be in the audience, or what it's like to work in a movie theater.

JW: Yeah, because I still pay to go to the movies. I like to see it with paying audiences. I like to go by myself in the day, there's less talking and I don't have to discuss my opinion with anybody but myself. I just go where the movies are playing. In Baltimore I go to the Charles the most, which is six screens and plays all the foreign films. Any weird film that I would want to see would usually play there. I go to the multiplexes sometimes.

TCG: Are you still living in Baltimore or are you in New York now?

JW: I live in Baltimore. I have an apartment in New York, but my house, my office and everything is in Baltimore.

TCG: Do you find that it's a more restrictive filmmaking environment now that so much attention is being paid to Hollywood movie content?

JW: No, I think it's much looser than it ever was. First of all, every studio, because of The Blair Witch Project (1999) is looking for the next little weird movie to come from somewhere. [Blair Witch was released by Artisan, which distributed Cecil B. DeMented.] At the same time, the MPAA has been fair to me on the last two movies. They're fair with sex in comedies, they're not fair with sex in dramas. It seems to me, the MPAA's message is, 'You can laugh about sex, but you can't enjoy it.' Which is a very American message, certainly.

TCG: Do they respond the same way in regards to violence?

JW: No, the violence in this movie is fairly traditional. The joke is why they're violent. Cecil B. DeMented and his gang are not violent until somebody gets in the way of their shot, and then they have to die. So as long as you let Cecil make a movie, there's no violence. But as soon as you try to stop his movie, there's carnage.

TCG: Do you find any restrictions on your content now that you're working on a bigger budget level?

JW: This is a smaller budget than Serial Mom. This whole movie was made in 32 days. It was hard. It was shot very quickly, sometimes just two takes. It was a lot of Steadicam. You couldn't cover it traditionally, or it would have taken four months to make. It is an action movie. It's my action movie for the Hollywood impaired.

TCG: By shooting it that way, did you find that even if you made a mistake it was okay?

JW: Yeah, it can be okay. I couldn't cover every scene from every character's viewpoint, that's what I mean by covering it traditionally.

TCG: But because of the kind of movie that it is, any mistakes could be easily incorporated.

JW: Oh, it can be, certainly. Mistakes can sometimes turn out to be the best arty shot in the whole movie.

TCG: Do you miss the midnight movie circuit?

JW: No, because nowadays that sensibility is in every show, every show is like a midnight movie. It used to be you had to wait up too late to see strange movies, now they're playing at matinees. I don't lament that. I think video changed that. Now everybody rents a video and has a midnight movie whenever they want, in the privacy of their own home.

TCG: You touch on the lure of fame in Cecil when two characters just stop and caress a copy of Variety.

JW: It's two of the Sprocket Holes who keep saying, 'Can we have a hit record? Why can't we make any money?' They escape with the footage at the end, so basically that was sort of the joke: that they got to make money off it in the long run. They were the least brainwashed, maybe. Cecil was a prophet against profit. He didn't even have an editor, if you noticed, there was no post-production. He just wanted to make the movie, I don't know that he would care if it were ever shown, he was that far gone.

TCG: What happened to you when you became a celebrity?

JW: Well, I tried to use that as a way to sell the movie when we didn't have a way to sell the movie. I used to have almost a vaudeville act with my early movies like Multiple Maniacs (1970). I would come out dressed kind of like a yippie pimp and I would say, 'I'd like to introduce the most beautiful woman in the world,' and Divine would come out dressed as the Divine character pushing a shopping cart and throwing dead mackerels into the audience. And then we would hire in each city the cutest kid and put him in this stolen police uniform we had, and he would pretend to be a cop and come on stage to bust Divine, and Divine would strangle him to death. That was our act. We were just trying to find a way to sell our movie, but it was our vaudeville act when we had no money for an advertising budget or anything.

TCG: What would you like to do that you haven't done yet?

JW: I've had a pretty good life. I've made 15 movies, written four books and I have a lecture act and I have a photo career. I don't know, I guess to just keep making these movies in this one body of work that once I'm finished with that body of work, I think you can take any of them, pick them out and in a good way they would say whatever I was laughing about and being obsessed by at that time of my life.

TCG: I think you should write an etiquette guide.

JW: An etiquette guide? (Laughing.) There are a lot of bad manners today, it's very true. That's a good idea, maybe I could put Miss Manners out of business.

TCG: Since the culture has shifted towards your point of view, but people have dropped their manners along the way, they don't know how to incorporate the two into their lives, so you need to provide an etiquette guide.

JW: One thing that makes me crazy is that the MPAA gives you a restrictive rating and their reason is language. Don't they mean bad language? Language means that people talk. I thought that was allowed. That's a pet peeve. But the MPAA was fair with me on this movie. This should have been an R, and it is an R.

TCG: Was there a film in your career where you felt your life changed after?

JW: Hairspray (1988), maybe, because after Hairspray for five minutes, all Hollywood wanted to make a movie with me. Until they did. (Big laugh.)

TCG: I thought Polyester (1981) was a big turning point.

JW: Yeah, that was part two, then Hairspray was part three.

TCG: What are you on, part five?

JW: I'm still on part three. Part three, hopefully, will be the same. Because really what I made this time is an underground Hollywood movie.

TCG: One more question about the theme of Cecil B. DeMented: Why is cinema important enough to die for?

JW: Well, in real life, for me, I wouldn't. But that's the comedy, hopefully, of Cecil B. DeMented, is that he's so driven insane by the desire to make films that he's willing to die. And anybody who becomes known for being a revolutionary, even if it's as ridiculous as a film revolutionary, has to die in a way. Suppose Che Guevara had lived, what would he be doing now? It's the same thing if you want to become a saint in the Catholic Church, death is a big career move. Cecil B. DeMented had a happy ending because they finished their movie then died, because that's really what film revolutionaries want to do.

© 2000, Serena Donadoni. All rights reserved.