John Waters interview: 'What stunt can I do next? Turn heterosexual?'
In 1972, film director John Waters achieved notoriety with Pink Flamingos, a movie in which a couple crush a chicken to death while having sexual intercourse and which culminates with Divine, the drag queen star, eating dog faeces. It is not, you might imagine, the ideal foundation for going mainstream but here he is, at 73, an American icon, asked to give commencement addresses at colleges, the subject of a retrospective by the British Film Institute and, in the most accurate barometer of respectability, has even appeared in an episode of The Simpsons. The Pope of Trash, as WS Burroughs called him, has been canonised by the establishment. “I started out with bad reviews and getting arrested, and now I have the Order of Arts and Letters from the French government,” he said.
Waters has taken anything but a conventional path. Raised in Baltimore, where he attended a strict Catholic school, he became obsessed with the movies. He dropped out of New York University in a matter of weeks, attending class just so he could steal textbooks to sell to fund his movie and rug habits. Back in Baltimore, he persuaded a group of local actors, including Divine, to make movies with him. When filming Mondo Trasho (1969) he was arrested for conspiracy to commit indecent exposure because the scene he was shooting featured a naked hitchhiker. His outrageous films attracted a devoted fan base and his distinctive look – tall, gaunt, impeccably dressed, pencil moustache – made him a celebrity.
It was in 1988 that he really crossed over into the mainstream, with the surprise hit Hairspray, a musical set in the Sixties about a plus-size teenager, played by a young Ricki Lake, who pursues a career as a dancer on a local TV station, and ends up advocating for racial integration. "It snuck into deep mid-America," Waters said. "It plays in every school. Racists like hairspray! Which is the most ludicrous thing. I have never heard anyone bitch about it being in schools even though it has two men singing a love song and tells your daughters to date black guys. No one gets upset – because it's joyous. It's not preachy." The musical adaptation of Hairspray ran for nearly seven years on Broadway and won multiple awards."I made more money on that than anything else!"
This journey to unlikely respectability is the subject of his new book, Mr Know-It-All: The Tarnished Wisdom of a Filth Elder. It picks up where his previous memoirs left off and tells the story of how he managed to start making movies in Hollywood, including Polyester (1981), Hairspray, and Cry-Baby (1990). But the book is so much more than that. Framed as a kind of guide book for the aspirant transgressive, it soon moves into conceptual essays that include meditations on drugs ("I think I've tried almost every one"), sex ("S&M looks silly at the beach"), and a punctuation-free riff on Andy Warhol. He even composes a letter to his imaginary son, Bill. It's a riot.
I went to see Waters in Provincetown, at the very end of Cape Cod. For most of the year he lives in Baltimore, where many of his films were shot, but this is where he has spent every summer for the last 55 years. "It's an art colony so it attracted lunatics, beatniks, drug addicts, rich people, gay people. It hasn't changed all that much, maybe just got a little fancy. It's a gay fishing village but not like Fire Island in New York where everyone is gay. Here you get families visiting to take pictures of their kids posing with drag queens. It's an odd mix. For me, it is about as healthy as I can get. I ride my bike everywhere. I swim. I get a sun tan. And I work here. I have written half my books and movies here."
One of the joys of Mr Know-It-All is finding out what happened on the set of those movies. "Every movie I made it is a miracle that it got finished. The things you have to go through! I'd never written about the later movies before, so I thought it was time. Some people don't like them as much. But that's how it goes. Whenever I see Damien Hirst we always joke: 'I like your earlier stuff.' If you're career lasts long enough everyone hears that. I think they are better movies! I write about what really happened which is not at all what people imagine. I think I was pretty honest about it: I failed upwards." It's true, despite each movie making a loss, Waters got given bigger budgets to make another. Such is the logic of Hollywood.
The making of Cry-Baby, a musical set in the Fifties, was particularly action-packed. Johnny Depp, in his first film role, asked Waters if he would marry him and his girlfriend Winona Ryder. He refused. “His lawyers got me ordained,” he said. “I just told them they were too young to get married.”
The cast featured a freshly sober Iggy Pop who had to play almost every scene with a plastered Susan Tyrrell, as well as the celebrity kidnap victim Patty Hearst and the former porn star Traci Lords, who was served on set by the FBI, who wanted her to testify against the mob. According to Waters, Ricki Lake lost her virginity during the shoot and Tyrrell had an affair with one of the teamsters.
Despite his reputation, Waters managed to persuade some unlikely actors to work with him. For A Dirty Shame (2004) he got David Hasselhoff to do a cameo in which he defecates on a plane, and the result falls to earth, where it strikes another character's head, turning him into a sex addict. "If they are going to work with me, they know they are going to do something like that," he said. "And they want to do something edgy. He was from Baltimore, too, which might have had something to do with it.
"The only one I know who was not happy was Tracey Ullman," he said. "A Dirty Shame got an NC-17 [no children under 17] rating which worried her and then she watched a screening of the movie on her own. I mean you don't want to watch one of my movies on your own, especially if you are in it picking up bottles with your cooter. My movies have to be watched at midnight with friends. They are celebratory affairs."
Waters is warm about not just the actors he has worked with but also the executives whom he coaxed into giving him money. “I praise them in the book and that’s only fair. Sure, I fought with them, don’t get me wrong – but ultimately they said ‘yes’ and gave me the money to make these crazy movies.” He can, of course, be waspish. The film censors get a lashing. “I hate the liberal ones, they’re smart. I much prefer the dumb ones.” Then there is Anna Wintour, editor of Vogue, a figure who Waters revels in teasing. “I got more publicity from her not inviting me to the ‘Camp’ Met Gala than anything else. I didn’t have to spend the money to actually go to the ball and was in every article about it. I don’t think she likes me much. And I’m not against her but I just don’t think she’s funny. What has she ever done that’s funny?”
While Waters is mostly playful in tone, when it comes to the Catholic Church (in which he was raised), he reveals a harder edge. “They have been bashing my beliefs for centuries,” he said. “I’m happy to bash back. I hate this new Pope. He’s a hypocrite. When it comes to gay marriage, how can he say, ‘Who am I to judge?’ You’re the f------ pope! You are supposed to be infallible. I bash them because they bash us. They are the enemy. Unashamedly.” Conversely, he professes great admiration for the Satanic Temple who, among other actions, stage “pink masses” in which they turn gay the spirits of evangelical preachers.
“I love them. I had their leader over for dinner recently, he’s a good friend. What they are doing is real activist work on the separation of Church and State, something I violently believe in. They went to an anti-abortion rally recently all dressed as babies. They use humour to attack. That is something you British do better than us. Like that Trump balloon! Why can’t we have something like that?”
He is both fascinated and horrified by Trump. “I think there is nothing good about him. He used to be a liberal, used to be at Studio 54. I never ever liked him. Even back then he was vulgar. He’s even ruined camp. There is nothing about him I like. His hair? He’s like a white James Brown impersonator. On Liberace it was funny but on him? Please. Do you have a mirror? His enemy: the wind.” He waits a beat, before resuming in faux conspiratorial tones: “I believe it is just one long piece that is sculpted.”
"I think Trump is going to win," he said. "But let's say that he doesn't and it's close. Maybe he loses by a small margin maybe by as little as one vote. I think he would refuse to leave the White House. That would be exciting! That would be anarchy! That is appealing to me as a closet anarchist." What would happen in this scenario? How would it play out? Waters pauses a moment to think, then breaks into a grin: "We'd have to get the army in. We'd have to assassinate our own president. No matter how much you want to, you just can't be a presidential squatter!"
White House Squatter...that has the ring of a Waters movie, if someone would give him the budget. But then Waters has not actually made a movie in 15 years. Are his directing days behind him? "Probably. And that's fine. God knows I've spoken. I have 17 films and they are all available." At present he is working on the first draft of his first novel, Liarmouth. "It's about a woman who steals suitcases from airports," he said. He is still involved in many projects, including the punk rock festival he curates in Oakland, his spoken word tours, his Christmas stand-up show, and the summer camp he hosts for his "super fans" (one wonders).
"You have to stay in touch with your audience. I'm lucky enough to keep getting the next generation. That's why I have to keep my street cred up by doing these stunts. That's why I hitchhiked across the country [which he wrote about in Carsick] and took LSD at 70 for this book. What stunt can I do next? Turn heterosexual? That's the only thing left!"
Mr Know-It-All: The Tarnished Wisdom of a Filth Elder is published by Little, Brown. To order your copy call 0844 871 1514 or visit the Telegraph Bookshop
