SOAK IN FILTHY WATERS
The cult filmmaker will talk trash at POP Montreal
John Waters describes Provincetown, Mass., as “a gay fishing village” that has been his summer home for the past 52 years. But the legendary cult filmmaker, photographer, author and equal-opportunity offender was quick to point out that he was not on vacation.
“I’m writing two books,” he said. “I’m always writing. I live at the beach, but I get up at 6 every day and think up f---ed-up things, then in the afternoon I try to figure out ways to sell out.”
The freshly minted septuagenarian sounded forever young over the phone line, sharing details about the titles he’s working on: Mr. Know-It-All, “about how to avoid responsibility at 70,” and Liar Mouth, “about a woman who steals suitcases at airports.”
Though he’s not a musician, Waters will be right at home at POP Montreal this weekend, presenting an updated version of his longstanding standup/spoken-word show This Filthy World, Saturday at the Rialto Theatre.
Attendees can expect an evening with him being “dirtier, filthier, older, holier, in 3D, naked — that’s my subtitle I just made up,” he assured, in case you were wondering. “I talk about fashion, crime, politics, movies, acting, things that get on my nerves, weird new erotic communities — the whole thing is a trigger warning.”
The same could be said of Waters’s entire oeuvre, I observed.
“Yes,” he agreed. “I can’t say I’m a misunderstood artist. People got me from the beginning and treated me fairly. I’ve had a long, great career. (Recent) tributes at the Lincoln Center and British Film Institute were like being dead and hearing your memorials. But it was nice.”
Waters found crossover success in the late 1980s and early ’90s with the self-consciously kitschy films Hairspray, Cry-Baby and Serial Mom, but created an uproar two decades before with a series of underground films that challenged notions of good taste.
To remind movie buffs of Waters’s once-shocking ways, a restored version of his second feature, Multiple Maniacs, screens Saturday at 3:15 p.m. at Cinéma du Parc.
Therein, the Baltimore writerdirector’s infamous muse Divine plays the drag-queen host of a show called The Cavalcade of Perversion, who gets up to all kinds of trouble. Murder, twisted sex, glue-sniffing and vomit-eating are on the menu — all in good fun, of course, once you come around to Waters’s warped world view.
“I was always trying to make people laugh,” he said. “It’s easy to be shocking; it’s hard to be shocking and witty. That’s why today’s Hollywood gross-out movies are not funny — they’re trying too hard.
“I guess the theatre of the absurd was one of my things, along with underground movies and movies that really embrace sexploitation and gore, all put together. I liked extreme things. I still do. Even though I might not agree, or live like that, I’ve always been interested in people whose lives were more extreme than mine. I don’t live like my movies, which is a good thing, because I’d be in prison.”
Waters was raised in a good Roman Catholic family in the suburbs of Baltimore. But though his parents leaned toward the conservative side, they were always supportive of his creative endeavours, even lending him the money to make his first movies.
“I paid them back,” he said. “I think they were praying I wouldn’t so I would stop making films. But they were good sports.”
Waters’s career took off with the followup to Multiple Maniacs, 1972’s Pink Flamingos, marked by an outrageous and very real scene of Divine eating dog feces.
“I was trying to make a comedy, a midnight movie, to appeal to the taste I and my friends had at the time,” he said. “I was using the ethos of, ‘What’s left that you can’t do?’ Porn had just become legal, so what was left?”
Leading the charge was Divine, a.k.a. Harris Glenn Milstead, Waters’s full-figured friend from Baltimore who had taken to performing in drag and was up for anything in front of a camera, much to the director’s delight.
“In real life, he was not transgendered and didn’t want to be a woman,” Waters said of his old pal, who died in 1988 at the age of 42. “He was like Godzilla. He wanted to be an actor, but he had this rage. In high school, he was this overweight nerd who was beat up every day and picked on by teachers. I discovered that rage and helped build it into a character.”
Waters had his own rage, inherited from the Catholic Church, he explained. And though he began channelling it into his home movies as a teenager, he was never tempted to go to film school. Unsurprisingly, he has no regrets.
“If I had gone to film school, my films would look better technically,” he said, “but they wouldn’t have let me be me. I like movies that are raw and amateurish. It just depends whether you like that or not. I didn’t know what I was doing, but my movies had a certain hit-and-run esthetic. People were scared of Pink Flamingos. They thought it was a snuff movie.”
Waters hasn’t made a film since 2004’s A Dirty Shame, starring Tracey Ullman, Johnny Knoxville, Selma Blair, Chris Isaak and a certain Mink Stole — a member of the director’s original Dreamlanders ensemble of actors, alongside Divine.
There have been several aborted projects, including the children’s Christmas special Fruitcake and a Hairspray sequel for HBO. But though he’s having trouble getting the final green light, he won’t be deterred.
“I’m not stopping till there’s Hairspray in Space,” he said.
In the meantime, he’ll keep riding his bicycle around Provincetown, Baltimore or whatever city he finds himself in.
“I’m always on my bicycle. I ride aggressively through town. I’m like Miss Gulch — duh, duh-duh, duh-duh duh!” he said, referring to the wicked character in one of his favourite films, The Wizard of Oz.
“I don’t do hills. I’m not trying
to be athletic. I just love to bike. I have an old s---ty bike, no outfits, I stupidly don’t wear a helmet and I don’t ride cross-country for fear of anal warts.”
As I broke into laughter, he sounded pleased:
“Oh, you liked the end of that one, did you?”