Divine Comedy:
John Waters
interviewed
By Eric Wittmerhaus
It's pretty tough to talk to John Waters without asking what he thinks of Hollywood's new wave of gross-out films. After all, this is a man who once filmed a 300-pound transvestite eating dog feces. And we're not talking prop food. So forgive Waters if he sounds a bit smug.
"Nobody thought those were real testicles in (There's) Something About Mary," he said during a recent interview in a San Francisco hotel. "Nobody thought that somebody really shot semen in (Cameron Diaz's) hair. But they all know that Divine really ate dog shit, so I'm sorry, I still feel like Muhammad Ali."
Which isn't to say Waters means any disrespect.
"I love Scary Movie," he enthused. "But I don't really feel a part of (the gross-out renaissance). (The makers of those films') might have never seen my movies.
"Their success, I hope, makes it easier for me to continue making movies."
Waters, 54, will likely continue to make pictures for years to come. His latest, Cecil B. DeMented, opens today. The offbeat, anti-Hollywood flick tells the story of how an ultra-independent film director (Stephen Dorff) kidnaps a fading, A-list actress (Melanie Griffith) and forces her, often at gunpoint, to star in his film about a family of art-house theater owners who go on a shoot 'em up rampage in the name of quality cinema.
As the cranky, aging Honey Whitlock, Griffith spends a lot of time lampooning her own career. From the uncontrolled rants at an assistant to lying about her age, it's not difficult to imagine Honey as the Griffith who might have been had the actress not begun pursuit of less mainstream roles.
Fortunately, though, Griffith laughs off some of her past work.
"She had quite a body of work that, even she admits, some are great and some aren't," Waters said of his casting decision. "I knew she had a sense of humor about herself. You have to when you work with me.
"I'm making fun of myself with this movie."
Nonetheless, a few changes to Griffith's style were in order. Getting her to look like the peroxided, thrift-store-shopping, punked-out kidnappee took some work. Although the film's 32-day shoot may have helped give the actress a haggard edge, Waters admitted this was a concern.
"I thought, 'Can Melanie do this?' " he said. " It's not a Hollywood budget. It was a whole action movie in 32 days, so she had to kick ass, basically, to get through.
"And she had to alter, you know, the Revlon look," he added. "She had to really let us give her a makeover, so that she was a John Waters star, a Cecil B. DeMented star. She has to look fairly demented. Movie stars are worried about that."
But everything seems to have worked out.
"She wasn't worried about saying, 'Did Pat Nixon get fucked here?'" Waters said. "She didn't bat an eye doing the scene in the porno theater where extras are, like, fake masturbating for three days. That was never an issue."
As for Cecil, played by Dorff, Waters said there is a bit of himself inside of the character, whose name was inspired by a moniker a reporter gave Waters. But the match is far from perfect.
"Cecil B. DeMille ... made epics and I made trash epics. So I thought Cecil B. DeMented would be the maker of worse-than-trash epics," he said of the character's genesis. "He would be beyond cutting edge, into insanity and criminality, which is the only real way left to be edgy — to commit a crime while you're making a movie."
While Waters has never committed a crime while making a movie, he won't lay claim to a squeaky clean record. He even once harbored a fugitive — former underage porn star Traci Lords — on the set of Crybaby, which featured a reformed Lords in a real acting role.
"The feds raided our set looking for her," Waters said. "That's when she started crying, and Patty Hearst (another Waters fixture, who in Cecil plays the ironic role of mother of one of Cecil's co-conspiritors) said, 'Oh come on, we've all been arrested.'
"Then we played a game on the set, like 'who's been arrested?' And everybody had ... We all have a record. I don't trust someone who hasn't been to jail once."
And by the end of Cecil, most of the film's characters have done something to warrant jail time. In this sense, seeing Cecil's onscreen direction differs from watching Steve Martin's in Bowfinger or Johnny Depp's in Ed Wood. While all three characters seek to exploit an established star, no director would go to the extremes to which Cecil does.
"Bowfinger was a much gentler movie," Waters said. "Ed Wood was more like my early life for real.
"I remember I used to pick up Edith (Massey, a Waters fixture until her death in 1984) and Divine, and we had this tiny little car, and the car would be tipping over because of the weight."
But a lot has changed for Waters since those early years, when a conventional, nonrisky industry mostly ignored his films. The director worked hard to promote his early work, setting up late-night screenings in his home town of Baltimore, Md. His audience grew, and it was only a matter of time before 1972's Pink Flamingos, — fecal snacking and all — caught on enough to become a slow-building, cult hit.
Waters spent two years making calls, driving around and shepherding the film across the country. One of Waters' benefactors was Landmark Theaters, a national art-house cinema chain.
"Pink Flamingos played for 10 years off and on at the Nuart (Landmark's flagship theater in Los Angeles)," Waters said. To show his appreciation, Waters shot a reel of film thanking the company. The tail end of that reel has probably been seen by more people than any Waters film. It's still shown on an almost daily basis at Landmark's UC Theatre in Berkeley, Calif.
"I was thanking the Nuart for buying my cigarettes, paying my rent, and then they had 50 feet of film and they just said, 'Do anything,' and I just made it up, one take, complete fluke."
What Waters made up was a public service announcement in which he urges the audience not to smoke. For the duration of the PSA, Waters is smoking a cigarette, and taunting the audience, saying, "Don't you wish you had one right now?"
"And people still yell out, 'Hey, want a cigarette?'" Waters, who gave up smoking at the end of last year, said. "It turned into this militant smoker thing, which I was. I used to purposely light up on elevators. I smoked swimming. I smoked in the middle of the night. I set the bed on fire all of the time. ... I coughed so much that on the street, strangers would come up to me and say, 'Are you all right?' ... If I could've shot 'em up, I would've."
Now, the idea of thanking a theater chain seems almost silly.
"Hollywood's looking for the next weirdo movie," Waters said. "They're looking for the next Blair Witch; They're looking for the next Scary Movie. They're even looking for one that costs nothing, so they can make more money.
"If it's new and interesting, they're looking for it. When I started out, they were not looking for it."
"If Pink Flamingos came out today," Waters said, "they would have found a distributor.
"But it would have had to come out in 100 theaters the same weekend and (the studio would) spend $1 million to promote it."
But despite all the gross-out hype, Waters seems to think the genre is, um, petering out.
"More and more is accepted ... As we know from There's Something About Mary, you're allowed testicles. Scary Movie then had a penis and testicles, but not together. That's next. And then the final thing is a major Hollywood star having sex for real, which will happen in the next 10 years."
As far as who that major star will be, Waters sees a wide range of possibilities.
"All the young ones would do it, if it was a good director," he said. "They would have all fucked for Kubrick. They would fuck for Scorsese."
But until that happens, do Waters and his ilk have a guaranteed audience? And where do the director's years in the trenches factor in?
"I don't know...Tell me on the 11th."
E-mail Eric Wittmershaus at eric@flakmag.com
