Director John
Waters, self-confessed king of all things tasteless and
tacky, celebrates a life spent shocking audiences and
mocking the movie world in a film version of his
stand-up act.
In This Filthy
World, Waters delivers a rapid-fire monologue
about life in film, from his first homemade picture
Hag in a Black Leather Jacket, reportedly
costing $30, to international fame he garnered for the
cross-dressing classic Hairspray.
The "pope of
trash" was in Berlin this week to present the film,
and the laughter and applause at a packed screening late on
Monday showed his cult following spreads well beyond
the shores of his native America.
The mustachioed
60-year-old ruminates on everything from shoplifting as a
boy to battles with movie censors, and from how to make
voting more attractive to young people to what is
wrong with capital punishment.
"I am against it
[capital punishment] for the reason that I'm afraid
I'll get it," he quipped. "We all have bad nights."
He also had
advice to gay people trying too hard to act as they feel
they ought to.
"You don't have
to like Liza Minnelli," Waters told a live audience at
the Harry de Jur playhouse on New York's lower east
side, where This Filthy World was shot
over two nights. "And S/M does look stupid on the beach."
When he was
younger, Waters said he used to tour courtrooms across the
United States to get ideas for his films, and he and other
members of the public would boast to each other about
which famous cases they had watched.
One woman topped
them all, however, when she told him "I was at
Nuremberg," referring to the trial of leading German Nazis
after World War II.
The
arch-provocateur also recalls his long collaboration with
Divine, the obese, cross-dressing star of many of his
movies, including Pink Flamingos, which has the
infamous scene where his character eats dog feces.
"I'm not a
sadist--it was only one take," joked the director.
Another of their
collaborations was Polyester, where audiences
were given scratch-and-sniff cards so they could smell
what they saw on film.
Asked if his
movies had become tame over time and whether he would return
to the more cutting-edge pictures of the past, Waters told
the audience after the film was shown: "I never want
to go backward and do something I did before. If I
wanted to do what I did at the very beginning, I
wouldn't be here anymore."
He was also asked
if wanted to make a spoof of a science fiction movie,
one of the genres he had yet to tackle. "That's the only
genre I could never do," he said. "I don't get it."
And his next
venture? A "very weird" children's movie for "special
children and their even more special parents." (Reuters)