Conversation with John Waters | Locarno Film Festival

[Music] um well good morning everybody thank you for coming it's a pleasure obviously and an honor to be here with john and okay we'll start the conversation uh we'll try maybe several subjects but of course we have to to start talking a little bit about cinema you are here with a an honest prize uh for your career it's a long time you you haven't make a film you know maybe it's already 15 years or something yeah i know those young people now weren't even alive when i made my last film that's even amazing yeah so my first question was simple i i know that you are not for nostalgia you always say that you have to move on now you have successful career as a writer as a you know with your solo shows in theaters whatever but my simple question is is there maybe something you miss from making making movies or is was there a specific pleasure you cannot get everywhere and anywhere else i i don't think that's true i made 17 movies it's not exactly if i haven't had my say you know my last movie was a spoof on sexploitation films and but since i've made that movie i've been paid three times in hollywood to make move four times to make movies that never get made so i'm still in the business they still pay me i just don't make them which is easier in a way you don't have to get up at 5am and sit in that old trailer in the morning and eat food and you know so uh but but uh as long as i can tell stories i'm fine you know i maybe i'll make another movie i still have meetings about them but they don't usually happen but uh and the only kind of movie i didn't make was this one called fruitcake that was a children's movie that's the only genre i didn't do and i had this movie called fruitcake that they gave me a development deal on which is a a happy family christmas story about meat thieves and in baltimore we have them they call them meat men and they come they knock on your door and go meat man and you go downstairs and you say i'll take a turkey and two pounds of hamburger meat they go steal it they come back and you pay half what's on the label and this is a normal thing in baltimore and this is about a happy family of meat thieves that get caught on christmas eve trying to fulfill the meat orders for their community but is there maybe the craziness of the shootings i don't miss that you know people said did you have fun making those movies fun are you kidding they were 23-hour days in the freezing cold with new money i look back on them fondly but that's not fun to me fun's having a martini here on a friday night you know so uh make [Applause] making movies was never fun to me like ha ha ha ha you know it was always stressful you know am i gonna get the shot in the old days when we were making pink flamingos the camera would freeze and i'd get back we'd have to reshoot the whole day so i wouldn't say that was light-hearted i looked back on them fondly making them but they were exhausting yeah they weren't fun yeah the thing is that there is the possibility of making fun doing movies without really enjoying no not if you're the director because if you're the director you don't even have time to go to the bathroom at lunch they're asking you questions or you have to do press you can never have a bowel movement if you're a director okay just uh talk a little bit about the maybe the industry you know this is a long dream you're just feeling fruitcake but they paid me hollywood treated me fairly the more money they give you the more hassle you get that's a that's a trigonometry question you know if they're going to give you all this money they are going to have something to say if you don't want to listen to the notes then go make a film on your phone they won't give you any notes then it's a fair trade-off if they're if your movie doesn't make money they get fired so i understand that i you know and i in my new book i don't name any of the people that i fought with in the film industry because i cashed the checks you know and they probably got fired because they said yes to my movie and uh what views uh with the industry with hollywood nowadays how have you changed or do you think it changed it's better i think it's worse for independent it used to be i could go out there when i was i would say from hairspray to the end of my career uh you could go to hollywood i would pitch the movie which was like go in tell the story give him an ad campaign and they would give me a lot of money to go write it and sometimes they made it sometimes they didn't and i would say the average budget would be six seven million dollars that's unheard of today for an independent film they want you to make it for a million dollars but they still want movie stars they still want music they still want production value so um i can't go backwards i can't say to people will you work for nothing for me i've only made 17 movies you know people said why don't you raise it on kickstarter well i own three homes you know i can't be an anarchist now it just doesn't it's not very convincing so you you mean that you you see that it's more difficult for independence i think it's harder for independent people for example and i think even in the art theaters in america i still go but everyone is over 50. you know there are old people go to art movies and they really go there they're a loyal audience they make hits they do but young people see them in a different way but i'm not against netflix i'm i'm for anybody that can say yes you know i don't care how people see my movies i'm happy it just i like to tell stories and i'm lucky enough that i write books and i have spoken i always had backup careers you know i always had ones that if you couldn't get a movie made i read a book if i couldn't get the book made i'd try a movie or go into television or you know always i just needed to tell stories i never wrote i never made a movie i didn't write i wouldn't had to do that i'd be bad at that okay what do you think about tv series tv series are you kidding it's more people see it they pay you more more freedom i think it's probably i would do tv in a minute yeah yeah did you have any offer to do uh yes the last thing i did was the last thing i did was for hbo was the sequel to hairspray to be on hbo yes so of course i'd do it yeah no they didn't do it then they made the nbc the big budget version of the musical instead but they paid me you know i i do hairspray i want the porn version you know i think pubic hair spray [Applause] and let's talk a little bit about uh because you have done a lot of successful books you know you are cult books in america and i think some other countries in argentina for example they told me that you are very successful your books yeah i was just in argentina it was great i got to be with isabelle sarley you know who she is the great she was sort of the sex star of armando beau who was sort of the russ meyer of argentina and she made millions of movies one would call fury where she falls in love with a horse it's so good my question is people uh do do you enjoy writing books oh i love to write books to me it's the same thing i get up every morning and write a movie i write a book i write something in my job as i get up think up up things and sell it in the afternoon that's my office that's what we do and uh yeah writing books is i'm writing a novel now that's like thinking up a movie it's not that different to write a script or to write a novel so um i like writing books yeah and they do better than probably my last movie so uh you know i stay where they're saying yes to me okay talk a little bit about your daily routine what's your monday to friday i get up at 6 a.m i read about six newspapers i hate reading them online i still get the papers delivered and then um i look at all my emails at eight o'clock exactly i write every day and i write to 11 12 and then i meet with i turn off my phone nobody calls me and then i meet with my office and we run my business and at night i'm a normal person you know and on weekends i try not to work you you leave you work where you live or you want to yeah i would i do in my in my own house but i have an office where everybody else works so and i have an office there but i never go there i work at home yeah because i can and people say how do you have the uh you know the energy to work for yourself and everything the discipline be easy i walk in the other room in my underpants and go to work i couldn't do that if i had an office job i doubt it i mean and uh for how long you live in baltimore during the year how many oh well i'm 72 i was born there 73 i am so i've lived there forever really but i have apartments other places and i'm always on the road and stuff but baltimore is where i like best and i like it even more than ever now even though trump is right there's rats and roaches but uh still that's what we embrace you know there's still it's still cheap there there's still a bohemia which is there isn't in new york really it's so expensive that new young ideas can't even breathe there really and it's it's hard to to find a place to live in new york where you could come to new york like in the old days and start some revolution of art ideas i think everybody now because of the internet can live where they were born you don't have to leave anymore just stay where you are and make it cooler i think is the best thing to do do you still get some inspiration for the people in role models you talk about some people there you still have people you still find new people from there that inspired you in uh oh yeah people just say the weirdest things i think i said this yesterday but it's true in baltimore i say i have an apartment in new york and they say why which is the oddest thing most people would say oh i wish i had one but no not there why would you have that uh it's a strange city it really is people have a good sense of humor about themselves they don't leave their own neighborhood sometimes much less the city and uh it's and they have an attitude they're they're kind of funny there definitely and that's why i said to trump when he said stuff against baltimore come on down here and say that in that neighborhood i dare you cause they'll kick your ass right you talk about attitude how important is attitude do you think for an artist for the filmmaker you know well attitude is how you because it's nowadays or can be dangerous to have too much attitude well attitude is like i failed upwards in hollywood in hollywood it's about the appearance of success it's not real success so when hairspray came out it feel it felt like a success it didn't make that much money but you have to strike right away while they think they're going to be hipper or make money or have some kind of new thing that's going to help them in their life but it doesn't last long so you have to strike quickly you have to tour for the rest of your life elton john said that to me once he said the day you stop touring it's over someone's there to take your place look at it i mean debbie harry stopped for a couple minutes madonna stole her career you know you can't blink and do you think that you know rebellion attitude this is still possible nowadays for young people well an attitude what do you mean by attitude i mean there's a good attitude and a bad attitude you can't be a diva with no reason to be one that sort of fails i think uh but you can't be maybe and that works if you have no what why are these people think they're so great they haven't done one thing yet sometimes that can work actually but um i think you have to have something how i've gotten away with it and i call getting away with it because i never had to get a real job my whole life and um is that i made fun of myself first i think and then i made fun of things that i really loved i didn't make fun of things i hated that much because being means good for 10 minutes not 70 minutes i think so um i i tried to make fun of the world i lived in i mean those early movies were made to scare hippies although we were hippies sort of i mean my audience was hippies that didn't fit in with other hippies that were basically closet punks but there was no world word for that yet yeah yeah maybe this is one of the you know statements of the punk movement to to insult your own audience you know it's one of the well it was but we did i don't think we insulted our own audience we included the people that were outcasts in their own minority i always said my original best audience was criminals and i used to show the movies in prisons and they would let me and the prisoners would say you're allowed to show us this and i taught in prison and they were great though we did a a movie in there that could never be shown outside and it was very you know we just had a video camera we waited for a song to come on the radio for the soundtrack and then said the dialogue um and i asked everybody to play the opposite of themselves which is a really good psychological exercise so the bikers were the girls the child molesters were the powerful people the blacks were rich the whites were the servants we did everything opposite and it was it was like a psychiatric hospital what do you like of your experience because you do also the shows or you visit you are involved in the parole you know thing yeah and uh well i don't get to parole people but i i try to testify from people are trying to get out yeah what do you i don't know what to interest you in prison prisoners is there a steal well i always wonder you know i'm always fascinated by people that do things that i can't imagine doing i'm not a violent person i you know but but i'm always intrigued to things there's no fair answers about suppose you did do something really terrible when you were young how can you ever make up for that and why could you have done it so i always never judge somebody i always try to find out the story behind why people act the way they do and i think that's what all writers do really you are interested in criminals you have read well i i am interested in criminals only because well i was a minor criminal that's why i'm worried my bag's over there because i used to be a thief i have bad karma right somebody's going to steal my bag but uh but i used to be good at it i never got caught but i know people that tell me stories my friend said he used to go this is terrible on christmas eve he would go to graveyards and when people would get out to leave flowers for their dead parents he'd steal their pocketbook that's bad karma yeah and you had contact with criminals no writers and yeah i'd be a good defense lawyer yeah because um i i do believe that everybody needs a can get a second chance if you admit it and say you're sorry you have to do those first two things and i think a lot of people don't do that is there just to come back to the the other subject nowadays the day of politically correct you know i think that one of the for general for filmmakers for writers for everybody is there is this kind of self-censorship to to that you are scared of you know annoying somebody that and now with the power of the social net and everything do you think that this exists this self-censorship again but i saw i just saw his new film this morning which is really gonna cause some trouble i imagine when it opens in america um i haven't seen a film in a long time that had real pissing and heterosexual at top of it but um so i wonder will you feel that when when this film opens i don't know it treats everybody fairly but not me maybe here in europe but it starts a little bit yeah but maybe in america this pressure is stronger but i don't really feel it because i think i am politically correct in a weird way in pink flamingos the right side wins devine is minding her own business resting on her mantle of filth when she's challenged by jealous worse evil people so the right person wins in all my movies so the the the political correctness is there i mean i love women who hate men and i hate men who hate women i'm what would what will be what could be not politically correct nowadays so many things that aren't politically correct i mean strongest one well you can't ask someone for a date you need a lawyer um i i know people that work in businesses that say that in america now you cannot say to somebody in the office that's a great looking dress you have on they can complain and then you have to hire a counselor to come in to train you so people don't talk at work anymore i agree with most of it some of it babies when i heard that one you know what they are that's when you have a child and you don't tell them what sex they are they get to decide give me a break um adult babies lock those up you know i have limits i'm not marching for adult babies but do you think that politically correct has also you know changed a little bit intimate relations between people has you know what's the difference when i was younger spontaneous behavior of people has changed a little bit well you're right i mean what your movie's about in that park and i talked about that park that was here that i went to in my life people had sex with five different people every night when i was young now you need a lawyer to ask somebody for a date so i've lived in both extremes of sexual mores and um i see both sides of it i see only criticism i have of political correctness in america it's for rich people you know it's in rich kids schools believe me they aren't worrying about pronouns in the ghettos of baltimore they've got worse problems to deal with there's no heat in the school system that kind of stuff uh whether somebody is a baby or not i don't know so i think it's a high-class problem it's it's a privileged debate you have been rich yeah [Applause] you have been rich and poor yeah is there any advantage of being poor i was never really poor i mean my parents were upper middle class they didn't support me but i knew if something went wrong they were there they would have been there for me uh my parents made me feel safe i'm really lucky they did that uh when i was poor it was chosen to be poor you know what i mean i didn't work i lived in san francisco and i panhandled and did all that but that was not being really poor that wasn't because i didn't i had food to eat when i was young and being rich i guess i'm rich now rich to me means i'm never around and that takes a lifetime of negotiation i am never once in my life ever around anymore and that took 70 years to figure out how to do that that's rich he also said once that uh being rich it's uh going to a bookstore and buy how many books you don't without worrying about the problem is being rich to go on a bookstore and buy every book you want without looking at the price yep and let's talk a little bit about books it has been a i don't know an important part of your life writing it and reading it nowadays filmmakers come mostly from film schools or art schools but at that time i imagine for you or also for me did you go to film school no they didn't they wouldn't have let me made those movies then now they would probably but then i knew what i wanted to be but they wouldn't have allowed me to make pink flamingos in film school i don't respect i don't know oh i do i think if you don't know how to it's good to learn how to work the equipment although i didn't know how to work it and those movies are still playing uh i think it's good to get your hands on the equipment it's good to meet other people that maybe can help you get jobs in it and everything but it's not going to teach you how to make good films i don't think it's maybe going to teach you the technique of it and how to hook up with other people how to do budgets all that kind of stuff which generally you can work out yourself when you have to on your own and you learn from your own mistakes better than a homework assignment i think yes i mean uh it's the technical knowledge and nowadays with digital it's not so complicated so you can learn it from internet yeah for example and now and now people go and they write treatise you know they get write papers or they teach my films in school which is hilarious to me because they used to be arrested the same you know in school if you brought them to school you would be thrown out so i guess that's good and uh which which were your influence at that time other filmmakers you have talked sometimes about black exploitation movies about you know the underground scene in new york uh what where also artists you know visual art is an influence you know influence to me certainly in the films was ingmar bergman the most because he had dramatic films he had vomit scenes he had nudity before anybody in baltimore bergman movies played in dirty movie theaters and they cut out the dialogue and they said monica's hot summer and i i even have ads for drive-ins monica chocolate sunday monica this which is amazing when you think about that ingmar bergman was taught sold as a as a sex film at the time and then fellini was a huge influence because we took lsd and watched his movies a lot and when i took lsd again this year for my book we listened to them we played the fellini soundtracks they still work um uh warhol of course because i think he stopped cinema and went back to the very beginning and did it really beautifully uh making movies why do you think he was stupid well he did up to the end to bad was the last one that he made you know he died not too long after that i think uh but andy revolutionized movies i think one day those movies will be thought of as as important as his art and certainly at the same time russ meyer and all the exploitation movies that we had in baltimore everywhere we we they tested them in baltimore we had so many exploitation theaters there and blaxploitation theaters too you know movies that were so rude they're not included in this festival here like black shampoo or fight for your life these movies are so politically incorrect if you saw them today it was always where the white people didn't get murdered on the whole audience cheers like mandingo and drum and those kind of movies where they boiled the white people in pots at the end and the whole audience applauded and i'd be sitting there the only white person in the theater having so much fun [Laughter] but it's uh it's interesting that you always you know you mix in a very intelligent way in a very ironical way you know this elliot you know high cultural references with more popular you know well i like both i like the high and the low at the middle is what i always had trouble extreme thing uh extreme middle you know well the extreme middle i don't know what the extreme middle is i guess that's like the third sequel to a bad romantic comedy that makes money yeah and uh um i mean how do you see popular culture nowadays is there you know quality in popular culture you know i mean is there a change of quality what's it's coming from the the popular roots or you think that it's always popular and you have always to accept what well i love the fact when it meets like quentin tarantino's new movie is a big hit and i think it's a great movie i love when that can actually happen something that's new and original and it works and it seems new it's not a sequel and everybody does go to see it so um yeah i don't think it's because something's popular means it's bad at all you have other examples of these films like with tarantino's film that can still work in the box and it's original and it's a real voice and he's the real thing no matter what you think he's the first voice ever that was developed from a video shop and it's a really really important voice and quentin's the real thing are you kidding and everything he says he believes believe me um yeah talk a little bit about your career as a writer uh you start you know talking about yourself with your first book your obsessions well the first book first writing did is i was at a camp and i wrote these horror stories that i would read around the campfire and then the kids would get nightmares and the parents would call the camp and i'd have to call my parents so right away i was causing trouble and then i wrote something for this magazine called fact magazine that was an ex but i made up the whole thing and i was a girl caught inside an unwed mother's home so the very first thing i got published was a complete lie basically and uh and then i uh and then i wrote the first book later shockway which was about making the early movies but i wrote all the movies before that you know so um i always was a writer really i think that's the thing that i do the most consistently i like a lot because it's very honest with role models you know thank you that was the people that gave me the freedom to become who i was and my new book which is mr know-it-all is me trying to share whatever i learned in 50 years to young people how they can maybe learn to negotiate because it's all about negotiation and now you are preparing a novel no yeah yeah it's called liar mouth it's about a woman that steals suitcases in airports and is uh how do you face you know the idea of writing fiction it's more closer to writing the scripts that hard because well it's different um in carsick the book i did when i hitchhiked across the country by myself the first two parts of the book were fiction i imagined the worst rides i could get and then the best rides i could get and then i wrote the real rides i got so that was fiction except i was in it that makes it a lot easier when you're a character so uh in this novel obviously i'm not in it so it's but it's kind of like writing a movie script yeah with a lot more i always did a lot of dialogue but there's certainly way more descriptions yeah talk a little bit about the real trouble you know did you enjoy it the real carsick oh the carsick when i hitchhiked yeah it was great i got 21 rides in nine days from baltimore to san francisco nobody was scary not one gay person picked me up those um and and and it was the greatest thing was all the heterosexual men that picked me up talked about how great their wife was and i have all the women i know that say i never meet any men that aren't gay go hitchhike in the midwest i tell you there's a lot of good men there that are looking for a good wife it was always their second wife and they always saved him from something at least the people to pick you up hitchhiking uh but i had great people to pick me up but the worst part of it was standing there for 10 hours when nobody would pick you up and you'd think now that it's over you but you can't imagine the feeling you think no one is going to pick me up i'm going to have to spend the night in the woods which i almost did once but this truck driver said well you can sleep in the bunk i thought well i guess that'll be good for the book no matter what happens but uh mercifully i gotta ride and there was somebody that recognized you not many people recognized me sometimes when i got in they go oh my god but uh a lot of times no why would it be me i'm standing on disappointed in kansas on an entrance ramp and believe me hitchhiking is not a beauty trip you look terrible after standing in those wind all day long you you don't look great and uh so some people recognize me when i got in most didn't it was touching because two of the rides when i got out tried to give me money and i told this one guy i'm a filmmaker and he went sure you are you know that's what he thought you poor deluded thing you know yeah i'm president of the united states and then i realized it was very touching yeah did you ever imagine when you were young that you will you became such an iconic figure in america yes now it's important to believe in yourself first no you always say this well i wasn't pecker i i i wasn't naive you know i read variety when i was 14. i was ambitious but i certainly all this stuff is gravy you know it's way beyond what i ever imagined could have happened i just wanted to make successful midnight movies at the time that kind of was my goal you never when you're that young think of yourself in your 70s or what's gonna happen and everything but i think that my parents did train me well you know that the they taught me to be organized and they taught me to uh to plan and to so i got a lot of good things from my parents even though i rebelled from them very very much and they were happy that i made films but they hated the films i made they wish i had made a different kind you know it's nice what do you say have your parents seen your new movie not not yet i am a little bit scared yeah yeah that ought to be interesting and uh what is nice also in your last book i think it's that uh you know you look crazy and you are you know saying i don't know a lot of crazy things about traveling about being famous about whatever but then there is another aspect that i really like that you are very fair very honest very you know in business in everything so i like this talk well i try to be honest in the book because extremely honestly i'm trying to say you know these movies didn't make money and this didn't uh or this didn't happen or uh and sometimes failure is good for you your friends get you back for a while you get over yourself for a minute and you got to rethink what you're doing so um it's it's failure can be just as good for you as success and my career never happened overnight i guess hairspray the musical kind of happened overnight and that was the thing i made more money on than anything ever in my whole career was that musical which is still playing everywhere in the world and since schools and who would have ever thought that and it used to be i used to joke and say well the fat girl and the drag queen can finally get the part but you can't anymore in america because of political correctness they can't cast by weight or anything so i've seen it hairspray done with tracy played by a skinny black girl and it makes no sense but the kids don't recognize that which is even better they just think it's fine you know so maybe that's the new frontier it's back to theater of the absurd where i started in the beginning and uh of all your films maybe which is your favorite way my favorite i think the my mom always said cereal mom was the best movie i made and i actually think it is actually yeah i think thank you i think the best divine movie is probably female trouble because that was a vehicle that i wrote for divine kind of like a susan hayward movie or something i want to live um dirty shame that one to me is that's my father said it best he said it was funny i hope i never see it again uh and i had lots of censorship problems with that which i never imagined was gonna happen because it's so juvenile about sex you know but uh it was my sexploitation movie and i grew up on sexploitation movies i loved them all those swedish movies i a woman and uh radley metzger and even doris wishman you know she made all the nude on the moon is there a better title than that well there is a porn title that's even better my ass is haunted that's really a good title it's a very sad story in your book when you when you go to defense for the qualification the nc and you lose and oh because the the film it's what you say it's very light in some sense it's very funny and when you lose with a motion picture association of america they're liberals the liberals are the worst censors because they're smart and and it's hard to argue the point with them because she said well anyone over 17 can see this movie that's any college student she's technically correct but in america the nc-17 the newspapers won't advertise well now they don't advertise movies anyway but uh and and they theaters won't play it and it means x-rated you know so so uh and the motion picture association knows that that rating is a failure it's like an edsel it's like a car that doesn't work it would be recalled if it was any other product and they have strong lobbyists to go to washington to change how an nc-17 is accepted which they do not do so i don't know if you have a rating like here does it matter here if a movie gets uh the adult rating not it doesn't hurt business yeah but it didn't used to in the old days i mean midnight cowboy was rated x but then they took away the x because then people exploited it like triple x double x quadruple x and it's still the same nowadays they didn't change anything on the writing in the merits no it's still nc-17 yeah yeah and everybody will do anything to avoid it they'll cut and cut to avoid it but i asked them what they could i could cut and she said we stopped taking notes that's when i knew i was yeah yeah and you see that then it's like you feel that it may be the end of your career you know it was the end of my career but no it was it did hurt it you know would the movie have been a success maybe not anyway i'm not saying that that damned the movie to financial uh unsuccess but it didn't help certainly and it i know certain theaters wouldn't play it and stuff and it comes right out and makes people think oh it's a porn movie or something like that which if i was going to make a porn movie it would be good uh in all your films you have casts you know from a certain point a lot of celebrities famous actors well i did that in crybaby like but i stopped doing that afterwards like stunt casting which crybaby definitely was pretty much i had so many people the cast would come in and restaurants would people would run out they were like so horrified by all of us together and you always mix with non-professional actors with crazy people but they all are professional now minx made like 20 movies you know i mean they might have started as non-professional but most everybody i use now they have to be in screen actors guild so they're professional enough but you work only with no you work with you mix i mix some too but not as much as i did in the old days because we just started out with my friends really so everybody nobody was a professional when you start i know you like to work with celebrities i like to work with good actors yeah um certainly uh kathleen turner i think was great i thought melanie griffith played it well i think uh tracy ullman was funny yeah so i i like working with really good actors and you have to have one today to get a film made you can't get a film made without them these days unless you have a very very low budget do you agree that is i don't know who said this but there is no good actors or but actors that are totally good or bad filmmakers you know then direct them well i don't know if you ever find a real bad actor that was impossible with all you mean people that just were like they done away who just you know just got fired for throwing slapping people and throwing her lunch in people's faces no i've never had somebody like that because you can tell when you have the meeting if they're going to be humor impaired if they have some sense of humor about they can't talk about their craft or their if they use the word rigorous too much or if they talk about their journey all the time it's always usually problematic yeah so maybe you're happier with your solo shows no no no i like people all kathleen turner they all had a sense of humor when we came in yeah they they were funny they could talk and you and you know you got along with them right away they they got the script they understood what you were trying to do you enjoyed the solo shows you had like a rock and roll star now oh solo shows i like doing them it's my anti-alzheimer's disease exercise because i constantly have to update him and it's a 70-minute memorize monologues so uh yeah i do it all the time yeah i do have a christmas tour 18 cities 21 days i got to go home and write that right when i go home from here maybe i don't know we should open a little bit to the questions of the audience um do you think that today is very hard to shock the audience and what is the best way for you today to show the others i don't just try to shock the audience i try to make them laugh it's easy to shock movies i'm shocked all the time when i go to movies another bad romantic comedy are they gonna can't they do a new idea i'm shocked all the time when i go to the movies but in a bad way i want to surprise you and take you into a world that you're maybe a little uncomfortable with but when i'm your guide you feel safe and you open your mind to something so if you use shock i learned that in grade school in english class the term shock value which is you say something outrageous to get people's attention and then they'll listen and that does work but you have to have something to say after you have their attention hi you talked about using lsd and writing a book have you ever i didn't write it when i was on it okay yeah i thought that would be impossible um but have you ever struggled with like finding um unique ideas and do you turn to drugs for that or what do you do you know i i have to be careful when i say her because um people i took drugs with when i met were dead now and became drug addicts and i i didn't but many people do so i'm be careful what i'm saying here i had all drugs i liked them i just stopped taking them i didn't take lsd for 50 years and i took it to write a book this book to what the experience was like i guess the only time we were never on drugs when we made the movie ever but i was on pop probably definitely when i wrote multiple maniacs to desperate living yes i was on pot definitely when i wrote them every morning i would smoke pot and write could i do that now no pot just makes me kind of paranoid now i mean i'm not against it but um i wouldn't care i'd rather my kids smoke pot than drank i mean how many school shooters are on marijuana none really so uh but i never turned to drugs for inspiration well i guess maybe in the old days i just smoked pot every day then anyway in the early six late 60s so i never thought oh i can't think of anything i better take drugs no i never did that but some people might i don't know thank you yeah yesterday first of all i love you thank you and your work and music plays a really big role in your films um and i know you host a burger boogaloo so do you still go actively search for music or do you like music come your way yeah i have youth spies that i give poppers to that tell me about new music as a reward because i can't go to a rap club at 3 a.m but i like to know about them and i say in my new book i have a whole chapter about how to have musical taste and whenever you say oh they don't have music as good as when i'm young that means your life is over and you're an old fart and you have no influence on anybody anymore so you should always try to find out about new music even if you don't so and i like all kinds of music you know so it's not one kind i mean it's amazing now you look at the top 10 and billboard almost nobody could identify each one of them because it's so many different kinds of music so i do keep try to keep play music all the time and i i listen to you i ask young people for uh and i read music reviews all the time that's the only way i know now really is to uh read music reviews and ask the young people that i hire that's part of their job is to tell me that kind of stuff yesterday on the stage uh you mentioned some names um gaspar noe bruno dumont talk a little bit about these fabric directors that you always put into well i use yeah i love feel bad european directors yeah uh it's the socialism i'm for your government pays for those movies that is a socialism i'm really for because in my country the government would stop those movies they would pay to stop them so that's an amazing thing that happens in europe that people don't realize in america think how do they get these movies made how do they make money they don't make money they lose that's okay it's never okay and you have to think of some ludicrous way to get these same kind of films financed in america when they know they're not gonna make money uh so i i do like those kind of movies and uh people expect always that i might not like them my guilty pleasures i don't have guilty pleasures because uh why would you be guilty about liking a movie but um i do like feel bad moves i feel good now why would i expect a movie to i hate when people say i only like to go to movies that makes me feel good what's the matter with you you know that's not why you go to the movies you go to the movies to be alarmed do you go to the movies to to be shocked into thinking of a new thing or to see something or you didn't know about or experience other people's agony not to make you feel better about your boring little life to me [Applause] hello i thought when i didn't know any movies by you that you are doing parodies like mad magazine or charles bukovsky in literature well mad magazine was a huge influence on me and i'm very sad you know it just went out of business last week in america yeah but then i saw some movies like a serial mom here and i thought you were a satirist in a way another cynic but the satirist is imagining a better world so what better world do we do you imagine in uh the suburbs of the world well it's not always suburbia yeah i imagine i'm not a cynic i'm an optimist i think and i am a satirist i guess which makes me think that i make fun of myself first that's really important to do make fun of the rules of the world that i live in first and then you can make fun of everybody else's rules but i think to be a successful one you have to make fun of yourself first and be able to do that and then i think it gives you the freedom to make fun of other people's world but understanding why they had those rules too you have to always learn the rules to break them with fun and fashion and to have any any leeway to change rules you have to know them first can you recommend john an important book for you the life-changing book yeah i think certainly denton welsh is a writer i really really like jane bowles wrote this one novel called um two serious ladies that i still think is the tennessee williams thought it was the best novel too she was paul bowles's wife she wrote one novel uh yeah in role models i have a chapter where i list my favorite books and uh and i think um i'm still looking you know finding new writers and and keep going then it's really the greatest thing to find one and then read all their books right in a row you know i love to get obsessed by one writer you are obsessed by a hula bit you know you recommend oh i do love him i do love him because he even shocks me sometimes and then i like that movie about the kidnapping of him that he's in even playing himself and that kidnapping story is still a little bit fishy right or who knows but i think it's fascinating i even went to his art show in new york he had a big art show in new york you have been also in the art shows you have done yourself you are following you wrote prologues on books about art yeah that's my other life i keep that real separate uh why because because the only obscenity left in the art world is celebrity so you know i make fun of that and uh i just had a big retrospective in maryland and i went to the wexner center and then i had another one at the new museum in retrospective about 10 years ago so and i i showed in a lot of places in switzerland i showed a lot here so uh yeah i've done that for a long time too another way to tell stories and you follow also the scene no do you think yeah contemporary when everything is possible now you know that is full of i do collect art i like the kind of pisses people off you know the perfect karen sanders an artist i like and and uh i bought a piece of hers recently and it was she never saw it or touched it she just told her art dealer in america to throw the canvas outside till i got mold all over it and then the mold grew and it was great because you couldn't bring it in your house it would wreck your house you had to pay to have it treated it could kill you it could disappear it was ugly and it was expensive it was perfect for contemporary art do you think that is still possible to have an aesthetic critical judgment in contemporary art certainly yeah yeah yeah i mean i i love you know i'm against art for the people i think it's a terrible idea of everything that the art world is criticized for it's elitism and everything i am 100 for because it's a secret club where you learn how to see you have to speak a different way you have to wear certain clothes you have but it's a magic trick you learn how to see something that other people can't see and you have to learn how to see that so i like that those people they are better than you so i have a question um you are explicitly sexual and people can be explicitly resistant towards that women i'm explicitly sexual in what way not not in person in a book or something you mean yeah yeah or like in your films and people can be really resistant towards that and in the face of resistance did you ever lose your confidence and if so how did you get it back i never had confidence why do you think i'm in show business that attracts the least confident people in the world that spend their entire life asking strangers for approval [Applause] hi hello uh what is camp for you today you know camp is a word i never say anymore i think it became in europe it was kitsch and then america was camp and then it became trash and then punk it became filth and now it's just american humor it's just funny you know what i i don't know that i would ever say oh that's a camp i i don't know i haven't heard anybody say that since the met ball since they had you know the big exhibit at the met uh and camp to me is innocent you can't try to be camp it's something that was so bad it was great without their knowledge that accidentally happened and i think today that's almost impossible because everybody is trying to be some genre if it's bad they're trying to be better and that usually never works it's not funny so um i don't know that camp is even possible in the culture of today because it was innocent um can you tell us something more about divine because he died very early and we didn't have chance to interview him i know how did you become friends and something about who he was really devine was really not trans in any way devine was almost never in drag except when we made a movie he was fat he said it was too hot how do women wear all this you know uh he um was a kind gentle man he was very unlike the divine character that was in my movies um he at the end wore expensive men's suits i think the last movie was then he played a man in alan rudolph's last movie he played a mafia type guy he was a pothead definitely um he liked to eat he liked to stay home he was a great host he had a really good sense of humor and he was a kind gentle man really um in real life when he put on that outfit he could become that character yeah it was just a costume really that he that he wore and uh and he started getting good i mean he got sick of the whole eating thing because people could never get over that and they didn't realize he was a good actor in that movie and that was a stunt basically he did his own stunt work but later he got weary of talking about that and then i think when we did polyester when he completely changed from that image that we had done together to scare hippies and played a normal person he got really really good reviews and in the best in hairspray because he played an unattractive blue color mother and even i didn't recognize him the first day on the set when i walked down there because he was just standing around with other women in the neighborhood he looked exactly like him and uh and so he was really pleased i mean he got really good reviews and of course he died a week later but i guess it's better than dying a week after you get them i mean before you get them but uh so his career he was gonna the next day after he died he was supposed to go film married with children which was a big hit tv show in america where he was gonna play the gay male uncle which would have been the first one of the first gay characters on a big hit sitcom in america probably would have been very successful so he really was cut down at the worst kind of point in his career people still go to the grave constantly they leave everything there so now we bought graves there i have one mink we all we call it disgrace land we're all going to be married i'll be buried there yeah same place and yeah how did you meet divine's parents moved six houses away from my parents and they ran a children's nursery school and devine was their only child not the best dad and he went to high school you know not the same one i went to but he went to the same high school where we shot cereal mom where they killed the teacher because they were really brutal to him there you know the teachers beat him up the kids and he was not he was an overweight nerd he wasn't divine at all then you know he was but that anger was built building in him that gave him the rage to later play the character of divine definitely hello hello uh i realized that you know a lot about human beings and and their feelings and and what moves them to do things i wonder how how would you tell someone to learn more about what it could be or what other types of human beings or other types of living or main thing is to read just keep reading everything you can and to eavesdrop i listen to what people say all the time i'm always astounded at what people say so spy on people you know i can sit in an airport and watch a flight everybody get off a flight and make up an instant bio about each person as they walk through the door just like that's the exercise in writing it's not true but you just imagine stories about every person i never understand people say they're bored bored we'll just walk outside how can you be bored i mean it's amazing to be you're bored when you're dead so um you know pay attention while you're alive apart from the noble do you have any other project idea i might have john waters camp that they have every year that that's next month uh that's a real summer camp where people come from all over the world a camp like this one this one is called the john waters camp people come they dress as my characters in my films for four days people get married at it last year a girl said can i eat in front of you i said i guess you know and she had a a little deli tray with a sample of a dog turd cut out like scientifically and she ate it i could knock yourself out i turned my head i didn't watch but uh it's pretty amazing people get married at it they come from all over the world look it up online it's pretty funny there's some great pictures someone last year gave me a portrait they had painted of me with their penis i know this startles me yeah but we all got to make a living thank you all you

Channel: Locarno Film Festival

Views: 10,744

Rating: 4.8759689 out of 5

Keywords: Locarno, film, cinema, Locarno Festival, movie, stars, vip, Locarno Film Festival, Festival, John Waters, Waters, Conversation, interview, arthouse, independent cinema, cinephile, blaxploitation, sexploitation, camp, albert serra, divine, Multiple Maniacs, Pink Flamingos, Female Trouble, Hairspray, Serial Mom, Cecil B. Demented, exploitation movie, grindhouse, midnight movie, politically correct, Pardo d'onore, film director, filmmaker, auteur, discutiamo discutiamo

Id: 5X0C2kYOHhc

Length: 52min 53sec (3173 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 05 2020