Cabaret

I love London. I am actually a Time Out subscriber. And my subscription to Time Out London is the most expensive subscription I get in the mail. To have a subscription in America costs so much money it’s unbelievable. But I enjoy it. You’re lucky in London that you have so many newspapers; in America they’re all going out of business. We don’t even have critics any more – a classical music critic in America is almost unheard of. Although while you kind of invented the tabloids, the New York Post had the absolute best headline ever when Ike Turner died – ‘Ike Beats Tina To Death’.

I’m coming over to perform my vaudeville act. I’ve done it my whole life; it started 40 years ago when we didn’t have enough money to advertise the movie. So I would just show up like some joke of a director in a ridiculous outfit and introduce the most beautiful woman in the world – Divine – and then we’d have fake cops come on stage and try to arrest us, and Divine would strangle them.

Whenever I say my name in France, people laugh, because over there, John Waters means ‘toilet water’. So I thought that could be the name of my fragrance. In America, someone gave me this gift from a sex shop. They actually have a bottle that is the smell of an asshole. I thought: Well, I’d like to mix that with maybe Chanel No 5 and put it out as Eau de Waters. I’m not against celebrities having fragrances as long as we stay true to our roots. Feature continues

But that, for me, illustrates the excess of capitalism – that someone somewhere in America is going to work every day to bottle the smell of an asshole to be sold. That gives me new faith in capitalism.

The only crossover that counts to me is getting the next generation of kids. The last time I was at the British Film Institute and I gave a talk, the kids there were really young. That, to me, is success – not money, but that you continue to get the new, angry kids who don’t fit in with their own minority. Because that’s my target audience.

My favourite characters are people who think they’re normal but they’re not. I live in Baltimore, and it’s full of people like that. I’ve also lived in New York, which is full of people who think they’re crazy, but they’re completely normal. I get my best material in Baltimore – you get dialogue that you just couldn’t imagine. I asked this guy in a bar what he did for a living and he said he traded deer meat for crack. I never realised that job even existed. You could make a whole movie about that person. And he was kind of cute too, if you could ignore his eyes rolling around his head. Although I did crack once, accidentally, and I thought: Oh my God, what, am I gonna rob my parents now? I prefer poppers – they’re legal in London, right? I used to do them on roller coasters. They’re illegal in Provincetown, which is the gay fishing village where I live in
the summer. In the airport there are signs warning you to get rid of your poppers.

‘Hairspray’ and ‘A Dirty Shame’ are all the same to me – all my films celebrate people who mind their own business, and they’re always pitted against someone who doesn’t and who is judgemental. And that is my politics. I think all humour is political. The only way you can get someone to change their mind is to make ’em laugh. Just like the only way you can get people into bed is to make ’em laugh.

I also try to ask the questions no one else would ask. Like: Would you sleep with a racist if they were cute enough? And the answer is: Yes, just change the subject when they start talking politics.

John Waters’s ‘This Filthy World’ is at Hammersmith Apollo on Sept 18.