Still Waters

Tired of his "Prince of Puke" label, film-maker John Waters has decided to explain his "good bad taste" in a spoken-word stage show. He talks to Brian Boyd

DURING the 1980s, film-maker John Waters was working in a high-security prison as a teacher. Once, he showed his class of serial murderers a tape of his film Pink Flamingoes. The studied response from his captive audience was: "Man, you're fucked up."

Waters has been on tour with his stand-up show for the last few years. "It's smart and dirty fun," he says. "It's as much about me as it is about my films. I found that, over the years, and because of films such as Pink Flamingoesand Hairspray, I was getting described as The Prince of Puke, The Duke of Dirtand The Pope of Trash, so I just wanted to explain how I ended up making these films - what my influences were and what type of person I was back then."

Waters thinks he is the only Hollywood film director ever to mount a stand-up show, but says this particular forum is just the continuation of what he has been doing for years.

"When I first started in Baltimore, I used to make these 8mm underground arty films," he says. "I would have been very influenced by the works of Warhol and Russ Meyer, and the only place I could ever get to show them were in these sort of beatnik coffee houses. I had my ensemble cast around me - Divine and Mink Stole and all my good friends - and before we screened the films, we all used to put on this sort of stand-up show by way of introduction to the film that people were going to see. So really, what I'm doing now is nothing new to me."

For Waters, his films are a celebration. "They're a giddy homage to bad taste," he says. "They're humorous. As I say in the show, to have bad taste, you first must have very good taste. So, there can be this thing known as 'good bad taste' and I'm proud to say that I've now been offending three generations of cinema goers."

Always wary of the "cult" category, Waters has intersected with the mainstream a few times during his career. After his breakthrough success with Hairspray(which featured Ricki Lake and Debbie Harry) in 1988, he got major Hollywood backing for his next film, Cry Baby, in which Johnny Depp played the lead. "At the time, he was complaining that he didn't want to be seen as a teen idol," says Waters. "So I said: 'stick with me, and we'll soon sort that out'."

"I never worried about the mainstream embracing me," he says, "because it was never really going to happen. What you can find is that certain actors want to work with you because they're looking for some sort of indie credibility. No matter how big the star is in my films, the vision remains the same - trash can never really become acceptable."

There has been a resurgence of interest in his work over the past few years, as both Hairsprayand Cry Babywent on to become successful theatre musicals, and a remake of Hairsprayfeaturing John Travolta and Michelle Pfeiffer was a major hit.

"It's funny for me seeing a film that so outraged people on its initial release suddenly being so acclaimed," he says. "I didn't direct the new one, but I did make a cameo appearance as a flasher, and it was fun for me to see that Travolta took even more time getting into drag than Divine did in the original. I think it is the sort of film that needs to be updated and, yes, I thought they did it very well."

In his show, Waters doesn't just bring you behind the scenes of his film career and fill in biographical details; he ranges wide over ideas as diverse as "negative art" and the US criminal system. "It can go anywhere," he says. "There are bits about Catholicism and other bits about fashion. I know that a number of people come along to hear about the films, but I think now I've got them there, I might as well expand a bit more."

His favourite part of the show is the inbuilt Q&A session. "You really hear the strangest things from people," he says. "Some people obviously come along because they think it's a film-maker talking about films, but as I stress, it's a stand-up show first and foremost. Some of the people who ask questions obviously have such a deep knowledge of the films, and that can sidetrack me a bit as I have to go into minute detail.

"And for me, it's instructive because I get to hear what people really think about the work. But I think you can still get a lot from the show if you've never seen any of the films. But it does help if you like your bad taste done in a sophisticated fashion."

• John Waters plays Vicar Street, Dublin next Wednesday. www.ticketmaster.ie www.dreamlandnews.com