In Oyster Issue #94 Ariane Halls caught up with the iconic and controversial John Waters. Here is an excerpt from Oyster’s exclusive interview where they chat about Baltimore, lovely anarchists and Showgirls:
John Waters is one of the most fascinating and charmingly controversial people in the world. He is the man who filmed a drag queen eating dog shit; who once said, “Sometimes I wish I was a woman, just so that I could get an abortion;” who, upon meeting Justin Bieber, asked him to autograph a bottle of Proactiv. Thankfully he lived up to my every expectation — that is, he loves Showgirls as much as I do.
Ariane Halls: How do you think Australians differ from Americans?
John Waters: I don’t think they’re so different from people in Baltimore, who have a great sense of humour about themselves and also aren’t impressed easily and don’t care that much about being trendy, and sometimes exaggerate and celebrate what other people try to hide about their culture [laughs]. So I think my friends are actually very similar [to Australians].
Your films have formed a sort of extended love letter to Baltimore. How would you describe the city to someone who has never been there before?
Well, it’s a working-class city — a blue-collar city. But the thing that’s amazing about it is that if you ever say, “I’m moving to New York,” someone in Baltimore would say, “Why?!” It’s a city of neighbourhoods; it’s the only city where, when you ask somebody what school you went to, you mean high school, not college. It seems like everyone thinks they’re normal, but I think they’re actually insane. I also live in New York, where most of my friends probably think they’re insane, but they’re actually kind of normal. So, I think it’s a city that’s eccentric but … they don’t even realise.
You’ve always been unapologetically strange and especially non-judgmental of others. Why do you think you’re like that? Do you think you’re a product of Baltimore, or of your parents, or…
Well, I guess everyone is a product of their parents in some way. I mean, although my parents were kind of forced to be more open-minded by having me as a child [laughs] … They were fairly conservative, but they never taught me to be judgmental. I think that’s my politics: you mind your own business until you know the whole story, and even then you never know the whole story — it’s quite complicated, why people turn out the way they do. I do believe that if you’re 60 years old and angry, you’re an asshole, but when you’re 20 years old and angry, it’s sexy.
Speaking of being conservative, Pink Flamingos is still banned in Australia.
In England, it’s cut — I mean, it has never come out in full. Is it totally banned?
No, I think you can play the version without the fellatio scene. And maybe the bit with the chicken…
Well, you know, the fellatio scene is pretty harmless … I think it’s kind of an innocent scene. You know, weirdly enough, it’s a scene that gets played on the television in America — uncut, which is amazing to me … And in England, I think, they cut that scene and the eating shit scene. To me, the eating shit scene was kind of Jackass. If I hadn’t done it, Johnny Knoxville would have done it. I think that was pretty harmless too — it was just a publicity-stunt joke about what you could and couldn’t do in the year Deep Throatbecame legal in America; that was the year we made Pink Flamingos.
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