The Radical Way to Success - If you have rich relatives, be nice to them!

updated: November 16, 2009

“The Radical Way to Success" – The director John Waters interviewed by Wieland Speck. Berlinale Talent Campus, February 13, 2007.

[A clip of SERIAL MOM (John Waters, 1994) is screened.]

John Waters: I haven’t seen that one in a while. And Kathleen [Turner] is great.

Wieland Speck: That was almost in the middle of your filmmaking work.

John Waters: Well, I think a bit later. This was the only real movie I had where I had enough money to make it. This was kind of a Hollywood budget, I think it was 12 million dollars, which was a lot then. She got a lot, but then she deserved a lot.

Wieland Speck: So, when we got inspired, as young people in the late 1970s, and 1980s, by your work, which was taking a kind of curtain off from certain restrictions that people felt.

John Waters: I didn’t know what I was doing when I started to make movies. I didn’t go to film school, I didn’t know how to do anything really, I just learned from doing it. And if you look at PINK FLAMINGOS (1972) you can see how technically terrible it is but people who liked it just said, well, it looks raw. That means terrible if you like it. People thought it was real though, they thought it was a documentary, and that I lived in a trailer with Divine and ate dog shit. And people would show up, real shit-eaters. And we would go, no, we made this for anarchy, not for sex!

JOHN WATERS’ PIECES OF ADVICE

Wieland Speck: Well, anarchy I think is the word that inspired us in Europe about your work. I don’t know if any of you here have seen the documentary running in the Panorama, THIS FILTHY WORLD (Jeff Garlin, 2006)? A few of us…

John Waters: So, that movie was made… well it’s my stand-up comedy routine that I do at colleges and punk rock clubs. I think, in the filmmaking world, you can never have too many careers because sometimes they say no to your making a movie. So what are you going to do then for money? So, I wrote books, I was a journalist, I always had back-up careers, which is something I would advise you all to have. It can certainly be related to film. I was a film critic for a while, I wrote for “Rolling Stone”, I was the book reviewer for “Vogue” for a while. So you can always have other jobs that are related to what you want to do, because almost never, just when you want to make a film does somebody say, “oh, okay, here”.

I always meet kids who think, how do I become a director? Well, if you’re asking me, you’ll never become one. Because no-one is going to just come and knock on your door, and say, “hi, would you like to make a movie? Here’s four million dollars.” I promise you, that’s not going to happen. So, the first thing I always tell anybody, is if you have rich relatives, be nice to them! I never understand young people when they say, “I hate rich people”. Well, guess what, you’re never going to make a movie then, because who is going to give you the money? Poor people? So, that is one piece of advice. Also, on your first movies, always put sex and violence in it, but try to think of a new way to use sex and violence that will get on people five years older than you’s nerves. Or, people who just had success.

Do something that makes them nervous, which is always really good. Never make a film just about your grandmother, unless she is a serial killer. Don’t make it whimsical or too personal at the beginning. Although you do have to make it about something. Someone has to like your movie though. I never get it when kids say, “I don’t care if people see my movies”. Well, maybe Marguerite Duras can get away with it but you can’t!

And don’t borrow money from people to make a movie unless you think you can really pay it back. Because if you don’t believe in yourself it’s never going to happen anyway. It is hard. How I raised money, is my father paid for PINK FLAMINGOS. He’s never seen it, he would be so horrified by it, but I did pay him back, with interest. I used to tour around the country in America and we would go in the 1960s wherever somebody had just blown up the Bank of America. We would go there, because there were riots. It was like you all going to raves, it was the same principle. It was really cute. People would have loose morals at riots too, so you could get laid and it was fun and it was political.

And I would go and see whatever movie had the weirdest theatre in that town, and rent it, which is called four-walling, for a midnight show. And I would stand on the corner and give out flyers. Maybe it cost a hundred dollars to rent the theatre and maybe we made two hundred. And I would get the hundred and move on to the next city. You can have your own premiere anyway. You can rent a hall.

Or a church. We used to do it in churches, because the police would never raid a church. But nowadays you don’t have to worry about that. You can’t imagine how exciting it was when you went to a movie and the police raided it, and the entire audience was taken away by the police. That really was fun, I tell you! It’s not like going to the mall today to see a movie. You could have your own premiere and invite your friends, and send out your flyers to the paper, so maybe one reporter would review it, even if he hates it. And then use that negative review in the ad. I always used to do that. If you get a bad review, don’t let that stop you! Advertise with it.

Wieland Speck: We almost have a book, if we follow all your steps, how to make a movie.

John Waters: When I was starting out, I made my friends my stars, which everybody does on their first movie. And the one mistake I made on my first movies that I would warn you about is music rights. I never paid for the music and I didn’t know you had to. And later, for PINK FLAMINGOS, we had to pay 500,000 dollars for those rights. It seems that kids always want to use their insane friends in the movie, but they never want to use their insane friends’ music. They want to use The Beatles. Well, guess what, that costs really a lot of money!

So, be careful, because even if you make a film and you put in music that you don’t own the rights to, and it ends up in a festival, and a distributor buys that film, and when they find out that you haven’t paid for the music rights, they will fall through. They won’t distribute your movie. Music rights are very expensive. For the world, for all rights, I would say it is at least 20,000 dollars a song, whether it is obscure or not obscure. So, that is something I would advise you, to make sure you have your music cleared before you put it in a movie.

JOHN WATERS AND THE BERLINALE

Wieland Speck: Any questions from the audience?

John Waters (to audience member): I see you have a “Film Threat” t-shirt on. That magazine inspired one of my movies because they had an article that their readers should attack the readers of Premiere magazine, like as a war. And I love that idea, it was cinematically tense. The idea of an arthouse audience attacking a mainstream movie theatre because of their taste. That sort of led to CECIL B. DEMENTED (2000), really. That idea of cinema wars.

Question: It is strange that the Berlinale never shows films made by you, but only one about you.

John Waters: No, my movies were here before. I was here with a lot of different movies. This was the first festival that I ever sold any rights to my movies. I was here with FEMALE TROUBLE (1974) and PINK FLAMINGOS and POLYESTER (1981). This was when the wall was still up and it was great. I had a great time. So, THIS FILTHY WORLD is not really a documentary, it is a film of my one-man show. It wasn’t directed by me, it was directed by Jeff Garland, who is a comedian himself. He is on the TV show, Curb Your Enthusiasm.

SHOOTING AND PREMIERING IN BALTIMORE

Question: I was visiting my brother in Baltimore, and I was at the Senator Theatre. Do you do all your premieres at that same theatre?

John Waters: Well, I have done a lot of my premieres at the Senator. Unfortunately just last week I heard that the Senator is going out of business and being auctioned off which is a terrible blow to movie theatres everywhere really because it was a beautiful old cinema. We filmed CECIL B. DEMENTED there, the beginning. And I have had a lot of premieres there. It is a beautiful theatre to have a premiere in.

I also had them at the Charles Theatre. My old premieres were in churches, and in church basements. We would have them anywhere and just swung around a flashlight. People still got dressed up and they came and it was the premiere. And we also used to give door prizes, which is dinner for two at the little tavern, which is the worst possible restaurant in the whole city. You would never want to eat there, and it would cost 25 cents to eat there. The winner would have to come up on stage and Divine would give them the prize.

Question: With SERIAL MOM, the chase scenes through the suburbs. Was that easy to get permission from the Baltimore police?

John Waters: I have cinematic immunity! The film commission in Baltimore is great. I am still amazed. They knock on people’s doors and say, “John’s making a movie, move!”. And people do! I wouldn’t. I always try to pick a neighborhood to film in that no one has made a movie in yet. Because they don’t know the hell of it. They don’t know how really foolish it is to ever let anyone in your house to make a movie. Even the movie A DIRTY SHAME (2004), which was a movie about sex addicts. I thought we are never going to get away with this, because we put up fake penis trees and anus trees on the lawn, and the families all came out and posed for pictures. This one older woman said, “I don’t mind telling you, it makes me horny this movie”.

It was amazing. The whole neighborhood association said, thank you so much for helping this community. I thought, how did we help it? I have really good location managers, and it is almost like jury duty. Before we go into a neighborhood they look up everybody on the internet and find out everything they can and identify who will be the trouble-makers, and go to them first and offer them a hotel room. Get them away before they cause trouble. I always think of the locations first when I am writing a movie. If you see me sitting out at the front of your house, I am thinking up terrible things that are going to happen in your living room. And people think I’m an insurance inspector or something. Or the cops. They get nervous. But I always get the music first, and I always know where they are going to live in my movies. That is very important to me. And I hang out in the bar, wherever it is in that community, whilst I am writing it. Which helps usually.

HOW YOU POSITION A MOVIE AND WORD OF MOUTH

Question: There is a so-called new idea that filmmakers should get more imaginative with their marketing and get more involved. You have been a fantastic promoter of your work all through your career. How important do you think it is that filmmakers be imaginative with how they get their film out there?

John Waters: It is very important. You could make the best movie ever made in the world but then what? How are you going to get people to see it? And how you position a movie and word of mouth, and certainly film festivals have a lot to do with that. But certainly the ad-campaign is so important. And how can you sell it? The thing is you never have enough advertising budget. And when I started I had no advertising budget. So Divine would get dressed as the character, and ride the subways, and give out flyers. People would run off the carriage, today you’d be arrested for doing that.

We always went into the community and became part of it. I would always give out flyers. I still, for good luck, every once in a while go and put up a hand poster somewhere. In laundrymats and restaurants. Plate jobs, that means you give people a flyer whilst they are eating, and run out before the manager kicks you out. You have to go aggressively to find your audience. Which is the same way that good movie studios do today. Not everybody is going to want to see your movie. You have got to find the ones that do want to see it. And you have got to identify those people and go to them and get to that community and somehow let them know about it. Especially if you are just starting and you have no advertising budget. Publicity is the only free thing you can get. The amount of publicity space you can get in a newspaper is worth way more than you could pay for an ad that big. But the days of using negative reviews are gone. All critics are hip now. None of them would say, this movie is appalling.

SHOCKING AND PROVOKING

Question: When you started to make movies, you had pleasure in seeing the horrified faces of the audience, such as the shit-eating scene in PINK FLAMINGOS. Do you like seeing the faces of the audience?

John Waters: That scene still works. And in any country of the world. Whether capitalist, communist, poor, rich. Although my films do best in rich neighborhoods and the worst in poor neighborhoods. Because my films have irony, and irony is in a way elitist. Poor, hungry people don’t think anything is so bad is good. If you are poor, it is a concept that is meaningless. I was always disappointed that my films didn’t work in real exploitation theatres but they didn’t, because the real exploitation audiences don’t want irony, they think you are making fun of the genre. And you are.

But the eating-shit thing was a publicity stunt. The year we made PINK FLAMINGOS was the same year as DEEP THROAT (Gerard Damiano, 1972) came out in America, where pornography became legal, so it was a case of what can’t be illegal anymore? They didn’t have a law against that yet. They do now. But they didn’t then. It’s the one thing in porn you can’t do. Actually there are two things. Underage or shit-eating. But, we didn’t do this for sex. This was a stunt. You couldn’t believe your eyes, could this be true. And I only did one take, I’m not a sadist. And Divine just did it. To us then it didn’t seem that weird. That is what I look back on as the only odd thing. I mean, today I wouldn’t ask someone to do that probably. Those are the kind of things you do when you are young. And I never tried to go beyond that or never tried to repeat that success, and if I did I don’t think I would still be working. I did have a scene where I wanted to have Divine vomit for real in FEMALE TROUBLE, but he couldn’t. We gave him apercat, that medicine that makes you sick, and the whole crew was affected and Divine is trying to vomit and he couldn’t. He was puke-shy.I think if I tried to repeat that, I wouldn’t be here today. I think I did that and it worked.

Divine eventually got really weary about talking about it, because people were so freaked out by it that they never could not ask him about it. For the rest of his life. And I think eventually he got sick of talking about it. I think Divine was a good actor but people couldn’t get beyond that at the time. They just kept asking him, how could you do that. And he would reply, “well it was in the script. I was starting out in the business”. I mean you all eat shit to get where you are today.

THE U.S. RATING SYSTEM

Question: You made several movies with which I am sure you developed a relationship with the MPAA. Did the ratings, which your movies got, hurt you commercially?

John Waters: I think the rating NC17, which is the rating that really doesn’t work in the MPAA very much, did hurt my last movie, A DIRTY SHAME. I always thought it couldn’t hurt me, with my past. But it did, because I found out later that the theatres, even the art theatres which would play my movies, have some landlords who have deep in their contracts that they can’t play an NC17 movie. The place it really hurts is video. For example, Netflix, which is a big company in America, which gets you home rentals through the mail and it is very successful but it means all the little shops are out of business and the only ones that are left are the chains, and they will not even carry NC17 or unrated movies.

It is great censorship and it’s a huge financial burden and that is why my last movie didn’t make money. I mean, people can say, I didn’t like the movie or it was a bad movie, but I know before all my movies how they did on video and everything, and this was a big problem. They were fair to me pretty much the other times. PINK FLAMINGOS was NC17 but I never even had a rating until the end, and the rating helped us there because it used to be in video shops unrated, and they put it in comedy, and some family would think, “oh, is it about Florida?”, and then take it home and freak out.

And PECKER (1998) got an R-rating, which seemed to be fair and what it should have gotten. With this film it was rated the same week as the Iraq prison scandal, so nobody was feeling that great about sex in America that week, and I think that did affect it. They just don’t like it to be about sex, but no one actually has sex in A DIRTY SHAME, they just talk about it really. So you can’t even talk about sex anymore? I appealed it and lost. It was quite an experience that I hope to never have to go through again. They want an NC17 to be a hit but there never will be one, it is impossible. So it is a faulty rating that they should recall, just like a car company that recalls a car that doesn’t work.

They could go out with their lobbyists and go to all the video chains, and make them change their rules so that they do carry it. That’s what they should do, but they don’t. If they did that I think that would be fair. So what if it is an NC17? But it is because you can’t sell it anywhere that it is in itself hypocritical to say that this rating is fair and that you have to take it. You can release your film unrated but I couldn’t because New Line is owned by Time Warner, all the big companies that are signature of the Motion Picture Association will not release an unrated or NC17 movie. Is there a rating here like this?

Wieland Speck: There is a rating, but it doesn’t hurt the film in the same way as you describe it. For example, if you get an 18-certificate I think it is not possible to send it by mail. But you can overcome it by getting it from Belgium or something like that.

John Waters: Do they enforce it?

Wieland Speck: Not very much.

GETTING CHARGED FOR FILMS

Audience member: For me it really does hurt. My films have been banned in Germany, and I had to go to court to get them back. So if some people really want to get your films away from the screen they go for the ratings. My films never got ratings because I saw no sense in it because there is no 18 anyway. If they want to get it away they have to charge you with a criminal act, and so that is what they do over here.

John Waters: So you got charged? I did too. I never won a court case with PINK FLAMINGOS. It was found obscene every time. It is obscene, but it is obscene in a joyous way. If you see that movie at midnight it is joyous. If you see it in a courtroom at 10 a.m., and you are sworn in for jury duty, then it really looks horrible.

Audience member: I won my case. I am an official artist now.

John Waters: The Museum of Modern Art bought a print of PINK FLAMINGOS and we used that in court thinking, but they were not impressed. Too bad, obscene.

WE HAVE TO FIGHT BACK

Wieland Speck: The interesting thing you said about Netflix, which is a great idea and sounds logical, but it kills the little shops.

John Waters: That’s capitalism.

Wieland Speck: Sure. But we have to be aware of it, because we do everything the Americans do a little later.

John Waters: With Netflix, you can get any film delivered to your house, and there is no late feels because you don’t get the next one till you send it back. But so what. You can keep it for three weeks. And they also have really good movies. It just comes in the mail, and you just send it back in the mail. You always have four films, and you only get the next one when you send one back. It is very popular and hugely successful. In fact they paid to produce this movie about my show, THIS FILTHY WORLD. They are so successful they are starting to produce movies now.

But you’re right. It is changing everything. It even made Blockbusters and the big stores do away with late fees, to keep up with them. And I think those stores eventually will go out of business. I always tell kids, take your old porn and put it back in the shops. Or rent a Disney movie and splice in a scene from DEEP THROAT. I think we have to fight back. Go and just make a donation with your old porn and put it on the shelf.

JOHN WATERS’ EARLY FILMMAKING YEARS

Question: I am interested in how you started filmmaking. Can you give us a view on how you got your first crew together, how you work on your scriptwriting, and thirdly, is their any story about how the idea for “Odorama” came up?

John Waters: The first part, I didn’t have any crew. It was me, and I rented the camera from news-men in the neighborhood. This was before video, so they had those cameras where the sound magnetic tape was a stripe on the camera and the sound was 24 frames ahead of the picture so when it went through the projector you could never have A-B cutting, you had to overlap each take. And Paul Morrissey made all his movies in the same way, with reversal colour film which never faded. It was the best strongest film ever. Later I did get a crew.

I would always rent illegally equipment from film schools, and one of the teachers would come and probably keep the money, and the students would be furious because I would have the equipment, and there was no equipment for the class. But you get it while you can, you know. That is the only way when you start. And we would shoot a couple of days in the week, whenever I could get enough money to pay for a day’s equipment. And I learned by doing. On PINK FLAMINGOS, whole days would come back with just black, or it would be freezing cold and the camera would just freeze. I remember we rented a camera from some really straight guy, and he was horrified by the movie. He would arrive on set, and look like he had just arrived in Vietnam, he was so horrified. One day his wife came and grabbed him and said “get out of here” and took the equipment. So we had to get somebody else because she was so freaked out. We thought we were being nice, we were friendly and all.

Regarding the screenplay at the time, I think I wrote it as I went along with PINK FLAMINGOS. I don’t think it was completely written before we started. And I have no idea how many days it took to shoot that movie, maybe ten. And we shot it over the period of a whole winter. Later, FEMALE TROUBLE I think was the first one where I had a real crew, and I learned from doing that. There was a guy in the film lab who would teach me things and try to show me how to do stuff. I learned because I had to learn how to do it.

And each time I got a little better, and I learned from my mistakes really. How the POLYESTER thing happened with “Odorama”, I always knew that there was this card that you scratched and sniffed, and I always knew that this thing existed because I had read in the 1950s there was “Smell-o-vision”, which was this big machine which pumped out smells, but the problem was that you couldn’t get the smells out, so after five shows in a row, people were gagging. And it was only good smells, which I knew was a mistake. And then they had Aroma-Rama, which I don’t know what it is but I love the name. And then this, which I knew Three M Company had a library of scratch and sniff. Who did it first was really Larry Flint, in a porn magazine, “Hustler”, where in the crotch of a woman you could scratch and sniff, and it was the smell of lilac.

And then also there were children’s books where you could scratch and sniff. I went and got the library of smells. At the time I hadn’t made HAIRSPRAY (1988), and my films were very notorious, and Three M Company is a very straight organization, and so we couldn’t really say for what it was. And you had to order like a million of each smell. So for a fart we said rotten egg. We thought of a nice way to say each smell. And when the movie opened, they were okay about it, once it happened. We had to test it, and I mixed some of the smells. So dirty tennis shoes was I think fish and pizza put together. It didn’t matter if it didn’t smell exactly like it, as long as it smelled bad.

I remember the first time we ever screened it was in Cannes. People broke the doors to get in, it was really one of my favourite memories, and to see the audience really screaming was really something. It works, oh my god! As I said, in THIS FILTHY WORLD, right before it opens, the insurance people said: “You have to test this to make sure that people don’t eat the card, and don’t die of it.” Eat the card? I thought, why would you eat the card? So we had to do these last minute tests. I guess people ate 3-D glasses… I don’t know, I don’t understand the urge to do that. Do people eat their ticket stubs?

Wieland Speck: I can remember it so well. I saw it in the Punk Temple here in Berlin, in Kant Kino. But then they stopped the scratch cards.

John Waters: On the DVD’s you can still get the cards, but they are littler. You can still find the Odorama card. It’s not as good but it still works, sort of.

JOHN WATERS’ NEXT PLANS

Question: Any plans for a PINK FLAMINGOS musical?

John Waters: Well, that would be tough. CRY-BABY (1990) is coming to Broadway next year in January. I think PINK FLAMINGOS would have to be Off-Broadway. It was optioned for an opera, which it could be I think: (sings:) I just ate a turd…

Question: What is your next film project?

John Waters: Well, I’m always superstitious to talk about it. But I have written it, and it is a children’s movie, a John Waters children’s movie. It is really the only genre I haven’t done. And I’m going to leave it at that because I think it’s bad luck. It’s like trying to get pregnant. You don’t tell people you’re doing that. And I’m trying to get it greenlit right now so hopefully I am going to make it in the fall. It is ready to go, and it has movie stars attached and everything. But I always think it is bad luck to talk about things before you do them. I am in this TV show which is coming out in America called TIL DEATH DO US PART. It is court TV, which is a whole television channel based on true crime, and this is real cases where the bride or groom killed one another, only it is done with actors. Every week it opens at their wedding, and I play the groom-reaper, someone who knows they are going to do it. That opens in two weeks in America. So that is what I have been working on. It was shot in Canada.

JOHN WATERS AND JACKASS

Question: I wanted to ask how did you meet the guys from Jackass, and how did you cast Johnny Knoxville for his latest part in your movie, which was a brilliant decision.

John Waters: I wanted him to be in A DIRTY SHAME because I liked Jackass, and he has the same agency as mine, CAA. And so we had what is called a meeting, and we got along perfectly well in the first meeting. He really got the whole movie financed because he was in it. That is how they think in Hollywood. They want someone that young people went to see their movies in the last six months. That is how you get a movie made today. And he was great and I think he is going to be in the next one too. I was in JACKASS NUMBER TWO (2006), which was like being in an Ed-Wood-movie. Johnny picks you up in his car, they drink, they do stunts that are really dangerous, it’s like being in a snuff movie.

One thing got cut out. Not sure if it is still on the DVD. I threw Stevo down a flight of steps when he was dressed in a jockstrap, and he was taken to the hospital. I felt terrible, and Johnny just said, “come on, we got to go to the next place”. He called me from the hospital and said: “I’m sorry I was such a pussy, I’m alright.” The scene that I am in with the 500 pound fat lady jumps on the midget. I really felt like I was in an Ed-Wood-movie with that ridiculous magic costume standing there. The first woman showed up and said: “I don’t mind telling you, I’m six months pregnant”, and I said to Johnny: “I’m not doing this, she wants a Jackass abortion, and she wants Paramount to pay for it.” So, we got rid of her. They had some agent who only specializes in fat nude girls, and we called him, and they sent a new one.

It took two hours, and she walked in, and said: “Don’t mind the nudity fellers.” She was 500 pounds of naked and she did it three times, and at the end said: “I do porno, don’t worry.” I pray I never see that porno movie. But she was a good sport. And I’m for those movies. I think JACKASS NUMBER TWO was really an amazing movie, and, that it was the number one movie playing in America on 3400 screens, and they drink horse semen in it. Amazing to me. The times have really changed. One of the reviews said: “John Waters must be so proud of what his children have wrought.” And I was.

THE BATTLES FOR GETTING MONEY

Question: Could you talk about the battles you have had with the studios, and troubles getting money?

John Waters: You always have battles getting money. And it isn’t so different for me. People assume I have a four-picture deal or something. I mean, I don’t know who’s making this movie right now that I’m trying to do. How it works for me now is that I have two very good producers, Ted Hope and Christine Vachon, who have produced a lot of movies you all know, and I do a treatment, which is the hardest part. It takes me about 4 or 5 months to get down the entire movie, and a treatment that is maybe seven pages. And then I go pitch it. Which means you go in and you have ten minutes. Just like the movie, THE PLAYER (Robert Altman, 1992). That is all true. So you pitch the movie. If they like it they give you a development deal, which I have had on every movie since CRY-BABY. So then I go home and write it. But that is easier, because I have already thought it up.

And then you turn it in and they make it or not. Or it goes into turnaround. Mostly always it goes into turnaround because by the time you turn it in, the people who said yes, aren’t in power any more. Turnaround means anyone else can make it, they just have to pay back the company who gave you the money to write it. I like doing it that way because then, it’s called getting them pregnant, because basically if they have paid you a certain amount of money, they are more apt to want to make it. But that isn’t always true either. But that is how I do it, and it is a way to get money up front to do it. It is hard to do that on your first film.

In the old days I went and I formed limited partnerships, with which I basically raised the money. From pot-dealers, from relatives, from anybody who had some cash. And the deal was, let’s say it cost 25,000 dollars, that as soon as I started getting money back in, I would pay them back in the same amount that they gave it to me, with the same percentage, and I didn’t take anything. And when it broke even, after that I would get a percentage, and they would too. That is how I did it for all of them up to POLYESTER. And then after that, New Line paid for them. But you almost never see any money from profits that way, so that is why everybody wants to get the biggest salary they can.

Because you will never see anything later, even if it is a hit. I mean even the people who made FORREST GUMP (Robert Zemeckis, 1994) claim they never got any profits. Well, if they didn’t, I sure aren’t! So, that is the difference. In the old days, I mean I still own those old movies that I made, and I give 25% of that back to the people who were in them. Mostly they are relatives now because so many of them are no longer with us. But for years, and still to this day, 25% of what I get from PINK FLAMINGOS and FEMALE TROUBLE I give back to the eight main people that worked with me. So, that is the way I have done it, but everybody is different. There is no rules. However you can try and get it. You can go the Hollywood way, which is certainly the way I do now, or you can go the old way, which is to raise the money yourself, you make the movie and you get distribution. And then sometimes you get more say, but not always.

Question: I wondered if the money people were scared of the content, or excited by the content.

John Waters: Well, if they say yes, they like the content basically. On A DIRTY SHAME they came back to me and said: “Make this exact movie.” But they say that till you have your test screening. A test screening to me… you pretend that it teaches you something but you generally hate it, because they take you to some mall in New Jersey and pick twelve people that they would never speak to in their real life, and then suddenly everything they say is perfectly correct. And they keep you there until you finally say something negative, and then they say, “see, you have to change that”. Or the worst, is the cards they have to fill out. And they say: “Who did you like least?”, and people pick the villain. Duh!

And then they say to you, “well you should make them like them”. You’re not supposed to like them, they are the villain. So I think it is good to see your film with an audience because maybe you see something that is slow that you didn’t realize, or something that they didn’t get. And sometimes you are too close to see that. But trying to get everyone to like it is a mistake because then no one will like it. Even the head of the main testing place in Hollywood said to me: “What is the norm that we test your movies against? There isn’t one.” But generally, New Line has been good with testing. You have to have one, and they give you some notes, and then you change what you can change. All movies do re-shoots now. So there is this idea you can fix it. Every movie you can make a hit. Which never really happens. I’ve done a couple of re-shoots too, I mean almost every movie re-shoots something now, and it is because of the test screenings.

RECENT AMERICAN INDEPENDENT CINEMA

Wieland Speck: When you think of a beginning filmmaker, you sort of have a censorship already in your head. And that doesn’t work. The American independent films of the 1980s and 1990s, it sort of got lost in the end of the 1990s because everybody wanted to make with a little money a film that looks like it could be on a shelf. And it became boring.

John Waters: In every movie, you also have to have three movie stars now. Not one. Even if your movie costs just half a million dollars, they still want three movie stars. And if you get three, they want four. Always you have to have stars in it. It is just the way it is. There is no point in pitching a movie without having someone attached to it. Which is also total bullshit, because how do you know, you don’t have the money yet, and you don’t know the schedule, but they are saying they will do it eventually. But you have to do that now. But there are examples.

And the studios are looking for it now. They are looking for the next BLAIR WITCH PROJECT (Daniel Myrick / Eduardo Sánchez, 1999). Some movie that costs very little but comes in that is really original and that makes a fortune. They are looking for it. They weren’t looking for it when I started but they certainly are now. And you all have access to every kind of equipment. I mean, if you see David Lynch’s latest movie, it was made on a cheap camera. You don’t need all that anymore but you have to make it work for you. You have to come up with something new that they haven’t seen that will excite people enough to leave their house, which seems to be hard these days.

Wieland Speck: We have some examples in the Panorama programme this year. ITTY BITTY TITTY COMMITTEE (Jamie Babbit, 2007) for example is one of those young American independent films. And TEETH (Mitchell Lichtenstein, 2007), which is also pretty daring, and I haven’t seen a film like that before in my life.

John Waters: Sure, TEETH was good I thought. Imagine that pitch. Well, it’s about a woman who has teeth in her vagina. Oh, okay, we’ll do that. Sounds like a date-movie to me! Let me ask you all a question. I am curious. All of you are filmmakers in some way right? And what is the hardest thing for you all as first time to get anyone to see or watch your film?

GET THE PEOPLE TO SEE YOUR FILM!

Wieland Speck: Well, this is why festivals come in.

John Waters: But in a festival, there are so many films, so once you get your film in to the festival, you hope that someone will see it and distribute it and show it?

Wieland Speck: But even in the festival of course, you need to promote it.

John Waters: Yes, how are you going to get people to come and see it, which is all these people that come over to me, I say, see my movie. You have to do that. Believe me, as much as you think, I would never do that, you should do that. Put things on windshield wipers, put them in people’s mailboxes. I’m telling you, get them to see it, because it’s only showing once, right? You don’t have the luxury of 2.00, 4.00, 6.00, 8.00 and 10.00 every day. So, read the trade papers, it’s important to know that stuff. Showmanship is as important as having a good DP or sound. You’ve got to learn how it all works. Don’t scoff at that, don’t say, I don’t care about all of that. I read “Variety” since I was 12 years old. It is important to know how it works. You can get names. Who is the distributor I wish could distribute my film? Send it to them. A no is free. Don’t be proud, everybody gets rejected. This business is full of insecure people who joined it so that for the rest of their life, strangers can tell them they are good.

Wieland Speck: Thank you John Waters. Thanks for your inspiration. Thanks for bringing back anarchy. That is what we need to be creative.