John Waters to reveal secrets of a 'happy neurotic'

ONE of cinema's true groundbreakers has more than film on his mind.

John Waters

YOU can't be cynical about John Waters. The director of transgressive movies such as Pink Flamingos and the original Hairspray has morphed into a popular raconteur simply because he's so up and charming -- not bad for someone who knew he "was never going to be a normal person".

"But that was fine," he says, chuckling. "You can make the same mistakes over and over if they bring you joy and not unhappiness. That's the difference, that's what you've got to work out."

Consequently, when Waters brings his one-man show This Filthy World to Australia in October, he will bring what he considers the work of a "self-help speaker".

Rather than opine about his career in movies, the self-confessed media junkie will speak "about current events and fashion and crime and how to be a happy neurotic", he says. "I do talk about my movies but I use them to talk about events or what caused them and what they're about and why they're remembered. It's not so much about my career as about what obsesses me in a good way and how to change your life."

Waters believes in psychology and talks about Sigmund Freud in his show, noting a little glibly that "even I have penis envy!" But he says he appreciates Freud as "a really good writer and really funny".

"So I believe in psychiatry and the talking cure, too," he says. "I think medication has done wonders for people who are clinically depressed, but I think that's about 5 per cent of the people who take it.

"I would never want to be 'even' -- I would never have a career," he notes. "It's appropriate to be depressed sometimes."

Waters's professional life has changed somewhat in the past decade. He has progressed from being a regular director of out-there cult films that began to skirt the mainstream, including Polyester, Hairspray, Serial Mom and Pecker, to someone now recognised as a visual artist and curator and accomplished writer.

A run through his past two months of engagements suggests a furiously busy, highly engaged enthusiast. He promoted his latest book, Role Models, in the US and Britain, was one of five judges at the Venice Biennale, curated a contemporary art show for the Walker Arts Centre in Minneapolis, performed his one-man show, played the Bonnaroo rock festival, filmed a small role in an independent movie, then spoke at the National Convention of US Mayors.

"I'm a travelling salesman!" he says. "The best review I ever got was this week at the mayors conference. Most of them were laughing, but I could see some faces were horrified. As I left an elderly African-American man said to me: 'And I thought Richard Pryor was crazy!' I thought that was the sweetest, nicest thing a politician ever said to me."

Channelling his energies beyond film is as much due to circumstance as desire. Waters says he's eager to make another movie -- it would be a Christmas tale for children called Fruitcake -- but he has been trying to make it for two years to no avail.

"I had a good deal with New Line Cinema and then the recession happened and the independent movie world radically changed," he says. "There's no $5 million independent movies any more and that's what I make, so it's very, very tough. There used to be 15 companies I'd go to pitch to, and now there's three."

Not that he's particularly frustrated. He was reminded of independent filmmaking's shortcomings while recently playing a role in the Traci Lords movie Go Straight to Hell.

"Being back in the trailer, I was thinking: 'God, I don't miss this, sitting in a stinky trailer, people knocking on my door every minute'. I'm eager to make another movie, but I have so many different ways to tell stories these days.

"All the things are written, so really I'm a writer. Every single thing I do I write, so that's really what I am." So much so that Waters has a rare memento of great literary significance he was given when he last visited Australia.

He spoke of wanting Patrick White's "trash can" because he was a fan of the Nobel prize-winning author. The overseers of White's estate read the ambit request and, in a perhaps unexpected sign of good humour, gave it to Waters. (It returns to the estate on Waters's death.)

"So every time I'm rewriting and updating My Filthy World for the Australian tour, I rumple up a piece of paper with a bad idea and I throw it in the same trash can that Patrick White threw his bad ideas in," he roars. "That's very inspiring for me and I really thank the estate for being that great to do that. I really do love Patrick White."

Waters is rapt he will tour all main capital cities after having visited only Melbourne and Sydney previously. The chronicler of small-town depravity is particularly enthusiastic about visiting the nation's capital.

"I want to meet the coolest person in Canberra," he says. "They're the kind of towns I like to go to best."

Waters will also present a weekend film festival at the Sydney Opera House, Double Features From Hell, in which he will introduce and host post-screening Q&As for eight films within the themes Shock, Terror, Goddess and Sex.

It is a typically eccentric and eclectic grouping of films. "They're all really good movies but it seems today people are a bit cowardly about movies," he says.

"This is for real cinephiles who are adventuresome and want to spend a weekend seeing movies and talking about them. Just imagine the other people that will come . . . good cruising and meeting people and drinking and partying afterwards."

His Shock theme is represented by Gaspar Noe's Irreversible -- "one of the most horrifying and beautiful films about intimacy and rape" -- and Lars von Trier's Antichrist. "I always said about that, if Ingmar Bergman had committed suicide and gone to hell and came back to earth to direct an exploitation art film for drive-ins, this is the film he would have made," he says. Terror is represented by Paul Greengrass's astounding re-creation of the passenger uprising on one of the September 11 flights, United 93 -- "most people refuse to see the movie because they can't relive it but it's an incredibly well-made movie" -- and his own Cecil B. DeMented.

Goddess features two rarities, the Argentinian film starring relatively unknown goddess Isabel Sarli, Fuego, and the Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor film no one talks about, Boom!

"It's my favourite failed art movie ever, a Tennessee Williams play originally. When the movie came out they were so desperate, they added an exclamation point to the title. I used to call the theatre and say 'What time does BOOM! play?' " (He shouts the word.) "There would be silence."

His Sex stream is not represented by straight sex. He will introduce (with Q&A sessions after each film) his own film about sex addicts, A Dirty Shame, and the 2007 "horrifying but sympathetic documentary" about a US court case concerning a man's secret sexual encounter with a horse, Zoo. "It's kind of moving," Waters says. "I never knew that people were into this."

This Filthy World opens in Perth on October 19, then travels nationally.
Double Features from Hell opens in Sydney on October 21.