John Waters interviewed by Kim Morgan

Kim Morgan: You’ve had your entire retrospective at New York’s Lincoln Center. Now, at the British Film Institute…

John Waters: Yes. As they say, “every goddam one…”

How does this feel, twice in a row?

Well, my international respectability is staggering, isn’t it? [Laughs] I’m incredibly flattered. Are you kidding? I wish my mom were alive. She was such an Anglophile; she would have been so excited about it. I have no irony, for the first time in my life to say I’m really thrilled about it.

You have gone into post-irony though, I think…

I hope so. I have it at the end of Pecker [1998] – they toast the end of irony. But I am an irony dealer, really. At the same time, irony is elitism. I don’t think if you’re starving, do you ever think something is so bad it’s good? But then, that’s a snobby thing to say too. Someone asked me, “You don’t think people in poor countries have a sense of humour?” Yes, but it might not be the same if they’re starving to death or if they’re in a boat trying to get to America. I don’t think too many people are cracking irony jokes when they’re in the trunk of a car, coming across the border. It just seems to me there’s a time for everything… But of course I know plenty of people who are poor with a sense of humour. Or, upper-lower-class. They never say that! They say lower-middle-class, upper-middle-class, they never say upper-lower-class, and that is the people I’m most interested in.

I know this question is asked of a lot of filmmakers, but it’s interesting, especially when it comes to you, because you have so many interests and influences and innovations of your own, so, what did make you pick up a camera to shoot film?

I’ll tell you my influences. I was a puppeteer for children’s birthday parties, and so [B-movie producer/director] William Castle was an influence. I’d try to throw all of those gimmicks in there. Somehow I got my hand on the Village Voice and started reading Jonas Mekas’s column and that opened up the world of underground movies that I knew nothing about. I read about Warhol and Paul Morrissey and Kenneth Anger and, more than anybody, the Kuchar brothers.

I used to run away to New York all the time, on the Greyhound bus, and make up lies that I was going to a fraternity weekend or something and then go see these movies. I wanted to be an underground filmmaker. But at the same time, during my teenage years, we went to the drive-in almost every night, and in Baltimore they tested every kind of ‘-ploitation’: ‘hicksploitation’, ‘blaxploitation’, ‘goresploitation’ – I mean amazing stuff. I also used to go to the Rex Theatre in Baltimore. They were fighting with the censor board all the time, and they had both nudist camp movies and Ingmar Bergman. They’d show Monica’s Hot Summer [Summer with Monika, 1952] Then they would cut out most of the dialogue and just leave the bare tits scenes in, so those movies I was seeing too. All of those exploitation movies and Bergman.

I love Bergman. I still love Bergman. I still just think of Brink of Life [1957], my favourite Bergman: three pregnant women in a maternity ward. I used to go to this college nearby, Delta College, and they showed every Bergman movie. I’d steal books and watch Bergman. I used to take Divine on acid and make him go to Bergman movies. And he would get so mad. I always remember The Hour of the Wolf [1968], where she rips her face off and Divine was like, “That’s it. I’m not lookin’ at these movies ever again. I want to see movies about rich people.”

That’s always been interesting to me about Divine. Many think drag queens just want to be pretty and Divine could look really pretty, but he embraced being scary…

Divine didn’t want to pass as a woman; he wanted to pass as a monster. Divine didn’t want to be a woman at all – he hated it – putting all that shit on. He was sweating all the time. He hated those wigs. The first thing he did when he walked off the stage was rip that wig off because the sweat would be pouring down. He did go in drag, a few times in high school, always as Elizabeth Taylor – she was his idol.

And, then… he put some scars on him when he went to drag balls, but in those days drag balls were scary. They were in the ghetto and pimps were there and the drag queens put razorblades in their mouth. But he never wanted to be a woman; he never walked around like that. He was the opposite of transgender in any way, really. In the end, he was playing men’s roles. He wanted to play everything. He wanted to do both. He just wanted to work, really.

And all of this, that melded into your aesthetic…

Completely. I made exploitation movies for art theatres.

And the look, the shooting…

I didn’t go to school. The only guys who taught me anything, technically, were the teamsters who illegally stole the equipment from their TV stations and rented it to me on weekends without the station knowing about it, so they could get extra money. They really helped me. And they would keep horrible hours – like 25-hour days and stuff. And the guy at the film lab, Pete Gary, he was a very blue-collar kind of guy, he helped me. He just always made me sign papers so that I would take responsibility in case he was arrested for developing the movies, because I got busted one time and it was a lot of publicity. But these people who you would never imagine would know about me or like my movies, they’re the people that taught me.

But in terms of your aesthetic, you’ve mentioned underground movies, and exploitation and Bergman… but also the people around you, the way they dressed, just looking at the world, that contributes to an aesthetic.

Oh, the aesthetic. I thought you meant technical. Oh, the aesthetic of those films and what you’re saying, definitely. But the technical side, I’ll quote Cecil B. Demented [2000]: “Technique is nothing but failed style.” I had no idea what I was doing when I was making those movies. The first movie I made, Roman Candles [1966], I didn’t know there was editing. I thought what came out of the camera was the movie and in this case, it was. So maybe that was Dogme 95 and I just didn’t realise it.

When thinking of Female Trouble [his 1974 film in which Divine’s character is disfigured in an acid attack and taken to a local beauty salon where the owners find her new look inspired], I think of today, when so many people change their faces through extreme measures, and tabloid culture, how we follow celebrity crime…

Nobody’s shot up liquid eyeliner yet.

It’s on its way! But, this idea in Female Trouble that crime and beauty are the same seems so relevant to me, especially now…

That was all Genet. That was what I read in high school, he was a big influence on me. And I always say, “Everybody looks better under arrest.” I still visit people in prison, I taught in prison. In my book Role Models [2010] I wrote a pretty serious thing about parole regarding one of the Manson women [Leslie Van Houten], who looks back in horror about it. So, I’ve always been interested in extreme behaviour. I would follow the Boston Bomber case mostly because I wanted to know what happened to the ex-wife of the one that died? She then remarried, supposedly, and has a child. I always say, “God. She has a boyfriend? Where did she find a new boyfriend? Where did she date?”

Your movies often feel so ahead of their time, style-wise too. Just in terms of embracing retro culture, but not in this perfected way. More punk.

In Pink Flamingos [1972] that blue and red hair that Mink Stole and David Lochary have was unheard of then. They had to bleach their hair out and put the colour in with magic marker or Indian ink. Today, you can go down to the Rite-Aid drug store and buy that colour. Pink Flamingos was punk before anybody really knew what punk was. I didn’t know what it was either, but it was made to frighten hippies. But then, the audience was hippies. And they wanted to be frightened. So it was a niche audience I was going for. But it wasn’t just a gay audience at all, it was bikers, it was angry straight guys, crazy girls, it was just everybody who didn’t fit in, in any minority, anywhere. The gay people didn’t get along with other gay people; they thought they were too square. They were just… they were angry, and had a good sense of humour. And it’s really healthy to be angry when you’re young and very less so when you’re old.

Did you ever think you were influencing culture with these films as you were making them? I feel like Karl Lagerfeld could just walk into Female Trouble and it would make perfect sense.

Yes. [Laughs] “Which designer did Cookie Mueller this year?” [The actress was Adam Selman’s inspiration for this year’s New York Fashion Week]. I’m always flattered by it. It’s always great. Were we thinking of that when we did it? No.

I think Van Smith deserves a lot of the credit. He did the makeup and costumes for all of my films up to A Dirty Shame [2004], and when he died, he got amazing obituaries: Women’s Wear Daily, the New York Times, the LA Times. His family was completely shocked; they didn’t even know he had done all that. They didn’t get it. And Van would have been shocked too because Van really never did go work with anybody else. We knew how to work with him, he was great, but he might have been a little hard on other movies – they might not have gotten his work methods. But the style, the look, it’s all a lot because of Van.

In Multiple Maniacs [1970] I’d say, “Just shave his hair weird so there’s more room for makeup. That’s how that look started, the shaving of Divine’s hair back. And, in one scene, his eyebrows go all the way around the back of his head. It is pretty extreme. But if you look back at what women looked like back then – look at Priscilla Presley when she got married. She didn’t look that different from Divine in Female Trouble.

It seems your audience is a great equaliser; it’s always been all types, and still is.

Yes. And they’re all ages too. I was at this punk rock show, presenting at this show, and there was a punk rock group who were especially sleazy and hilarious and after they went off, I thought, “Boy I wish I had a teenage daughter. She could date one of these guys.” I do bring out in people behaviour that you might not expect, but that’s just humour. I don’t think I’m ever mean, even Pink Flamingos, as shocking as it is. There are parts of it I look at now and think, “Oh my god… no wonder…” but I’m proud of it. It didn’t mellow. It isn’t old hat. It still works.

And it would still shock [former head of the Maryland State Board of Censors] Mary Avara. I saw an interview with her from the 1990s; it was when Pecker came out and she was still mad at you.

Well, the most she was mad was when we were making Polyester [1981] and Multiple Maniacs finally got shown in a real theatre, so she had to see it. When she saw the rosary job in that – it’s when you put a rosary up someone’s ass – she went so insane and banned the whole thing and went to court. The judge, he said his eyes had been insulted for 90 minutes but, still, it was not illegal. And she went insane from it. Because there was no law against rosary jobs. Because there is no such thing. [Laughs]

Yes, I read a quote from her where she said, in her 80s: “I wanted to throw him out of the window.”

I know. She would go berserk. But I hated her with equal hatred… because she would make me cut a brand new print I had spent my last penny on. She would say things like, “Don’t tell me about sex. I was married to an Italian.” Now, I used that line in A Dirty Shame, so I got material from her. I’ve always said, dumb censors are your press agents. You should pay them. She really helped my career. But smart liberal censors, like the MPAA, they are the scary ones. You lose when you fight them.

Yes. You got an NC-17 for A Dirty Shame

Yes. And what she [the MPAA censor] said was correct, “Oh, anyone over 17 can see it. That means anyone in college.” Yes, but no theatre will play it, so it’s a lemon. But the problem is, the same people have run that office for so long, they are unaccountable to anybody. They have more power than anybody. They need to get new people in there. And she’s nice. That’s the scary part.

In Multiple Maniacs, back to that rosary job, which is funny, but shot so beautifully and artfully, cross cut with the crucifixion… And Divine says, “It’s like fucking Jesus himself!”

[Laughs] I forgot that line…

I thought of those crazy saints, like there’s one I love, 14th-century Julian of Norwich, an anchoress, who wrote Revelations of Divine Love. The book is beautifully written, but it really sounds like she wants to have sex with Jesus page after page in her exaltations…

All those crazy religious people are having sex with Jesus, aren’t they?

Yes. You wrote about St Catherine of Siena in Role Models…

Oh, I looove her. She’s my favourite. She’s the only one I pray to. And Pasolini. I pray to Pasolini…

But did you think about those crazy religious people when you created that rosary scene in Multiple Maniacs? And filmmakers, like maybe Buñuel or Pasolini? There’s a lot going on, and it reminded me so much of these holy women’s relationships with Jesus…

I did read those books. I read [Rudolph M. Bell’s] Holy Anorexia. That is a great, great book. I read that later than Multiple Maniacs, but it’s a book I’ve written and talked about: it’s all the story of those saints and nuns. They were so out of their minds. They were like S&M, anorexic lunatics. And these people were prayed to. I love extreme Catholic behaviour before the Reformation. The Reformation ruined everything.

You’ve discussed before about nuns and their movie censoring, how they were an influence on your cinema watching, movies they were declaring not to watch, like, say, Elia Kazan’s Baby Doll [1956]…

I went to private grade school and my mother was Catholic and my father wasn’t, so when you didn’t go to Catholic school, you had to go to Sunday school. But the nuns knew that these were the parents of the kids who didn’t send their kids to Catholic school, so they hated your parents and they were very cruel to the children. My mother said, “When I was young, I loved the nuns.” And I said, “Well something happened because these nuns were sadists.” It made me rebel really early. All they did was tell you everything you’d go to hell for doing, constantly. We got the Catholic Review at home, and my mother told me it was the first she ever saw me rebel, when I was really young, when we had to stand up in church and take the Legion of Decency Pledge, which they did once a year. And I refused to do it. I would cut out the ads for [the condemned movies] and I would memorise them. Other kids memorise multiplication tables; I would remember And God Created… Woman [1956], Baby Doll. I would remember them in alphabetical order. Of course, I would never have heard of these movies if not for the nuns. Naked in the Night [1958], Love Is My Profession [1958], that was my favourite, to hear the nuns say that one. My secret little life was that I pretended I had a dirty movie theatre; that’s how I played as a child. All the movies that you go to hell for seeing. And I would redesign the ad campaigns… this was creative play to me. I always think later in life, all I really wanted as a child was the wrath of the pope himself. [Laughs].

The term political correctness is overused, to the point where it starts to lose meaning, especially among liberals; it’s either a pejorative or not a pejorative. You’ve seen people rebelling on all sides of the spectrum, and when the term didn’t exist…

I am politically correct. I am completely politically correct.

Yes. But there’s got to be something beyond, perhaps? Like in your recent commencement speech at Rhode Island School of Design, you said, “Being gay is not enough anymore.”

It’s not. In rich kid schools? Being straight… they’re the ones who should be marching. As a gay man in the arts, do I ever feel prejudice? No. But, if I was gay maybe in a poor neighbourhood in a poor kids’ school? Yes, then it can be a problem. It’s a class issue now. What’s happening now, with rich kids, they pretend they’re gay when they’re not. But then you have to do it. So, I don’t care. I mean, “Eating pussy for politics.” You still have to do it.

When I was watching Multiple Maniacs, the scene where Divine is getting raped by Lobstora, it’s hilarious. And then I thought, really, “Might some viewers be offended by this today?”

Was it a rape joke? You’re getting raped by a lobster? [Laughs] I think Gaspar Noé did a real scene with Irreversible [2002]; it’s a brilliant movie about rape. But I think for comedy… yeah, it’s a thin line. But I’m always looking for that thin line. I think that scene is funny. No one ever complained about that movie. The only movie anyone ever complained about was Desperate Living [1977] – in the beginning I was told, “How dare a man make a movie about lesbians?” But nowadays, it’s really true that lesbian groups use that movie to raise money for colleges. And it’s the same movie. And it kind of is offensive to lesbians [laughs], but they seem to like it.

Where is Lobstora now?

I kept that lobster for a long time before it fell apart. And I finally took it down to the harbour, when there used to be like rats down there. Now it’s a fancy place. We put it in the water. We gave it a water burial. So that’s where Lobstora lies: deep in the Chesapeake Bay.

Your actors take a lot of risks in your films, which seem like an initiation for some stars. Like, with Polyester, Tab Hunter was really taking a chance then, in 1981.

Tab was taking a really big chance then. His career was really kind of nowhere at the point, and he figured, why not? Why not do it? And it did sort of revive him. The new documentary [Tab Hunter Confdential, 2015] is very good. And there’s shots of him… Oh my god, you forget what he looked like when he was young. No wonder he was a movie star. He was amazing. It was really radical for Tab to do it, lying on the foor, kissing Divine. Nowadays, you can’t even imagine that causing a ripple. But I remember we didn’t announce it, until after I shot it. In those days, when Variety was great, we put that ad in with Tab and Divine embracing and people didn’t believe it. They thought it was a parody. Tab was really brave to do it. It was probably the least money he ever got, and the most I had ever paid anyone. Two worlds meet.

Johnny Depp is another star who changed his image, but very much on purpose, in Cry-Baby [1990].

Yes, very much on purpose. He wanted to end the teen idol thing. And they’ve all done it. Traci Lords came to me because she escaped porn and she could play with me. Patty Hearst, same thing. Patty never signed an autograph in her life until she made a movie. Who wants to be a famous victim? She made fun of it by having fun. And then she could sign an autograph because she was doing something she was proud of. She didn’t think being a kidnap victim was funny – I’m not saying that – but at the same time, she knew that the image was so strong that how can you get beyond that? How you get beyond it is to embrace it and to make fun of it, then they can’t use it against it you.

Kathleen Turner in Serial Mom [1993]…

But she was already such a big star. I actually think it’s my best movie. We had enough money, sort of. Kathleen was so good, everyone rose to her example. I think Mink’s performance is great in it because she was surrounded by a different kind of acting. And I directed it differently. But then [in my earlier films] they had to memorise so much. Mink said in an interview that they were called amateurs, for their acting, but they were more professional than anybody. They had to remember ten pages of dialogue and do it in one continuous take, and if they got one word wrong, I’d cut and start all over from the beginning, so, I don’t want to hear the word amateurish.

Your movies tweak genres and conventions and even labels. What do you think of certain labels? Like camp? Or melodrama?

Well, melodrama, I like. Camp, I’ve said a million times: “No one says that word any more do they?” Even kitsch. That’s like old queens talking about Rita Hayworth. And there’s nothing the matter with old queens talking about Rita Hayworth, I’d probably like to hear that. I haven’t heard that in a while. But I don’t even say trash any more. The punk movement never died… a lot of the punk world was gay. It was a great look for gay disguise. And it was a great look for really unattractive people. And goth. So I always loved that style, because if you were not a traditional beauty, or even if, by society’s standards, you were ugly or had a body type that wasn’t thought of as sexy, you could work it in the punk world and come across with a great look and be a star. So, I always felt comfortable in that world.

It makes me think of how you view your characters and shoot them – like Edith Massey, an unusual, interesting-looking woman and, so, she photographs wonderfully. Who were the photographers who inspired you?

Oh, Diane Arbus. The hugest infuence on me, way before Pecker. If you look at that one shot [‘A young Brooklyn family going for a Sunday outing’, 1966], the woman who looks like Divine in Female Trouble, she’s holding a child and the other child is drooling, we looked at that picture. That was a direct quote, basically. Diane Arbus was a huge, huge, huge influence. When I would sneak away and go to New York, I would sit in Washington Square, that’s where the beatniks went, that’s where the oddball gay people went and the drag queens, and that’s where Arbus took all those pictures. As a kid, I thought, “Wow. This is dangerous here. This is beyond Life magazine.” But I was corrupted by Life magazine too, because they brought Jackson Pollock, homosexuality, beatniks, all things into my house that I was so relieved to know about.

Tennessee Williams was also an influence…

Oh, he saved me. Because when I first read him, I realised there was bohemia. Nobody had ever told me what that was and that’s what I always wanted, and still want. That was the world I was trying to find.

And Williams didn’t define himself as one thing. One thing that might become problematic is when things are labelled too easily…

I agree. I’m against separatism. That’s what I said in my commencement speech. Separatism is defeat.

That’s why Hairspray [1988] works so well: you’re really embracing acceptance with joy and humour. It’s not to knock over someone’s head with, it just is. And it’s such a strong message in the movie.

That’s how you always get change, and change people’s minds – by making them laugh. Not preaching. I always said that Hairspray was a Trojan Horse. It snuck in all my ideas, and still no one noticed, to this day. It’s playing everywhere in America. Every high school is doing Hairspray. It’s kind of amazing that happened. But the message of Hairspray is exactly the same as the message of Pink Flamingos. They are different in terms of material, in terms of what would be NC-17 and PG, but the message is the same. Maybe teen dance shows were the one thing I was obsessed with that didn’t scare people. But that was maybe just an accident.

You’ve always used music brilliantly, and introducing older music, with great taste and some shocking surprises. Like, in A Dirty Shame, you had Slim Harpo’s ‘Baby Scratch My Back’, but then Johnny Burnette’s ‘Eager Beaver Baby’ and Doug Clark and the Hot Nuts’s ‘Baby Let Me Bang Your Box’ and more… And in Mondo Trasho [1969] you’ve got that whole collage of music. You use music, not just as a soundtrack, but you overlap and songs run into each other to create this unique effect. And this before a lot of filmmakers were doing that. You had The Chordettes, The Del-Vikings, Little Richard, Link Wray…

And that’s why Mondo Trasho will never be released. It just makes the movie more and more likely never to come out hundreds from years from now. I didn’t know then that you were supposed to buy music rights. But it was a silent movie. You know how silent movies had music to tell the story? That’s what I was going for. The first person to really do it was Kenneth Anger with Scorpio Rising [1964] – he was the first one to use pop music in that brilliant way. And [with Mondo Trasho] it’s all because of the novelty hit ‘Flying Saucer’. That was the first song that took lyrics, sampled them and told a story. A flying saucer has landed. And we cut to John Cameron Swayze… [singing] “Come on baby, let’s go downtown.” Meanwhile, the space ship is over here… It told a story by sampling lyrics from songs. That is where that came from.

I love the scene where Divine is shoplifting to Ike and Tina’s ‘Finger Poppin’’.

Oh, well, Ike and Tina. We were listening to them when we were shoplifting. Divine and I used to go a place and see them in high school.

Oh my god. That must have been fantastic.

Oh my god, yes. The Ike and Tina Turner Revue. I don’t care what anyone says, she was better when she was with him. I mean, I don’t blame her for leaving him, good for her, but… We would see them at Unity Hall, it was a kind of working-class, blue-collar Union Hall. And they would come in a broken-down green school bus with ‘Ike and Tina Turner Revue’ painted on the side, like, hand-painted. And she looked like she did on the cover of ‘Dynamite’: she had on a ratty wig, a mink coat, a moustache, springalators, she did have a moustache. She was unbelieveably great. And when they would sing, they would almost do rap songs, ‘Letter to Ikey’ and that. And the Ikettes behind them were so great. It was a huge infuence on both Divine and I, Tina Turner. And I still love her. God knows, they could sing. They were unbelievable together. I saw them a couple times. And they’d sing ‘Don’t Play Me Cheap’. Oh my god… she was an influence. More than anybody. I had an album A Date with John Waters and I have that song, ‘All I Can Do Is Cry’, that long one where Ike’s getting married to somebody else. I wish I could have done that video with her. They didn’t have videos then but imagine that video with her. “I took a seat at the back of the church.” Ohhhh…

You’ve said before that you didn’t like television, or you didn’t watch it. Has that opinion changed through the years?

Television today is better than it has ever been. But I still don’t watch it much. I watched The Wire every episode and loved it. And, I’m in the middle of maybe doing a TV project. But I love to read; that’s how I like to relax. I read a couple books a week. So, I can’t watch television. I can’t do both. But I know I’m missing something really great. It’s certainly better than independent movies these days.

With independent movies, in America, you’ve talked about how your kind of indie is on the out and how it’s so hard to get properly financed for a movie now. And people often ask, “When is your next movie?”

If there is one, it’ll probably be on TV. Because more people see it, you get better budgets. I don’t get why kids want to go to a mall and stadium seating when Spartacus or Ben Hur aren’t playing…

Classics.

You know, I met Douglas Sirk with Fassbinder. Talk about the odd couple. They made a movie! I saw it. A short, written by Tennessee Williams. [The film is likely 1979’s Bourbon Street Blues, co-directed by Sirk and starring Fassbinder.] It was in German so I couldn’t understand it. Sirk directed and Fassbinder is in it. This was at the Berlin Film Festival, they showed it to me.

You watch so many movies, what do you mostly go for?

It seems more and more I go for the European ones – they’re the movies that I really like the best. I write the ‘ten best’ list in Artforum every year and it seems like they’re always European ones. But I’ve always liked those movies. They’re lucky. In those countries, the government gives them money to make those movies. Can you imagine the government giving Bruno Dumont money to make a movie in America? [Laughs] We’re the only country where basically the government tries to make you stop making movies.

The British films you programmed for the BFI season, they’re interesting partly because they’re not typical or canonical: no Carol Reed, no Powell and Pressburger…

The Deep Blue Sea [2011] is a movie I really love. Trog [1970] only because Joan Crawford, when she made it, she was such a pro. She really took this seriously – as she did every movie she made because she was an insane movie star. A real movie star, the kind we barely have anymore. So no matter what the material, she had done horror before, she’d done a lot of them, but this one [laughs], this one, maybe she should have said no… The Derek Jarman movie Blue [1993] because I think it’s such a radical, beautiful movie. And, it’s not like people are clamouring to see it.

I was very pleased to see Joseph Losey’s Boom! [1968] on the list.

Boom!, yes. I’ve presented it for many years. It’s an amazing movie. It’s staggering when you watch it, it’s so great and then so awful. So that means it’s perfect, really. And Tennessee Williams did say… that it was the best movie ever made from his work and I think maybe I, and Tennessee, are the only people who agree with it.

The lines in that movie. Insane, but things you might say: ”Shit on your mother!”

The dialogue is so staggering. To me, the best is when, Richard Burton, every time a wave crashes, he says “Boom!” – “The shock of each moment of still being alive.” I live in Provincetown most of the summer and whenever I see a wave hit a rock, I say that to myself. And they were all drunk when they made it. And you can tell. Elizabeth Taylor tried to buy the house, and they kept telling her, “It’s a set. There’s no roof.” I always said – and in Cecil B. Demented the cultists have a tattoo of their favourite film director – but if I had to get a tattoo, it would say ‘Joseph Losey’. [Laughs]

You said that Serial Mom was your best film… do you have a favourite?

It’s hard to say. With my movies… you know, I don’t pick ’em! I’m always amazed that one did better than the other. Serial Mom is certainly the most professional. If I had to sit with an audience and watch one of my movies, which is always, ugh… god, god [laughs], if it were up to me, they’d be ten minutes long, I would probably pick that one. I’m a fan of Cecil B. Demented lately.

Cecil B. Demented might be a good idea, for real, now. Kidnap a movie star to get your movie funded.

Right. [Laughs]. That was kind of Lars von Trier-ish. He might do that.

In terms of your Dreamlander actors, was everyone game all of the time? You had some actors do some pretty extreme stuff…

Yes. Everyone was game. Recently I presented the [William Friedkin] film Killer Joe… that scene with the chicken. And Mink [Stole] said afterwards, “They were just like us. They went for it. If you’re gonna do it, go for it.” And she was right. It was never anyone saying, “Should we do this?” It was just like group madness. We all were on the same page; all doing it as a group effort and it was almost like a political act in a weird way. It was exciting. We were young and everyone was bonded together. We were… what’s that psychosocial term when you’re crazy all together?

Amour fou?

Yes. That’s what we were. And proud to be so.