For a guy known for going to extremes, there are still some lines of decency John Waters is not willing to cross.
Waters, the transgressive filmmaker whose trash masterpieces (trash-terpieces?) “Pink Flamingos” and “Desperate Living” scandalized cinemas in the 1970s, has been gleefully pushing boundaries for more than 50 years.
And he’s shown no signs of slowing down. In recent years he’s acted, written books, done spoken word projects — his latest holiday single, “Happy Birthday Jesus,” a cover of a 1950s novelty single by Little Cindy, was released earlier this month — and he regularly tours. Baltimore’s favorite son will be at Ann Arbor’s Michigan Theatre on Saturday to perform his latest show, “Going to Extremes,” in which he’ll try to make sense of a world that has gone mad, even by his standards.
I chatted with Waters last week about movies, his career and his beloved Baltimore, and I found out the one place he won’t go. Waters is a bulldozer of wit, and when talking to the legendary filmmaker and cultural observer, the best you can hope for is to not get run over.
Here are 10 takeaways from our conversation.
He reads eight newspapers a day
Waters is a newshound, and he subscribes to the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the New York Post, the Washington Post, USA Today and the Baltimore Sun, all of which he gets delivered to his house and he reads every morning. Then online he reads the London Times, the Guardian, and sometimes other publications, like the Cape Cod Times.
“I like the press, I’m a press junkie,” says Waters, on the phone from Provincetown, Massachusetts, where he owns a home and has been coming since he was 17. “I read it all, I have to! That’s how I get material.”
In those papers, he says he misses coverage of the arts, specifically movie reviews. “I miss the power of movie critics,” he says. “We had some really terrible reviewers that helped build me and my career by giving me really great bad reviews.”
He appreciates the art of a savage takedown, like the kind John Simon used to deliver in the National Review. “I’m so glad he never reviewed any of my movies, but he could write a really good mean review,” he says.
The key to a good mean review, according to Waters? “Being smart,” he says. “You can’t just be mean without any wit.”
He writes every morning
“Every day of my life, Monday to Friday, at exactly 8 a.m. until exactly 11:30 a.m., I think up weird things,” Waters says. “It can be for a show, a book; I have a million projects. But that’s what I do every morning.”
He writes longhand with Bic pens on Evidence legal pads and then cuts up his pages, putting them back together, in the preferred order, using Scotch tape. He does many drafts, until he gets to a first draft he can hand to his assistant, who types it into a computer, which he then rewrites by hand. “I have to do everything by hand,” he says.
This process continues, and within a month or two, he says he has enough material for a new show, like the one he’s doing in Ann Arbor on Saturday. He’s performing it for only the second time, and he’ll shelve it as he embarks on his annual Christmas tour throughout December. He’ll then return to it when the holidays are finished.
Writing is never fun, he says, but it is satisfying. “Fun is after it’s a hit and you’re having dinner on the profits,” he says.
As for whether he finds the material funny, “If I write something for the first time and I laugh out loud, that’s really good. Because I am my first audience, I’m trying to make myself laugh,” Waters says.
He’s a frequent moviegoer
Waters says he sees somewhere between 50 and 80 movies a year, and he just turned in his annual 10 best list to New York Magazine. “I’m not telling you what they are,” he says. No hints, nothing? “They don’t want me to, that’s why they pay me to write them.”
Waters tends to champion underdog films on his list, or films that have been outright panned by the rest of the moviegoing public; last year, he included the much maligned “Joker: Folie à Deux” at No. 6. “Most all the movies I like got bad reviews, or nobody went to see them, one of the two,” he says.
Partially that’s because he’s not looking for what most people are from the movies, he says.
“I like difficult movies, I hate movies that make you feel good. I hate whimsy. I already feel good, I don’t expect a movie to make me feel good,” he says. “I want a movie to make me feel bad, then I know it’s powerful and well made.”
It’s important to support your favorite filmmakers, Waters says, especially in today’s theatergoing climate. “If you know a film director and you want to support him, you should pay to see the movie the Friday night it opens. That’s the best thing you could ever do, because by Saturday they’ve already projected it’s a hit or decided if it’s gone next weekend.”
His personal list of favorite filmmakers includes several button pushers and boundary breakers.
“I would never not see a Pedro Almodóvar movie, I’d never not see a Gaspar Noé movie, I’d never not see a Todd Haynes movie, or a Todd Solondz, or a Harmony Korine,” he says. “I have a long list. Bruno Dumont, I love.”
On occasion, Waters’ taste does mix with the masses.
“I loved ‘Final Destination,’ that was a huge hit!” Waters says of “Final Destination Bloodlies,” this year’s entry in the successful horror franchise.
So might that make his list of the year’s 10 best? “I would say it’s a good clue,” he says.
He won’t be directing a movie anytime soon
Waters’ last film was 2004’s “A Dirty Shame,” and while there’s been rumblings he’s close to directing another project, he says there’s no truth to the rumor.
“That’s not close anymore, those rumblings are over,” he says. “I had two movies that almost happened many times. One was I wrote a novel called ‘Liar Mouth,’ it was optioned, they loved the script, Aubrey Plaza was going to star in it, and then nobody gave us the money. And then I had a children’s Christmas movie I’ve been trying to make for years, it almost happened a couple of times but then it didn’t, and then it was going to be animation and it almost happened, but then it didn’t.
“The movie business as I know it is over. So that’s OK, you know? They paid me to write the movie,” he says. “I’m just saying, I’ve written a lot of books, I have 52 spoken word shows this year. I’ve never been busier in my life than I am now, so I’m glad I just need ways where I can tell stories, and I have a lot of jobs where I can do that.”
Waters says the movies he’s appeared in over the years have reminded him how painstaking the process of making movies can be.
“Sometimes I’m in movies where I’m on the set and I think, ‘this is exhausting, oh God, I remember this,'” he says. “I have no bitterness about Hollywood.”
He’s proud of the talents he helped discover
Waters gave Matthew Lillard his first big on-screen role in 1994’s “Serial Mom,” and Lillard credits Waters with giving him a career.
Others Waters helped give a career boost to include Maggie Gyllenhaal, Adrian Grenier and Michael Shannon, all of whom appeared in 2000’s “Cecil B. Demented” early on in their careers.
Waters says he’s happy for anyone he helped give a career boost.
“I’m happy for everybody that has success that I know in show business,” he says. “There’s so many other people in show business who are mad when their peers are successful. That’s so British. I’m really happy when they (find success), because it’s hard to get.”
He has no interest in entering the world of higher education
“I hated school, always,” says Waters, when asked if he’d ever consider teaching a course on a college campus, perhaps a film class.
So that’s a hard no on that.
“Academia always made me nervous,” Waters says. “I never loved school, and they never encouraged any of my interests, either.
“But I taught in prison for a long time, and I liked it very much,” he says. “So if I ever taught anywhere, it would be in prison.”
He’s got a big birthday coming up
Waters turns 80 in April, and he already has plans.
“I’m exploiting it,” he says, saying he already has six shows booked on the day itself, April 22, and two more on the way.
Privately, he says, he has a trip planned with friends to go to Europe to celebrate his birthday, but he’s keeping those details to himself.
“If I tell everything then I don’t have a private life, and you have to have one,” he says.
You may think you know him, but you don’t
That private life is key to Waters, who has lived so much of his life publicly, on stage, and across various forms of media, where his pencil thin mustache and his vicious sense of humor have been a staple of culture for more than 50 years. But he says he only allows people to see what he wants them to see.
“I learned how to make everybody think that they know everything about me, when they know nothing,” he says. “That’s a talent.”
He learned that right from the start of his career, often at the behest of the people he was dating.
“The people I was with didn’t want a public life, so I respected their wishes,” he says.
“I’ve had boyfriends that none of them want to be famous or want that life. So if I had a boyfriend who wanted to walk the red carpet, it would be not great,” he says. “They’re never usually in show business. I don’t want to talk (about show business), I want to talk about different things.”
He’s optimistic about the state of the world
Waters says he’s hopeful that the next generation will take the mantle and shake things up the way they need to be shaken up.
“I’m hopeful the youth will come up with a new way to startle us and change things and be funny. Scandalize me! Do something that makes me nervous,” he says.
He says the “new non-binary world” is giving way to a new sexual revolution even more radical than the first one.
“I love to hear parents say to their trans kids, ‘Can’t you just be gay?'” he says.
If you misquote him, he will correct you
About 10 years ago, I ran into Waters in an airport. I was heading to Baltimore the following weekend, and I asked him where I should go when I’m there.
In my memory, when I said I was going to Baltimore, he said something along the lines of, “Don’t bother.” When I bring this up to him, he’s quick to correct me.
“I would have never said, ‘Don’t go.’ I did not say that,” he says. “I would never dismiss it. That’s one thing I know I never said.”
I tell him I remember him being casually dismissive about the trip.
“I might have said, ‘Why are you going there?’ That’s a fair question,” he says. “‘Do you know what you’re getting into?’ But if you do, it’s the perfect place to go.”
He was correct, but it took him knowing his own thresholds of what he would and would not say — even in a brief interaction with a stranger, a decade ago — and it turns out dismissing his hometown was a bridge too far.
Even for Waters, extreme has its limits.
agraham@detroitnews.com
John Waters: Going to Extremes
8 p.m. Saturday
Michigan Theater, 603 E. Liberty St., Ann Arbor
Tickets $39-$96
Ticketmaster.com