‘The moment I had success, I stopped doing drugs’: John Waters on 60 years of screen carnage | John Waters

John Waters still remembers the day his 1988 comedy Hairspray was certified PG. “It was terrible,” he says.

Even then, Waters, whom novelist William S. Burroughs called the “Pope of Garbage,” was famous for photographing the unphotographable. In Eat Your Makeup, he recreated the JFK assassination just five years after the event, casting the brash Divine in the role of Jackie Kennedy. He invented a blasphemous sex act called the “rosary job” on several lunatics, which also involved raping a giant lobster. Most disgustingly, in Pink Flamingos, he convinced Divine to mock a new dog turd on camera.

Now, he was making a bright comedy about heart-thumping teenagers on a fictional TV dance show in the early 1960s. Hairspray is not without its eccentricities: there are nice touches of symbolic ugliness (vomit on a joyride, a mouse interrupting a moonlit rendezvous), the glorious sight of Debbie Harry smuggling a bomb under her beehive wig, and God in the dual roles of Baltimore housewife and racist TV director. The result was, in Rolling Stone’s words, a family film that “the Bradys and Mansons could love.”

Speaking from his beachfront home in Provincetown, Massachusetts, Waters shudders as he recalls that first and only player: “I was scared. I thought my fans were going to turn on me.”

The 80-year-old provocateur turned off his camera for an early-morning video call, but the sound was resonant enough to make him feel as if he were right here in the room: the languid accent, the high notes of feigned comic anger, the annoying purr that signaled an audible curl of the lips. I ask him to describe his appearance today, where he feels a bit like he’s having phone sex in one of his movies, and he helpfully replies: “I’m wearing a turtleneck, slacks, and Paul Smith socks.” It’s not mentioned but implied that the pencil mustache, which he once said he hoped would give him the look of “a high school principal who might be a child molester.”

Although Waters has kept busy writing books and touring his live spoken word show (which is coming to the UK in February), he hasn’t directed a film since his 2004 comedy Dirty Shame about sexual hysteria in a small town. He failed a few years ago to raise financing for an adaptation of his ill-feeling Liarmouth novel, even with Aubrey Plaza attached, and there are no new films in production. Thank goodness, then, for the old: boutique label Criterion gave the Blu-ray treatment to the bells and whistles of Hairspray and the 1977 adult fairy tale Desperate Living, set in Mortville, a borough of scoundrels ruled by the mad queen Carlotta (played by goofy grandmother Edith Massey).

It’s a weird double bill. Hairspray marked the beginning of Waters’ unlikely foray into mainstream Hollywood, paving the way for spiky but non-threatening comedies with real stars: Johnny Depp (Cry-Baby), Kathleen Turner (Serial Mom), Christina Ricci (Baker). It also produced a multi-Tony Award-winning Broadway musical in 2003, as well as a second film version starring John Travolta in 2007.

On the other hand, “Desperately Living” remains the main part of his filmography. “It wasn’t very good when it came out,” he admits. Perhaps the absence of divinity had something to do with this. Originally cast in film as a snarling lesbian who undergoes a phalloplasty and an abortion, he was attached to the stage instead. “I think he also wanted to get away from me a little bit, to prove what a good actor he is,” Waters says.

It may be obscenely funny, but “Desperately Living” feels heavier and less uplifting than much of Waters’ other work. “It’s the angriest movie for me,” he says. “And my ugliest.” Without justification. What about the moment when a car runs over a dog? “It wasn’t like that Which “Disgusting,” protested Waters, who got the animal from a freezer in the hospital laboratory. “He was already dead. He should be in a movie. I was thinking more about the fact that the dog hadn’t been fully thawed, so parts of him stuck to the gimbal and had to be painstakingly removed for a second take. “Oh yeah, that’s right,” he admitted with a chuckle. “The magical world of filmmaking.”

“Desperately Living” was also the first of his films to be written without the aid of marijuana. “Most people, when they become successful, become addicted to cocaine or something like that. But the moment I achieved success, I stopped doing drugs.” Why? “I wanted to keep going and not get distracted.” He’s tried everything. “I hated heroin. All that itching and scratching. Fortunately, I’m not a jazz musician, so I didn’t need it.” Private ridicule is reserved for ecstasy. “The drug that makes you love everyone is… no For me,” he scoffs.

Watched back to back, the similarities between these two seemingly different films become apparent. There is an obsession with rats and cockroaches: in Desperate Life, a cockroach scurries over the naked body of stripper Liz Renay, and the opening credits show a skinned rat being served on fine china. Later, more dead mice are stirred into the cauldron; It’s amazing that the cast and crew did not contract Hantavirus. In addition to the rodent appearance in Hairspray, this film also features a dance called the Roach, which hero Tracy Turnblad (future chat show host Ricki Lake) performs in a cockroach-patterned dress while pretending to crush insects underfoot. “Why don’t we have gimmick dances today?” Waters asks, looking annoyed. “Why was there no Covid dance and no new Covid song? I miss the new songs…”

His favorite rat moment came in Baker, his relatively gentle 1998 comedy about a young Baltimore photographer celebrated by New York pundits. “There’s a scene where rats have sex in a trash can,” Waters says. “We had a trainer but the rats wouldn’t do anything. I tried to talk dirty: ‘Eat that rat’s dick, you bitch!'” Then the prop master came over and grabbed the rats from underneath and shook them. They looked perfect.

In 2019, President Trump dismissed Waters’ hometown of Baltimore as a “rat and rodent infested mess,” prompting a harsh response from the director: “Give me rats and cockroaches in Baltimore any day over the lies and racism of Washington, Mr. Trump.” Now it takes little effort to compare the current US president to Queen Carlotta, who casually insults her subjects (“Hello, stupid! Hello, ugly!”) and issues capricious decrees: “Every word I ever utter will be taken as a direct declaration!” Carlotta’s plot to infect the residents of Mortville with rabies is reminiscent of the current administration’s cavalier attitude toward public health. “That crazy RFK Jr.,” Waters whispered. “How did he do that? never Get hired?” He broke into a chant: “Hey, hey, RFK/How many kids is Covid killing today?”

But one should not confuse the chaos and carnage on screen with desperate life and moral chaos. When I go to suggest that there are no rules in his films, Waters stops me dead. “No, there is We are “The rules,” he says. “The rules are: Mind your own business and don’t judge people if you don’t know the whole story. People who win always follow through. People who lose are jealous and judgmental. But there are definitely rules.”

The comedy in neither film should mask their underlying seriousness. Hairspray may treat the civil rights era with a deft touch, but its discontent is palpable. Both films celebrate resistance against racism, fascism and tyranny. What do these films say about the United States in 2026? “I think they say anger can be good, but the way you change things is through humor.” Is there anything not to joke about? “I certainly wouldn’t go to Israel and that whole situation. It would be a lose-lose for me even if I tried. But I’ve always walked on the edge of what you can’t make fun of. In all my films, I make fun of things I love, not things I hate. That’s why I’ve been getting away with it for 60 years.”

It’s incredible that nearly two-thirds of that time has passed since Devine died, three weeks after the release of Hairspray, at the age of 42. Still “I was shocked,” Waters says. “And he lives on today in so many ways. I think he changed drag queens. When we were young, they were very plain and square. Today, every drag queen has some sort of advantage, and I think it’s because of the divine. He was overweight, had scars on his face, carried a chainsaw, and he was a punk before anything like that happened.