John Waters
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(laughter) PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: That’s so interesting. What were some of the first books you stole? JOHN WATERS: All of them, you know— (laughter) PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: And this after working in a bookshop. Or before, no. JOHN WATERS: I didn’t steal when I worked in a bookshop. No. Because they were so great they gave them to me for free. No— PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: They knew what they were doing. JOHN WATERS: Once, but I didn’t steal, but once I stole once records, and I saw the store detective seeing me do it, so I put them back, and she didn’t see me put them back, and then she arrested me, and I sued and got five thousand dollars. (laughter/applause) That was terrible. I feel guilty about that, you know. (laughter) PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: I can tell. JOHN WATERS: I don’t feel that guilty. Because all those records that I stole I ended up later paying thirty-five thousand each to put them in the soundtracks of my movies, so they got their money back, yeah. (laughter) PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: But do you remember some of the early books you stole that gave you a thrill? JOHN WATERS: Yeah, City of Night, I think John Rechy, certainly Last Exit to Brooklyn, those early books by Grove Press. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: How old were you? JOHN WATERS: Oh, a teenager and but I just— PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Fifteen, sixteen? JOHN WATERS: Yeah, yeah. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Where did you put the books? JOHN WATERS: Inside my coat. Not like Divine, I didn’t put them between my legs like in Pink Flamingos. No. I had a special coat, actually. But I don’t believe in stealing books today, I’m against it because bookstores are having so much trouble. I think we should you know take our books and put them back in after we’ve paid for them. I think that would be a good thing to do. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: In the chapter you read, you know, obviously reading is so important and I wonder if you agree with Werner Herzog, when he gives classes in film studies at the Rogue Film School he has, when he’s asked what his students should do, he says, “Read, read, read, read, read, read, read.” JOHN WATERS: I agree and that if you’re making films, watch every movie and keep the sound off, you can tell how they’re made, then. See bad movies, too, because see why they’re bad. But I don’t really think you should read bad books. I wrote a whole chapter in my last book about the kind of books that I like. They should be hard, it shouldn’t be easy. You know, I don’t understand when people say, “You know, I just want a light book for summer that makes me feel good.” Well, don’t you feel good anyway? Why should the author’s problem be you? (laughter) PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: So the books should be— JOHN WATERS: Hard to read. Like, you know, or give you a kick. I love a feel-bad book. (laughter) PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Such as. JOHN WATERS: Well, they don’t make feel bad. You know, let me think. What’s a feel-bad book? PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: No, no, no, what is a feel— JOHN WATERS: Well, I’m reading that book My Struggle now. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Karl Ove Knausgaard, who’s coming here on Friday. And you know, it’s amazing, I mean, this Norwegian writer. JOHN WATERS: And it’s on the best seller list this week, too. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: I mean, it’s just extraordinary. I invited him about five, six months ago and people didn’t know who I was talking about. I probably didn’t pronounce his name right. Now I can say Karl Ove Knausgaard and people know exactly—but it’s extraordinary to witness how somebody becomes famous. JOHN WATERS: Well, the articles were pretty amazing and also one out of ten people in his country read the book. The other book I really loved recently I read was Can’t and Won’t by what’s her name, you know, the woman that writes very short ones. I’m just going blank on her name. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: It doesn’t matter. The woman who writes short books. AUDIENCE: Lydia Davis. JOHN WATERS: Yes. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Who’s that? JOHN WATERS: Lydia Davis? PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Lydia Davis. JOHN WATERS: Yeah, she’s and I just read her— PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: I have not read her. JOHN WATERS: She’s great. She’s really, really smart. The smartest book I’ve read in a long time, actually. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Why? JOHN WATERS: Because she’s just brilliant and funny and some of her stories are three sentences long and boy, you know, talk about good editing, right? (laughter) PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: You know the line I’ve always loved of Pascal, who said, “If I had had more time, I would have made it shorter.” JOHN WATERS: That’s true. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: That’s right. JOHN WATERS: If you ever think you should cut something out, cut it out. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: One more line by Herzog before we move on. Another piece of advice. I know we both admire him. Another piece of advice he gives is, “Go out to where the real world is. Go work as a bouncer in a sex club, a warden in a lunatic asylum, or in a slaughterhouse. Walk on foot, learn languages, learn a craft or trade that has nothing to do with the cinema. Filmmaking must have experience of life as its foundation.” JOHN WATERS: I agree with most of that. I don’t think you have to get a job as a warden. (laughter) Maybe I’m not quite as extreme as Werner. But I think I don’t trust anybody that hasn’t been in jail one night. It’s part of life. You gotta get busted once. Have you been arrested? Hate to put you on the spot. (laughter) PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Moving—no, but I know what I need to do next. Now, as you all noticed at the very beginning, I didn’t really give an introduction to John Waters. No need for one. But over the years I’ve asked my guests—for the last six or seven years, I’ve asked my guests to give me kind of a biography of themselves in seven words, a haiku of sorts, or if you’re very modern a tweet, and John, you gave me these seven words, which maybe you can help us unpack a little bit. “John Waters was once a children’s puppeteer.” JOHN WATERS: Well, it’s true. And that’s the beginning. That’s the first job I ever had in show business, and it went well. I was twelve years old, and I had maybe three puppet shows a week for twenty-five bucks each, and that was pretty good in 1954. And so I was hooked early. I always knew what I wanted to do. So I’m lucky. You go to school to figure out what you want to be. I knew what I wanted to be, always. And my parents were horrified by what I wanted to be. But they knew it was that or prison, I think they thought. (laughter) So they encouraged me to do that, and even when I made films that mortified them and nobody said were good for ten years at least, they were there for me. Even though they were embarrassed. They didn’t know how to take it or anything. Well, what parent would be thrilled to say, “I heard about the new film your son made where a drag queen eats dogshit. Congratulations.” (laughter) I don’t blame my parents for being uptight. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: But they supported you very much. JOHN WATERS: My father paid for that movie. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: I know. (laughter) JOHN WATERS: And never saw it. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: He never saw it? JOHN WATERS: Never saw it. And I paid him back all the money with interest, which he was shocked. And when he died I found the little things that he had saved in his safe deposit box, which was very moving to me that he saved the hundred dollars here, two hundred, three hundred, when I would go around the country with the prints in the trunk of my car and show them. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: But he must have been proud that you could pay him back, in some way, you know. JOHN WATERS: Yes, that was about it. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: In some way, no? JOHN WATERS: And also his name was John Waters, too, which was especially mortifying, right? (laughter) If you’re going to name your son Junior, think about it. (laughter) PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Quickly, though. Puppeteer. How did puppeteer come about? JOHN WATERS: Puppeteer. So many film directors become puppeteers and actors say, “We’re not your puppets, you know.” But they are. (laughter) PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: I want to talk about something that comes up in Carsick quite often, is the notion of impersonification. You say, “Once I climb in, will they believe it’s me, even if they know who I am, or think I’m just a John Waters impersonator, which I am in a way every day, only older.” JOHN WATERS: Yeah, I’m impersonating him right now. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: But what does that mean about you? JOHN WATERS: It means that I can play myself when I have to. Which I’m doing right now. It’s what I do for my living. But it is the real me. I’m no different in real life. But when I get in a car, when I was hitchhiking a lot of people later told me, they thought it was me but then they drove by, “Why would he be hitchhiking by an entrance ramp in Kansas?” And then they come back and stop and open the door and like staring at me like this and they’d say, “Where are you from?” And I’d say, “Baltimore.” They’d go “Aahahayah.” You know. (laughter) But most people thought I was a homeless man. People came over to give me money a lot. Which was—shocked me the first time. This farmer tried to give me—I didn’t take it but one woman she wasn’t even in a car at a rest area, you know, I had a sign and I looked like an old man hitchhiking, I looked like a homeless guy, and she would come over and try to give me thirty dollars, or twenty dollars, she had kids, and I said, “No, I really don’t need this. I’m writing a book. I’m a film director.” And they look at you like, “You’re off your meds. (laughter) What kind of film are you making out here hitchhiking?” PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Or you may be taking the medication but the dosage is off. JOHN WATERS: Yeah. But even I had real friends. I had one friend that called my office when it went online and the story kind of went viral because a rock-and-roll band called Here We Go Magic picked me up. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Yeah, you wrote about that. JOHN WATERS: And my friend wrote and said, “Well, if John is having a breakdown. I know that something’s wrong and wherever he is in the country I’ll come get him and take him home.” And it was very touching. They thought I really had lost it, and was wandering the country. (laughter) Which I was! Yeah. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Willfully. JOHN WATERS: Willfully. Yeah, and I thought I’d lost my mind too after about day three. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: But it’s interesting, no, a little bit more about this notion of impersonator. Because, you know, it’s just an interesting phenomenon that we sort of stage ourselves. You know, there’s this— JOHN WATERS: Well, you go to work, you are impersonating yourself. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: You’re playing— JOHN WATERS: You’re playing your public self. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Yeah, you’re playing, yeah, it’s kind of the notion a Canadian sociologist who once called this “staged authenticity.” JOHN WATERS: I guess. That’s too intellectual for me. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Yeah, this is supposed to be a little bit intellectual. JOHN WATERS: Yeah, I know. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: I’m playing at being an intellectual for the moment. JOHN WATERS: I play that too. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: I know, so let’s play at that. I mean, there’s a notion— JOHN WATERS: Staged—what did you say— PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: I’ll say it again. My lisp doesn’t help. Staged authenticity. JOHN WATERS: What do you mean staged? You’re either authentic or you’re not, I’d say. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Ah, no, no, no, but this is the whole problem. To impersonate also means there’s a kind of an imposter syndrome, there’s, you know— JOHN WATERS: I wish I could go that far and say, “You know, actually, I’m lip-synching right now.” (laughter) That would be great. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: That would be great, yeah. Okay. (laughter) Moving—the structure of your book you mentioned it a little bit earlier. The best, the worst, and the real. And much of a trip taken such as this one has in it the seeds of anticipation of what you imagine the journey to be. Before coming onstage tonight, what did you imagine would be the best or the worst scenario? JOHN WATERS: I guess the worst you’d come out there would be three people and no one spoke English, (laughter) and you didn’t show up and I had to just stand here. But I could have just kept talking. I could have handled that. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: No, I would imagine that. (laughter) JOHN WATERS: So the best is—we’re having the best. This is the best. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: We’re having the best—it’s just fantastic, (applause) yeah, we’re doing— You know, the book is so much about the notion of anticipation of what you will be living, what and the journey you’re taking here in Carsick. You have imagined it. JOHN WATERS: The first part I wrote before I left, I could have never written it after I’d done the trip, the first part, and it was fiction, which I’ve only really written in movies before, because I’ve written all my movies, which are of course fiction. So this was imagining the best I could think of, which was meeting characters like that librarian. Or I have sex in a car in a demolition derby. (laughter) I don’t think that’s really going to happen but I like the idea of it. I would. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Tell me a little bit about this fantasy, the demolition derby. JOHN WATERS: I’m not saying that’s my fantasy. (laughter) PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: I mean, but it isn’t mine. JOHN WATERS: I’m trying to write a humorous book, so the sex scenes in it I hope are humorous, too, even the terrible ones when I’m entrapped in a bathroom in Kansas for just taking a pee, but you know in Kansas sodomy for straight or gay is still illegal, so I get taken to this terrible jail by these horrible homophobic cops, but it’s so ridiculous that I hope it’s funny. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Right. JOHN WATERS: The sex in here is ridiculous, too. Having sex in the middle of a demolition derby and then I go home with a guy and he says, “You wanna watch some porn?” and takes out like pictures of cars crashing, (laughter) only it’s a demolition derby where they go forwards, you know, which you can’t do, so it’s devil kind of demolition derby. So is that my real fantasy? No. But I like demolition derbies, and I do think some of the people there look pretty great. They don’t realize it, which makes it better always. They have a certain chic that you know. If you had a club in New York that was, you know, working-class chic, it would be faux working class. It would be for fashion, really, it would be a style thing. This really, they’re not really aware of that world, but yet they look more handsome than anybody in a way because it’s effortlessly cool. And they love demolition derbies. I saw a family there, they go at this demolition derby, before it starts, they take a new car, it’s like an amusement park ride, and you pay five dollars and you go in and you and your dad, it usually is, get to just smash the car with a hammer for five minutes. And I thought, “Isn’t that peculiar? Like quality wrecking time with your father.” (laughter) And they’d say, “Go ahead, son, get the rear-view mirror, knock it off.” And at the end it was just this car left completely beaten to death by the families. It was really nice, I thought. (laughter) PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: What did you imagine the trip to be before you took it? JOHN WATERS: Well, I imagined the best. You know, the worst is I get murdered, you know, I get picked up by a sports fanatic that will never shut up. I start smoking in it again. That’s the worst thing. I’d rather be murdered than smoke again. It’d be harder. It’s harder to quit smoking than die. It is. (laughter) So I had all these fears. Not really, everybody else made me afraid. I wasn’t afraid, but as it got closer everybody was saying, “Well, are you sure you don’t want to have somebody follow you?” So I just let my imagination go, with everything, the best and the worst, and then when I did it for real it was never that extreme. But the people were great. What I didn’t imagine was the endless time alongside the road where no one picks you up and you stand there for ten hours. And believe me ten hours alongside the road with that Kansas wind hitting you in the face is tough. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: It’s a long time. JOHN WATERS: I looked pretty ugly. I looked like a Walker Evans photograph. (laughter) PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: But you also talk about hitchhiking as inspiring optimism in some way. JOHN WATERS: This inspired optimism, because every person that picked me up. I had a trucker, a cop, a coal miner, frackers, they all were so optimistic, and some were Republican, some were Democrat, but they all were open-minded, they all wanted to talk. They all talked about how much they loved their wives. All the straight men talked about how smart and beautiful their wives were. They were all upbeat. They all had survived something. They all were—people that pick up hitchhikers are good people. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: I love this line about men who love their wives. “And yep, here’s yet one more heterosexual man who loves his wife. I’m telling you. It’s a trend. Women I know who are always complaining they can never meet a good straight man. Maybe you’re living in the wrong part of the country. Maybe you need to hitchhike. Route 70 West could be a path to a great marriage. Go ahead, stick out your thumb for romance.” (laughter) JOHN WATERS: Well, but then as somebody else pointed out to me, but if they’re all happily married, where are you going to go? You got to get there early. (laughter) And I believe these were all second wives, because—And they weren’t trophy wives, it wasn’t that, they were the same age, they were just, they married up in intelligence. I think when they were younger, they had maybe substance problems, or I don’t know, they had problems, right? And they had survived that and gone on to the next step. And I love people that have survived problems. It’s much more interesting to never have—If you have no problems, you’re just the cheerleader in high school the day you graduate it’s downhill. You know, you gotta have something to overcome or fight for. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: I have to ask you, John, of course, the why of hitchhiking. You know when I found out a couple of years ago I think when you were here last that you were going to write a book about hitchhiking and about your hitchhiking journey, I immediately said, you know, this has to happen, I have to talk to you partly because in my own family history, as I told you, when I was growing up, my father, he used the word, he’s alive and ninety-six years old, but he used the word that it was immoral for me to travel in any other way than hitchhiking— JOHN WATERS: Wow. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: —until I turned twenty-one. My mother didn’t agree at all. But my father said it’s the best way of traveling. It’s the only way in which you actually learn to talk to complete strangers. You also exchange for the rides stories, you learn how to lie very well. You learn all kinds of good things. So why at the age of— JOHN WATERS: Sixty-six when I did it. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: When you did it. I was hesitant. JOHN WATERS: My midlife crisis, yeah. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Yeah, so it’s your midlife crisis. JOHN WATERS: Sure it was. My life is controlled, it’s scheduled. You know, so I was like, “What would it be like to give all that up and go out on the road? And let’s see what happens. I don’t know what’s going to happen.” You can’t be a control freak if you’re a hitchhiker. You really can’t. It’s impossible. You know and I never, I thought I would be a backseat driver, like, “Slow down! Oh my God!” I never did that once. I never saw one car accident the whole way. I saw a lot of fires, but I never saw car accidents. We were never stopped by the police. The police saw me hitchhiking. One cop gave me a ride. And I had a little fame kit my assistant made up, which I loved, you pull out, “Excuse me, here’s my Academy of Arts and Science card. Like, ‘I vote for the Oscars, can I get out of jail?’” You know? It worked! (laughter) PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Tell me, what was in the fame kit? JOHN WATERS: The fame kit was just my Directors’ Guild of America card, my Academy of Arts and Science card, and I think a clipping about Hairspray or something very mainstream, you know. And the cop is great, he looked through the whole thing and he said, “Doesn’t say anything on here about being a professional hitchhiker.” (laughter) I knew he was joking with me, I said, “will you give me a ride?” He said, “Yeah, hop in.” And he gave me a ride and then he dropped me off, and I was in this place and he said, “I’ll come back and check on you later,” and he did, and I still hadn’t gotten a ride, it was like five hours later. And he said, “What’s the matter with you? Shake the sign! God!” (laughter) It was humiliating. To get a bad hitchhiking review from a cop. (laughter) PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Tell me about the heydays of hitchhiking. Were there days earlier when you hitchhiked? JOHN WATERS: Well, when I was young, you had sex more when you hitchhiked, you know. You either said yes or no. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: You had more sex. JOHN WATERS: I said either. Depended on the person. But everybody that hitchhikes has to admit that people do come on to you. And sometimes you say yes and sometimes you say no, at least in my experience. It did not happen much when you’re sixty-six. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Library or no library. JOHN WATERS: Yeah, yeah. The lechery really calms down. I didn’t have any gerontophiliacs. That’s a sexual attraction to older people. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Coming back to the earlier days. Take me back. JOHN WATERS: In the sixties, everybody hitchhiked. You know, and you’d be in like New Haven, there would be so many hitchhikers. That was a great hitchhiking spot. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: And your parents were fine— JOHN WATERS: My parents weren’t against hitchhiking. And I know they didn’t know that perverts picked you up. But also you didn’t come home and say to your mom, “Hey, good one today!” And I guess there were serial killers then. There was all that kind of stuff going on. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: It just was less written about or spoken about maybe. JOHN WATERS: And there weren’t so many movies, The Hitcher, and Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and all the movies where the hitchhiking always ends badly, including the movies I made always had bad things happen to hitchhikers. Nothing ever happened to me bad. It happened to some people I know, though. There are certainly horror stories. But nothing ever bad happened to me. Maybe that’s just luck but I believe in goodness of people. Sort of. |