The Yellow Springs Film Festival's Mini-Fest is April 17 and April 18 with events in both Dayton and Yellow Springs. The two-day event will kick off with a sold-out evening with John Waters at the Brightside where the legendary director's 2000 film Cecil B. Demented will screen followed by a Q and A.
WYSO music director Juliet Fromholt spoke with Waters ahead of his visit to southwest Ohio.
This transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
John Waters: I've seen some other good people you've had there, Jim Jarmusch, Fred Armisen.
Juliet Fromholt: We have. You know, Yellow Springs and the Dayton area are really a hotbed of filmmaking these days, and we are so thrilled to have you coming to join us and add to that catalog of directors who are coming to screen movies and talk to our film enthusiasts.
Waters: It'll be great. I love to see my audience and meet my audience all over the country. You know, they dress well, they're fun, they know movies, and sometimes I can tell them movies to watch, the only kind of homework they like.
Fromholt: And what a movie to be screening among movie people, Cecil B Demented. It's the whole package. It's a movie about movies for movie folks.
Waters: Well people think it's [autobiographical] because I had a sense of humor. Cecil, as all fascist dude, cult leaders never have a sense of humor. He doesn't have one about himself that's why I think the movie's funny. But I did some of those things. We never asked for permission, we would have to run in, and film stuff and do all that kind of crazy shit, but I didn't even know you were supposed to do it.
Fromholt: You know, it's funny because watching this movie again. To me, it has become a kind of tribute to, you know, I know a lot of filmmakers, especially from the 90s, who were part of that run and gun, shot on video, guerrilla filmmaking movement.
Waters: The one thing from the movie is the best dating advice. If everybody, if every person under 30 had to get the name of their favorite artist tattooed on their arm, wouldn't it make dating easier?
When I was young, you had to move to New York or move to L.A. to see anything. Nowadays, nobody has to move. Stay where you are and make it better. Because films are available, you can see everything in some way now, when you didn't used to be. So that's why every city has gotten a little cooler, and maybe New York and L. A. have gotten a lot less cool.
Fromholt: Absolutely. That would have saved me a lot of trouble in my younger years for sure.
Waters: I mean if I ever found somebody that had David Lean tattooed that would be a real dealbreaker.
Fromholt: What is it like getting to share your movies with an audience in person? Because there's something special about that collective act of like watching a movie, you know, together and then getting to talk about it.
Waters: When I was young, you had to move to New York or move to L.A. to see anything. Nowadays, nobody has to move. Stay where you are and make it better. Because films are available, you can see everything in some way now, when you didn't used to be. So that's why every city has gotten a little cooler, and maybe New York and L.A. have gotten a lot less cool.
Fromholt: I love that, you know, especially being here in the Midwest, you know, we are often taught, oh, the coasts are the place to be. But I would like to say we're cool, too. We're doing cool things here in Ohio, trying to at least.
Waters: You need to think you're cool-ler. That's what you have to do. You have to be militant about it.
Fromholt: That's right. Going back to the movie a little bit, I feel like there is so much to be said, on the one hand about Hollywood, but on the other hand, just about like the joy and foibles of making art with this one. Do you still feel that kind of rush of making art when you're interacting with this movie again?
Waters: Well, first of all, I never call what I do art. I hate it when I meet somebody, and they say they're an artist, I think to myself, I'll be the judge of that. And later, history will be the judges of that, not you. So I never say my artwork. But when I'm doing it...people say, did you have fun making that movie? No. 13-hour days, you don't get it. That's not fun. It's fun when it's over, you get good reviews, or you make money, and you're having dinner. That's fun. But at the same time, I'm proud of it, and I look back on it fondly, and mostly I look back on and think, how did I ever get that movie made? And I look at some of that stuff on every movie and wonder that. And this movie was the first movie ever I got entirely French money. Canal+ paid for it. And I made the deal in Cannes at the Cannes Film Festival. So all those cliches are possible. Deal signed on napkins.
Fromholt: What is something that you would like our local audience to look for in this movie or pay attention to as they are watching it? Give us some homework.
Waters: Well, my favorite scene is when Cecil licks the Panavision camera, and he said, that's in the script? I said, it is, look, and then he did it. Well, we used to do this. This is terrible, but it's good advice if you want to make a dollar holler when you're making a movie. Is buy the clothes you want people to wear and then film the scene and then take them back. You can get away with that.
And I always believe have a unit photographer always on set because the stills are what sells your movie. People remember that picture of the Divine in the red dress with a gun from Pink Flamingos. People don't remember From Here to Eternity, what happened in it, but they remember that picture of them making out in the bathing suits on the beach. You always have to have stills to sell your movie, that's something that people forget today. The other one is, always pay for your soundtrack albums. It costs a fortune and if you don't have it, your film will win the film festival and then the distributor that bought it will dump it.
Fromholt: That makes perfect sense. And music's so integral to this movie and so many movies. When I think about this soundtrack, I can't imagine this movie scored or soundtracked any other way.
Waters: Well it the first time we had punk rock, and a lot of...you know, The Locust and all those great people in it. But at the same time, we had Liberace singing in it. I think it was all kinds of music, and music in my movies is basically a narrator that tells the plot through the words, kind of like that novelty record "Flying Saucer." That was a huge influence on me that I never got over. Nowadays if you ever see a movie and there's a narrator, it means it had a bad test screening and they had to cut out a scene so the plot doesn't make sense anymore so they have to put in a narrator. It's easier to disguise if you use music, but I always had the music cues written in even when I turned in the script.
Fromholt: So you knew, from the onset, music is serving the storytelling, from the very beginning?
Waters: It's always been part of the narrative in my movie, yes. In the early movies there was no dialog, it was only music. So I can't show them today because I never paid for it.
Fromholt: Well, we are so looking forward to having you here in Ohio. What else do you want our local audience to know before they join you for this screening?
Waters: When I hitchhiked across America by myself when I was 66 years old for a book I wrote called Carsick, I got stuck for the longest time in Ohio where nobody would pick me up. So please, Ohioan people, pick up hitchhikers.
Fromholt: Noted. Well, John, it has been such a pleasure. We are so excited to have you joining us on April 17.
Waters: I'm looking forward to coming. Wear an outfit.
