John Waters on Turning 80, Dirty Jokes, Hosting Mosswood Meltdown

John Waters turns 80 this year. Mosswood Meltdown, the gloriously disreputable Oakland punk festival he has hosted since its inception, turned 12.

Somehow, neither shows much interest in acting its age.

Every July, a few thousand devotees descend on Mosswood Park for a weekend that feels equal parts punk festival, comedy show and a John Waters cabaret extravaganza. Waters emcees every act on both stages (this year’s lineup included Iggy Pop, Bikini Kill, Pavement and Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein’s Ramones tribute band, The Return of Jackie and Judy), introducing them with the sort of filthy one-liners that have become as much a part of the weekend as the music itself. This year, for example, he anointed Pavement “the cock and balls of indie rock.”

Waters has become the festival’s unofficial patron saint. Standing behind increasingly absurd podiums — a fake game-show lectern one minute, an elegant dinner table with a dead rat as the centerpiece the next — he writes every introduction himself, testing material that often finds its way into his touring stage shows months later.

Between introductions, The Hollywood Reporter caught up with the Pope of Trash backstage to talk about turning 80, writing jokes every morning and why he’d still rather spend an evening in a dive bar than at the Folsom Street Fair.

What’s the intersection between your shock factor and punk?

I think we were always punk, all my work from the very beginning. Even when hippies were peace and love, I made Multiple Maniacs, a film that glorified insane violence. I always made fun of whatever the liberal values were, because I’m a liberal, my audience is liberal, so we made fun of that. Those films were punk always, before there was such a thing. In Pink Flamingos, when they had that dyed blue and red hair, we had to bleach their hair out to white and then dye it with magic marker and India ink. Today your mother buys that color dye at the Rite Aid. And the only person who is the correct heir to the throne is Johnny Knoxville. The Jackass movies are the closest to Pink Flamingos, and the new one is worse. He’s now the filthiest person.

How do you continually evolve while keeping that signature shock?

That’s my job. Every day I think it up. I write every day in the morning, and I have to think up things, that’s my job. I have pads, I have notes, little joke files, like Bob Hope did. But I don’t have any writers; they all had twenty writers. I’ve never made a movie I didn’t write. I never would. So every day I just have to think of something. To do that, you have to read a lot. You want to be a director, go see every movie. You want to be a writer, read every newspaper, read.

You’re turning 80 this year. What accomplishment are you most proud of?

That I’ve been able to have this career, doing what I want, for sixty years. Hollywood’s been fair to me. I was always understood, I always had an audience. The critics who hated me, we used that, they helped me. Censors helped me. Everybody who tried to stop me was better than a press agent. Now the Academy gave me a museum show, that’s amazing to me. The National Registry picked Pink Flamingos. I always say, what was that screening, what did they say? They said, “the singing asshole.” Well, this would be perfect, we should give this the registry award. I don’t feel any kind of revenge, I’m just honored by it. I’m eighty years old, I’m still older than Iggy. And when William Burroughs died, that was the last person who used to always be older than me in the room.

What do you think about the young generation of creators and risk-taking?

Well, they’re taking more risk. The new sexual revolution makes mine look tame. I keep telling them, we don’t know how to masturbate to them; you have to teach us. That’s a real thing we need to learn. Everything else is new that people have to accept. So I learn new things all the time. I talk punk dirty in my show today; later I give a whole spiel about new punk rock sex you should have. We’ll see if any of it catches on.

Does it encourage you when you see microbudget filmmakers suddenly breaking through?

I think it’s absolutely great. Before that I always said, what movie ever got a start on the internet? None, until a month ago, where two of them did and became the biggest hits, grossing $180 million. Now every Hollywood studio says, “Why can’t you make a movie for $30,000?” I’m mad at those directors, but I give them great credit. Be careful though, because the studio will hire them away and give them a hundred-million-dollar budget to make a comic book movie. It’ll fail, and their career will be over. It happens constantly.

How do you know when a joke works?

That’s my job, to make people laugh. If they don’t, it’s a terrible feeling. I haven’t had that happen in a long time. A lot of the stuff I say here will end up in my next show. I rewrite it once a year, part of this will become the Christmas show. So every joke I said here today, I’ve never said before. It’s a test.

Are you working on any film or series projects?

I had Liarmouth, my novel, it was optioned. I wrote the script, they loved it, Aubrey Plaza was going to star, but the budget was too expensive, so it didn’t happen. I have another movie, a children’s Christmas animation called Fruitcake, who knows, that’s fallen through a couple of times too. I have lots of books coming. I have more jobs than I’ve ever had in my life, so I’m not looking for a new one.

Are we living in a more John Waters world than we used to?

Reality TV is the one thing I never watch, I have no interest, because they’re all hairhoppers, people I don’t want to ever know, much less care what their lives are like. I pitched one here, we could have one, “Housewives of Squatters,” or “Pickpockets at Burning Man.” That, I would watch. I don’t care how those people live, so I don’t watch it. Gore Vidal said the best thing about TV, he said, “I hate watching it, but I love being on it.” I don’t even know how to turn on my TV, I have three assistants, it’s so hard, I start crying. I miss tinfoil and rabbit ears. So to me, I like to read at night. You can’t watch much television and also read a good book. You can’t do both. I much prefer writing, I can memorize lines that I wrote way better than lines other people wrote.

Gay bar or punk bar?

Oh, punk bar. I’m much more at home there than at the Folsom Street Fair. I don’t have the outfits for the Folsom Street Fair, and leather looks stupid on young people, I think. The gay people I like would be here, they think gay culture is a little square, which it is. They have terrible music.

So I like gay people who can’t get along with other gay people. I like punks who can’t even get along with other punks. I love each minority that can’t fit in with their own minority, and then they hang out with all the other people who can’t fit in their minority, and those are my people. Those are the people who have given me this career for sixty years, and I thank them for it. They get younger and younger, I do recruit. It’s true, what they say.