Feel It In Your Waters

John Waters has a thing for Justin Bieber. “To hell with One Direction,” laughs the iconoclastic, irreverent filmmaker, author and raconteur. “Justin's a smart kid, and he looks very cute in his mugshot. I like it when he acts bad – who wouldn't be bad when you've got eight billion dollars? But I'm an even bigger fan now that I've met him. I was on The Graham Norton Show with him and he came out, stared at me and said 'Wow, your 'stache is the jam'.” After the show, Bieber drew his own version of Waters' trademark pencil-thin moustache on his upper lip and proudly displayed it to the waiting paparazzi.

Waters' affection for the rambunctious Canadian teen idol is only one of the topics of discussion in This Filthy World Vol. 2, the spoken-word tour he's bringing to Australia in March. While Waters made his name as the writer and director of trashy classics ranging from the enthusiastically revolting Pink Flamingos (the one in which his friend and collaborator, the drag queen known as Divine, infamously gobbled down a dog turd) to the exuberantly odd Hairspray (which subsequently spawned the successful stage musical), he's perhaps better known these days as a stand-up storyteller with a keen eye for the eccentricities and extremes of popular culture and human behaviour. “I hardly even talk about the movies anymore, unless I use them as springboards,” says Waters. “I use Pink Flamingos to talk about limits. I talk about the children who appeared in my movies and how they turned out – they all turned out great, even the ones we stuck up Divine's dress and had come out as babies. But I also talk about crime, about how I want to be a rock star, about new projects I want to start, like a tabloid for intellectuals called The National Brainiac. What I'm trying to bring to everybody is that you can be neurotic and happy, and that's what I've worked my whole life to be. The main two things in life you want to work towards are never being around assholes and being able to buy any book you want without looking at the price tag.”

The Gospel According to John Waters is full of such nuggets of wisdom (his tenet “If you go home with somebody and they don't have books, don't fuck 'em” is essentially the 11th commandment, although Waters admits he's broken it on occasion: “If they're cute enough, who's looking at their shelves?”), and it attracts a wide and varied audience, from long-time devotees to more recent converts. “I've played all the music festivals in America and my audience is getting younger. That's the one thing you can't buy, your audience getting younger, and I'm proud of that. I have youth spies – I give them poppers and ask them to tell me about the new acts. So I don't go out at four in the morning but I have people who tell me what's going on at four in the morning, which is important to know. But the stuff I say makes the youngest kids run in fear, so that's good. Fear and laughter is the whole point.”

While new disciples are joining Waters' world all the time, he has noticed uniformity to the kind of punter he attracts to his shows: “It's more universal than it's ever been, I think. Wherever I go in the world, whether it's Australia or Finland or Fargo, North Dakota, the audience looks the same, laughs in the same places and is incredibly open-minded. That's really good in a way, but the sad thing is that everywhere is a little bit the same now. Local colour everywhere is vanishing.”

However, don't get the idea that Waters is wallowing in nostalgia. “I'm proud of my past, and I have quite a chequered one, but I always think tomorrow is going to be better than yesterday. Having a global community is 95 per cent better. Porn's free, for one thing. And it also means you don't have to leave where you are and go somewhere else to be cool. I'm probably the only person from the '60s generation that doesn't think we had more fun than kids today. I think they have just as much fun sitting in their bedroom in their parents' house using their computer to shut down the governments of foreign countries.”

Sadly, it's been ten years since Waters was behind the camera as a director. But he remains busy and active as a creative force, whether it's doing stand-up shows like This Filthy World, writing books (such as his upcoming one about hitchhiking across America last year at the age of 66), curating art exhibitions and film festivals or generally popping up somewhere unexpectedly but entertainingly. “I'm involved in many, many careers but basically I'm a writer, a storyteller,” he says. “But I would also call myself a filth elder.”