Burn down the multiplex and destroy Hollywood - by whatever means necessary. Put an immediate stop to the mass distribution of mediocre films, discover your inner auteur and pit prophecy against profit. Say a little prayer to Andy Warhol, bow down to Fassbinder, Lynch, Preminger and Von Triers, become cinematically incorrect, join the new cinema underground, become an outlaw film-maker. Technique is failed style. Rise up to take back the screen. Death to those who support mainstream cinema. As cultural rallying calls go, it's catchy enough, and more so when it's been framed by the prototypical indie director John Waters. Not that the middle-aged terrible of left-field flickery has turned into a celluloid militant, he's just paraphrasing the plot of his new and hilarious film, Cecil B. Demented. Sitting in a London hotel, he's laughing his head off and twitching his trademark pencil-thin moustache as he explains how Demented is a satire on the independent film world and how he's just discovered that self-parody can make great art.
The film goes a bit like this: Honey Whitlock (Melanie Griffiths) is a Grade A Hollywood star - more than a bit of a diva bitch, she arrives in Baltimore for the charity premiere of her new mainstream schlock vehicle. Lurking in the audience is Cecil B. Demented (Stephen Dorff), a guerilla film maker and cult leader of a bunch of militant indie cineastes. They kidnap Whitlock and force her to star in a no-budget film shot in "ultimate reality" as penance for her mainstream ways. Brainwashing her as a prisoner-of-war, she slowly comes around to their point of view.
"The whole idea of the film is that I'm making as much fun of the whole indie film world as I am of Hollywood," says Waters. "So, you have the Melanie Griffiths character acting like a prima donna bitch - the way those actresses do, and then you have this mad radical filmmaker who in many ways is just as bad she is. He's a cult leader and I've always found that all cults are humour-impaired, no matter what they represent, so I wanted to take an extreme look at the cult of that type of filmmaking."
Did he specifically want Griffiths for the role? "Absolutely, and the really funny thing was that in the US she is the face of the Revlon woman and she was working for them while doing my movie. So she'd go from some mad scene where we're setting fire to her hair, on to a Revlon shoot. I thought she'd be very interesting in the role. She has done the sort of mainstream stuff that her character in the film has done, so she knows about the world. But what really clinched it for me was the last movie I saw her in before casting. She was injecting heroin into her neck - so obviously she was a prime candidate for a John Waters film. She's married to Antonio Banderas and he featured in a lot of the early Pedro Almodovar films, so she would have some knowledge of the sort of director that myself and Pedro represent."
Apart from serving as a Spinal Tap of the independent film world, Demented also contains a wonderful conceit in the shape of a cameo appearance by Patti Hearst. "I just thought it was very appropriate to have Patti in there because the film is also about the `Stockholm Syndrome', a psychological condition in which kidnap victims or hostages begin to identify with their captors or oppressors - named after a kidnapping case in Stockholm. It was the reason given why Patti Hearst [from the Hearst newspaper dynasty] became an active member of the urban guerilla group, the Symbionese Liberation Army, who kidnapped her in California in the 1970s - and she knows a lot about that," he says. "What happens to the Melanie Griffiths character in the film is actually a re-run of what happened to Patti Hearst - first being kidnapped and then joining your captors and coming to believe in what they believe in. "I'm just obsessed by cults and I was transfixed by the Patti Hearst trial. I've actually got 23 books about the trial. I've had her in my films before and she's a good friend. Other people I've worked with, like Johnny Depp, have always been ready to make fun or parody their image and Patti was no exception. "She helped me promote this film in the US and I think she found the whole thing really liberating in that she could talk about what the Stockholm Syndrome really is - she was kidnapped when she was only 19 and the Symbionese Liberation Army brainwashed her. She ended up robbing a bank with them and got sentenced to two years in prison. People were aghast when I told them I was making a kidnap comedy and was going to have Patti Hearst in it, but people are often aghast at what I do in my films."
Now 54, Waters was born and grew up in Baltimore. While in his teens, he began making 8mm, underground, arty, short films, influenced by the work of Godard, Warhol and Russ Meyer. From his beatnik coffeehouse base he assembled a repertory company of native Baltimoreans: Divine, Mink Stole, David Lochary and Mary Vivian Pearce. Dubbed the "Pope of Trash" by William Burroughs, Waters has always had a strong interest in the transgressive possibilities of film - characters being raped by a 15-foot lobster or eating dog excrement and plot lines about pornography and drug addiction led him to remark once that "films are my crime".
Credited with making one of the most notorious films in the history of US independent cinema, Pink Flamingos (1972) - which featured a competition to find the "filthiest people alive" - his work is closely associated with the transvestite actor, Divine (real name Harris Milstead, who died in 1988), who came to prominence in Waters's breakthrough Hairspray (1988), which also featured Ricki Lake.
Always perverse, slightly surreal and a giddy celebration of bad taste, Waters's films are distinguished by a sense of humour that often goes unnoticed amid more lurid elements. The gags come thick and fast in De- mented: film reviewers, the Sundance Film Festival, Hollywood re-makes of foreign classics, product placement and censorship all get a lash of Waters's mordantly funny tongue.
The success of Hairspray brought major Hollywood backing for his next feature, Cry Baby (1990), which starred Johnny Depp, and there were fears that the mainstream would neuter his idiosyncratic vision of US life. Such fears were allayed by the release of Pecker (1998), a feel-good romp about "lesbian strippers and pubic hair harassment".
"It's not something I've ever worried about, or been too self-conscious about," he says of the fear of going mainstream. "The opposite thing is that you can get certain actors who want to appear in your work because they're looking for some sort of indie credibility. Some people have remarked there aren't any transvestites in Demented. First of all, there are, except instead of drag queens, I have drag kings [women dressed as men]. I'm never going to have another drag queen in my films out of respect to Divine. What I've found about my films is, we may get bigger stars willing to appear but the same vision still exists and there's no way I'll ever be thought of as any sort of Hollywood director." Can trash ever become respectable? Waters asked in his memoir, Shock Value. "To understand bad taste one must have very good taste. Good bad taste can be creatively nauseating but must at the same time, appeal to the twisted sense of humour, which is anything but universal." Certainly, though there must be a respectability of sorts in the fact his trash masterpiece, Pink Flamingos, was honoured with a 25th-anniversary re-release three years ago in a "director's cut" version. He smiles proudly and says: "It's hard to offend three generations of cinema-goers but hey, it looks like I've succeeded."
Cecil B. Demented opened yesterday at the IFC.