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by Anthony Kaufman

The King of Trash is back, and this time, it's personal. "Death to mainstream cinema! Take back the screens!" cry Cecil B. Demented and his horny band of cinema terrorists in John Waters' latest comic romp, which rails against everything from high popcorn prices to bad Hollywood movies. Stephen Dorff stars as the titular terrorist, an underground director with Otto Preminger's name tattooed on his arm, who kidnaps Hollywood's hottest star, Honey Whitlock (Melanie Griffith like you've never seen her).

With "Cecil," 54-year-old director Waters vents and provokes like the good old days, when the perverse humor of his early films "Pink Flamingos" and "Mondo Trasho" upset the status quo, sent the Moral Majority into a tizzy and created a haven for weirdoes everywhere. Anthony Kaufman spoke with the director about terrorist fashion, filmmaking inspirations and revolutionary politics.

Citysearch: I like the fashion sense of your cinema terrorists. There seemed to be a lot of fur.

John Waters: That was probably all fake thrift-shop fur. But I'm not against real fur either—I think it certainly lends itself well to costumes. And terrorist clothes always have to look tough, so leather and fur and stuff put together. I wanted it to look like a Tom Thumb thing, kind of like a children's movie, only weirdly perverted, like Otto Preminger, like Cecil B. DeMille. They always had cranes and riding boots and all those kind of cliched movie costumes.

CS: Preminger and DeMille are sort of the patron saints of this movie. Tell me about the other directors you evoke—all the tattoos worn by the cinema terrorists.

JW: I love the idea of people tattooing their favorite director on them. I have seen people that have tattooed my signature. I signed a girl once on her back and she had it tattooed—that gave me the idea.

Every director that the cult [in the film] loved is a director that was a huge influence on me. I think they were all directors that were very much public figures, known for being real auteurs, strong directors. All of them have changed the cinema, probably in a way the Moral Majority doesn't like, also.

CS: Let's just go briefly down the list.

JW: Well, Cecil B. DeMille did it first—director as star. Certainly Otto Preminger, who was known for being mean to his stars, and that's why I used him as Cecil's idol, really. Andy Warhol, of course, who had the brilliant idea of putting drugs and gay people together in a movie, which was really radical and really smart, and making a movie with his own group of movie stars. Fassbinder, who still may be my favorite director; it seemed like when he died, he took the whole New German Cinema with him.

Kenneth Anger was one of the first people to ever use pop music ironically, and everyone copied him, including me. David Lynch, of course; David Lynch was my sponsor to get me into the Academy. Spike Lee—I love how white people get so mad every time. And I like all his movies. Sam Fuller—oh my god, "The Naked Kiss" has the best credit sequence of my entire life! Hershel Gordon Lewis, the king of gore, who is a friend of mine—without him you wouldn't have had the first 20 minutes of "Saving Private Ryan."

CS: There's a real spirit of revolution in this movie, albeit a joking one.

JW: I had pages and pages of notes, taking every political slogan from every political group and rewriting them toward cinema. They were all taken from real radical expressions, but redone toward cinema fanatics. And these were the movements that I identified with when I was young. You never really get over the first radical things of your youth.

But I didn't want to make a movie about that; I think it would be impossible. I haven't seen the Abbie Hoffman movie ("Steal This Movie"), but you've got to reinvent that for kids in some way so that they can get into it. Which is what I tried to do with this movie. Never try to be nostalgic. One person's nostalgia is usually a younger person's boredom.

Article from NY CitySearch:  http://newyork.citysearch.com/feature/24921/

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