Q&A: John Waters on His Sense of Smell and Having a Sense of Humor

“I knew why those movies weren’t successful,” John Waters reflects on the Sixties cinema gimmick Smell-O-Vision, in which films were attempted to be enhanced by scents being piped into theaters. “It was because they had nice smells. I wanted bad ones.”

Screenings of his 1981 black comedy Polyester, starring Divine as a suburban mother besieged by bullshit, included scratch-and-sniff cards with plot-corresponding scents like airplane glue and farts. The Pope of Filth, best known for the films Serial Mom, Hairspray, and Pink Flamingos, returns to Austin’s Paramount Theatre Oct. 17 to screen Polyester and 2000’s Cecil B. Demented, which stars Melanie Griffith and features early screen appearances from Michael Shannon, Maggie Gyllenhaal, and Bastrop resident Adrian Grenier.

Waters will deliver an introduction to the latter film after doing live commentary on Polyester, which – of course – will include Odorama cards for attendees.

Austin Chronicle: Has scratch-and-sniff technology evolved or improved in the 44 years since Polyester came out? 

John Waters: It’s much harder now to make the scratch-and-sniff cards. It’s not as popular so there’s way less places you can have them printed and less smells you can choose from. When I first did it, there were libraries of smells. 

The first time I ever saw scratch-and-sniff was on the gas and electric bill. It said something like “If it smells like this, you have a gas leak.” There was also something that had “If it smells like this, your child is on marijuana.” When we made the cards, I thought we had to be kind of arty – I hadn’t made Hairspray yet, so it wasn’t safe to like me. We had to order like 100,000 smells from the 3M company, but I didn’t want to say we need 100,000 farts. We said “rotten egg.” We kind of disguised them. Then we mixed things, like I mixed fish and something else for dirty tennis shoes.

Austin Chronicle: Can you think of a particular smell that you have reverence for in your life?

John Waters: I don’t have a very strong sense of smell. I got the idea because I had a friend, a woman, and she was like Francine – always sniffing around like, “Ooh, what do I smell?” I thought, God, she had an overdeveloped nose.

My earliest memory of smell might be popcorn with butter, when my mom would make it. Or maybe vomit? I think as a child, the smells you remember are the ones you hate.

Austin Chronicle: When I watch Polyester, my heart breaks over and over for Francine Fishpaw and the tortuous existence of a suburban mother who is a punching bag for almost everyone in her orbit. What did she represent for you as a young writer?

John Waters: Well I grew up with Father Knows Best, so it was kind of my joke on that. It was also when Divine first got good reviews because it was the complete opposite of type. We thought up Divine as a person to scare hippies and this was very different: taking that image and doing it completely on the opposite end, playing a sad, alcoholic housewife. 

The other influence was Douglas Sirk. When his films came out they were dismissively called “women’s pictures.” Later, [Rainer Werner] Fassbinder praised Sirk so much that he was thought of as an auteur and his reputation was completely reinvented.

Austin Chronicle: Do you think about how your own reputation is reinterpreted by different generations? 

John Waters: Well now I’m so respectable I could puke. It’s odd to me that Pink Flamingos has been played unedited on Turner Classics. How could that possibly be? It got named to the National Film Registry as a great American movie and what was the scene – the singing asshole? – that made them think, “This is the movie that should be in the Library of Congress”? 

One of the main people responsible for that was Carla [Hayden], who was head of the Library of Congress and she’s also from Baltimore. She got fired by Trump. Her crime was wanting people to read. They don’t want you to read.

Austin Chronicle: They want to keep us ignorant.

John Waters: That’s how I got kind of infected by all my heroes: from reading books. When I was in Catholic high school, they’d let me read so I’d shut up, but I’d be reading the Marquis de Sade and Jean Genet and they didn’t know who that was. They thought, “Isn’t it nice that he’s reading?” when I was totally corrupting myself with great books. 

Austin Chronicle: All the hysteria in Polyester – religious, teenage, marital – it feels like a portrait of society at that time. Do you look back at life then and think, “Oh, things used to be so simple”?

John Waters: I never say things are simple. Things are never simple, but today, for the first time in my life, I’m a radical in the middle. I don’t like either extreme, but now it’s switched and the Republicans are woke and they have trigger words. You know why I hate both extremes? Neither of them have a sense of humor about themselves. 

Austin Chronicle: When you made Polyester, what was your confidence as an artist like?

John Waters: I was confident because I always thought the movies would do well – and Polyester was a hit. I think my confidence was always that I never questioned whether I could get these movies made. How did I get them made? I raised part of the money to make that movie. I found a distributor that backed it. I was raised to believe that I could do what I wanted, even when my parents hated what I wanted to do.

Austin Chronicle: Why are you presenting Polyester and Cecil B. Demented together? 

John Waters: I don’t know, they just picked them. I like Cecil B. Demented – it’s one of my favorites of the later movies I made and it didn’t do that well when it went out. So I like to do the ones people maybe haven’t seen. 

Austin Chronicle: It had mixed reviews…

John Waters: They all had negative or mixed reviews. Hairspray got mostly all good reviews, but that was the only time that’s ever happened.  

Austin Chronicle: So was Cecil B. Demented initially underappreciated?

John Waters: Yes. I understand that it was a weird movie, but all my movies were. I think today, it probably plays better because everyone can understand a comic movie about film terrorism. 

Austin Chronicle: I find it to be rewatchable because of all the delightful details and lines.

John Waters: My favorite line in it is a throwaway line that one of the film terrorists says to Melanie Griffith: “We’re beyond the critic’s reach now.” It’s such a ludicrous thing to think when you’re making a terroristic movie with a kidnapped star. 

Austin Chronicle: Was the tight knit bond of the guerrilla filmmakers inspired by your own experiences collaborating on films?

John Waters: Of course it was, but I wasn’t like Cecil because I had a sense of humor about myself. Yes, it very much came from growing up making underground movies and getting arrested while we were making them and never doing what we were told. We didn’t know anything about getting permits. All that guerrilla filmmaking stuff, we did, though I always had a plan, which Cecil would be against.

Austin Chronicle: Who was the inspiration for his character?

John Waters: Otto Preminger! That’s what his tattoo is. Wouldn’t it be easier if everyone had a tattoo of the name of their favorite director? It would make dating so easy! I would get Joseph Losey – no one else would have that.

Austin Chronicle: Do you have any favorite Austin memories?

John Waters: Yes. The first time I ever came to Austin, the Texas Chain Saw Massacre movie had come out recently. I met Tobe Hooper. I got drunk with him, we went around everywhere, and he gave me a skull from the set that I still have on my desk. It’s still the best horror movie ever made.

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