Director John Waters recalls career of bad taste

BERLIN, Feb 13 (Reuters) Director John Waters, self-confessed king of all things tasteless and tacky, celebrates a life spent shocking audiences and mocking the movie world in a film version of his stand-up act.

In ''This Filthy World'', Waters delivers a rapid-fire monologue about life in film, from his first home-made picture ''Hag in a Black Leather Jacket'', reportedly costing 30 dollars, to international fame for cross-dressing classic ''Hairspray''.

The ''Pope of Trash'' was in Berlin this week to present the film, and the laughter and applause at a packed screening late yesterday showed his cult following spreads well beyond the shores of his native America.

The moustachioed 60-year-old ruminates on everything from shop-lifting as a boy to battles with movie censors, and from how to make voting more attractive to young people to what is wrong with capital punishment.

''I am against it (capital punishment) for the reason that I'm afraid I'll get it,'' he quipped. ''We all have bad nights.'' He also had advice to gay people trying too hard to act as they feel they ought to.

''You don't have to like Liza Minnelli,'' Waters told a live audience at a US college where ''This Filthy World'' was shot over two nights. ''And S&M does look stupid on the beach.'' When he was younger, Waters said he used to tour courtrooms across the United States to get ideas for his films, and he and other members of the public would boast to each other about which famous cases they had watched.

One woman topped them all, however, when she told him: ''I was at Nuremberg'', referring to the trial of leading German Nazis after World War Two.

The arch-provocateur also recalls his long collaboration with Divine, the obese, cross-dressing star of many of his movies including ''Pink Flamingos'', which includes the infamous scene where his character eats dog faeces.

''I'm not a sadist, it was only one take,'' joked the director.

Another of their collaborations was ''Polyester'', where audiences were given scratch-n-sniff cards so they could smell what they saw on film.

Asked if his movies had become tame over time, and whether he would return to the more cutting edge pictures of the past, Waters told the audience after the film was shown: ''I never want to go backwards and do something I did before.

If I wanted to do what I did at the very beginning I wouldn't be here any more.'' He was also asked if wanted to make a spoof of a science fiction movie, one of the genres he had yet to tackle. ''That's the only genre I could never do,'' he said. ''I don't get it.'' And his next venture? A ''very weird'' children's movie for ''special children and their even more special parents.'' REUTERS DKA KP1733