I always wanted to sell out but no one would buy me. -- John Waters FilmFestivals.com caught up with Waters in London, where the "King of Filth" was in town to promote Cecil B. Demented

Cecil B Demented is a film about filmmaking…

Yeah, it's a film about terrorism, about politics - a satirical comedy, a political comedy.

Are you getting people saying you are trying to appease that - the whole post modern Scream crowd?

No, most people see it as it's supposed to be, a comedy about how what you have to do to have an edge. Hollywood thinks it has edge, do I have to set myself on fire, trash a fancy hotel room and kill two people, would that make you prove I have edge still? To me that's kind of a joke, but that's sort of a spin on it too.

They say write what you know, I knew 60's terrorism really well and radical terrorism and cults - I still know a lot about that - I read all about them - I have a giant library on them and I know the movie-business and I put them together. And think how exciting it would be, if movie going was that political. It started with Film Direct and in Film Direct they had a joke as an article saying that readers should attack the offices of Premiere Magazine, only some did and their lawyers, like flipped up and had to put a retraction in. I love that idea of Screen on the Green forming a pact and just started whacking the multiplexes - if you had wars here - if people lost their lives through their taste in film. If reviewers attacked other reviewers. If there was complete war because of movie-taste. I felt that could be funny.

Some critics are bound to say that you are Cecil

I am and I'm not - I didn't have cinema in my family. My father lent me the money to make Mondo Trasho and I paid him back. He lent me the money to make Multiple Maniacs, I paid him back and then he lent me the money to make Pink Flamingos and then I started to pay him back and then he said you're set up in business, don't pay me back and don't ask again. I had very loving parents, even though every one of the movies I made were completely against everything that they believed in, and no one said they were good for ten years. Cecil B Demented's parents do not give him any money, they force him to work in a movie-theatre, which would drive anybody crazy. Then even after his big moment when he's known all over the country - it's his Oscar, when he's going to kill himself at a drive-in movie, as he gets the last shot for his movie, they humiliate him by standing out in front of the press and the national guard, and say whatever made you think you could direct? So that's very different.

I'm like him because I was demented enough not to realise that when we were young. Like asking Divine to eat dog shit, I asked Mink Stole to set her hair on fire and she said yes, so that's why I put that in this movie. But that's because we were on marijuana and he's not on marijuana, but we were! (laughter) In a matter of fact he doesn't take drugs. He encourages drugs in his leading man because all cult leaders don't allow humour and they encourage drug use so that they are more controllable. If I controlled my actors it was so that hopefully they'd still get money from movies and I think it was a little more communistic - semi-fascist at the time. Even though Mink Stole saw the movie and said to me - that is you, she was angry that I'd put the hair burning thing in there but I'm glad she said no. You could be disfigured, I could be put in prison! I meant it as a tribute to youthful lunacy but its just as much about Jim Jones and Manson and the Meinhopf gang, there are cults everywhere and they'll continue to be everywhere and I tried to make a comedy about a cult.