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"We're having a dinner for John Waters' Pecker," the voice said matter-of-factly before pausing and then bursting forth with a shriek of laughter. "No, no, no, we're having a Pecker party." Another shriek. "Just come ... Oh, what the hell."
It gets that way when people try to talk about Pecker, maverick Waters' latest satire about his beloved Baltimore. Waters, the natty man with the pencil-thin moustache, the broadest sense of humour and the obsessions with female serial killers and the Manson clan, is the filmmaker who has given us such cult classics as Pink Flamingos, Female Trouble and Hairspray.
Pecker is his 13th feature film. "The title to me is a word that I thought I could get away with," Waters muses in a Toronto interview, "because it really isn't obscene.
"No child angrily carved 'pecker' into his school desk. No man ever said: 'Suck my pecker!' Women like the word because it basically makes fun. It's a baby word, a thing a mother says to a son: 'Stop playing with your pecker.' It's a funny word."
It's a funny movie. Waters has turned his satirical eye to photography and definitions of what art is, what purpose it serves and how it is popularized for profit. In the movie, Edward Furlong plays a naive young Baltimore shutterbug nicknamed Pecker. His casual shots of family and friends suddenly are given 'art' status by a Manhattan gallery maven played by Lili Taylor. The movie lampoons Pecker's rise and fall from fame.
"I actually only criticize and make fun of things that I really like," writer-director Waters says. He likes both Baltimore and New York and makes fun of how they interact on a sociological level, at least in a trendy art world sense. "I couldn't stand to be in either one or the other all the time."
Pecker is a heightened reality, of course. "Everything is exaggerated, certainly," Waters continues. "People get more joy out of things in my movies than they do out of real life."
At 52, Waters uses words such as joy with more abandon than he once did. He says he now makes movies to invent the places he would like to visit, "and the people I want to meet. So how can I be angry? It's not a bad life."
He once was angry. "Pink Flamingos was made about left-wing terrorism," he says. "People think it's all these other things and it was really tear gas and going to riots, all that Yippie stuff. That was what the big influence was for Pink Flamingos, although it might be hard to see today."
Waters films his obsessions, even if they are filtered through absurdism. Serial Mom -- he once said he only accidentally made "a family film," grew out of his obession with crime. He says he feels healthier for it.
"Because if I had never ever been able to make these movies, God knows where I would be. Just think if I had committed every crime that is in all 13 of my movies?"
People would be making movies about him, I suggest. "And I wouldn't be having a fun life ... Although, I could do all right in jail. At least the phone doesn't ring. You can always get a date. They show movies. I could think of worse things."
Pure John Waters, the man whose Pecker inspired a party.