Q&A with John Waters.

“We ain’t got no budget,” goes a line in the tongue-in-cheek hip-hop theme song to Waters’s freewheeling attack on the Hollywood star system. Stephen Dorff and Melanie Griffith star as, respectively, the leader of a guerrilla band of horny misfit filmmakers (the Sprocket Holes), and the A-list Hollywood star they kidnap and coerce, Patty Hearst–style, into a string of terrorist activities. (Hearst, in fact, had a cameo in the film, her fourth for Waters.) With its awards-show abduction scene, its passages of movie-theater mayhem, and its bloody penultimate sequence—a shootout on the set of a Forrest Gump sequel—Cecil B. Demented is Waters’s most extreme and sustained attempt to bite the hand that once fed him.

Photos courtesy of Arctic Prod/Ice Cap Prod/Canal + / The Kobal Collection / Genser, Abbot