E-Mail This Article to a Friend Naked lunch (continued)

Q: Is it like furries?

A: No. I think it’s supposed to be a kind of butchness. I wouldn’t say "butch" is the first word that comes to mind with many of the bears I’ve met. But the look is, in a way. Like in Baltimore — straight, middle-aged men look like bears. They dress like them, but they’re not them.

Have you seen American Grizzly [magazine]? It’s shocking. Johnny [Knoxville] so wanted to be in it. They wouldn’t let him. Johnny wanted to do the cover and they wouldn’t. They said, "We wouldn’t sell any magazines, our audience isn’t interested in celebrities."

So you had never heard of bears?

Q: No, never. I’d never heard of upperdeckers [defecating in the tank of a toilet], either.

A: That is a weird one. I don’t know where I heard that.

Q: Nothing against it, but it just doesn’t ...

A: But it’s a good thing to tell your fans to do. It’s a good terrorist act for someone who tries to stop your movie, or something, you know ...

Q: Are there some practices you wouldn’t use?

A: I didn’t put things in that were mean to women. I didn’t put in any S&M things, fisting, stuff that’s not funny. I just picked ones that I could make a character do that would be funny and that would be not really showing real sex because I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to make it removed from that. So even though it’s a movie totally about sex, there is no real sex. And molysmophilia. The dirt fetish. It’s perfect. I mean, if you’re in love with dirt, how can you ever be disappointed? There’s always more dirt. How can you ever have a bad date? We did a whole entire glossary — it was like 20 pages — where we described what everything, every slang term, meant.

A: Do you have that available to the public?

Q: Well, I could show it to you, but it gives away all the jokes. You know what I mean? There’s one scene where we say four things and we don’t say what they are because they’re so rude, but I’m going to tell you what they are in the DVD bonus features. That is: blossoms, plate job, tromboning — no, I think they say what that is. There’s one other one, but I forget what it is. In the last scene, they don’t even say what it is, they just keep saying, "Done it, no, did that."

Q: What are they?

A: I’m not going to tell you ... blossoms is the worst. See if you can find it. There are Web sites where people trade pictures of their blossoms. And you want to pray you never come across one.

Q: So blossoming is where you draw the line.

A: Well, what’s drawing the line? I guess drawing the line is something I wouldn’t repeat, and I do feel that it is my duty to bring it to the public’s attention. But in my real life, I mean, there’s plenty of things in this movie I haven’t done. And no one’s ever had the missionary position, ever, in my films. Well, Kathleen Turner and Sam Waterston, but their [characters’] little children are outside, in horror, hearing it.

Q: So that final frontier is the missionary position?

A: No, but to me, it’s something I try to avoid. I also didn’t put things in that I already used in other films. I didn’t put water sports in. What makes me laugh about the whole thing is that there’re so many practical matters that come in when you’re into these things that make it so silly.

Q: It’s true, it seems like so much ...

A: Work.

Q: You’ve said it’s better to invent a new sex act than to make a movie.

A: It is. Well, I invented one, but I don’t know that it really works. I invented a fictitious one. The funniest thing I ever read, that sort of led to all this, was by Walter Matthau’s wife — and I’ve said this before, even in other movies. She wrote a book called Among the Porcupines. She has in the book where she was young and gave a blowjob and she thought she invented it because she had never heard of it. I love the idea that, for a day, she thought she invented the blowjob.

Now, one thing I didn’t know that I found on the Internet was the astral orgasm. You know, the out-of-body experience, when you have such good sex that it goes beyond, into like some psychic thing. Astral orgasm is something I’m looking forward to.

Q: Maybe even the Catholic Church would approve of it.

A: Have you read their review of the movie? They didn’t like it. But you know, it doesn’t matter anymore. They don’t call it "condemned" anymore, like in the old days of the Legion of Decency, so what fun is it, being rated morally offensive? Although, it’s still wrong, because I don’t think it is sacrilegious. I think it’s like, God gave you sex, and sex can be so good, then why shouldn’t miracles happen from it? I don’t think that’s sacrilegious.

I had to go to Catholic Sunday school, and that’s where I was taught by the same nuns that were in The Magdalene Sisters. They were really terrible. They were obsessed. All they did was read to us that you’d go to hell if you saw movies on the condemned list. So that is where I got my best education. I made this movie because of that. I made a condemned movie. So it inspired me. I used to get the copy and look at the condemned list. I can remember Baby Doll was one of my favorites.