“Someone told me the other day that they saw The Odyssey and the I Want Your Sex trailer was playing before it. I’m just like, What? Oh my God,” says Gregg Araki of his first feature film in 12 years. He’s an avatar for queer, small-budget cinema of the ’90s and aughts with his films Mysterious Skin, The Doom Generation, and Nowhere. He’s much more accustomed to having cult followings than to being lumped in with a billion-dollar movie. Gregg Araki is not the next Christopher Nolan, nor does he want to be, but he is finally getting his due.
It’s the day before the New York premiere of I Want Your Sex at Metrograph on the Lower East Side, and he’s just arrived from Los Angeles, where he lives, and is at the Nine Orchard hotel, eating a fruit plate and wearing an old Joy Division shirt. He looks so good for a 66-year-old—full head of dark hair, toned, almost no wrinkles—that he could pass for one of the waifish, cool-kid leads of his movies. “It’s probably my most pop, my most fun movie,” he says of the film, which was shot in just 17 days and debuted last week. It represents the biggest release of his career. “I really wanted to put something into the world that was sex-positive,” he says of the movie.
It’s an LA-set broad comedy starring Olivia Wilde as Erika, an art star whose work explores sex, and Cooper Hoffman as Elliot, a 20-something studio assistant who becomes her subordinate in every sense of the word. Chase Sui Wonders, Mason Gooding, Johnny Knoxville, and Margaret Cho round out the cast, as does Charli xcx, who’s such a well-known Araki fan that when the director noticed that “the Brat graphic was inspired by [my film] Smiley Face, like it’s the same font,” he cast her to play Hoffman’s stressed-out med-student girlfriend in this project.
His films range from wacky apocalypse melodramas to stoner comedies, but they share an almost painterly visual design, bold costumes, and an embedded critique (and celebration) of sexual culture. The music is always pulled from what he’s listening to, often shoegaze bands of the ’90s. And then there’s his history of brilliant and unexpected casting, allowing young actors to prove their cool credibility, including Rose McGowan, Parker Posey, Shailene Woodley, Anna Faris, Adam Brody, John Krasinski, Heather Graham, Juno Temple, Denise Richards, Ryan Phillippe, Mena Suvari, and Guillermo Diaz. He cast a young Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Brady Corbet (then a teen actor, now the director of The Brutalist; Araki calls him “a prodigy”) in 2004’s Mysterious Skin, a highly acclaimed, very-difficult-to-watch film about sexual abuse. Its 4K restoration hits theaters on August 14. Up-and-coming actors are so eager to do a turn in an Araki movie that he takes a lot of general meetings, with recent ones including Heated Rivalry stars Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie. (Araki is a big fan of the series.)
“I was born at the exact right moment—[in] ’59—so I am actually like [a] borderline boomer or Gen X. I was 19, 20, 21 right when punk rock music, new-wave music, Talking Heads, X, that whole scene [came around],” Araki says. Perhaps his greatest strength as a filmmaker is his enduring ability to tap into youth, even when the age gap between himself and people in their 20s is now some four decades. It was this awareness of his Gen Z audience that made Araki increasingly think about the world’s changing sexual mores, so much so that he swapped the genders of the characters at the heart of his film—which began as a screenplay written by Araki and Karley Sciortino, a former Vogue sex columnist, that featured a female intern and a male boss. “A version of that was going to happen…and literally fell apart, like indie movies do,” he says of the film, which took about 10 years to make. “And then after MeToo, I was like, I kind of don’t want to have a male dragging a female around by the hair, even in a consensual situation.”
“He thought I wasn’t necessarily right for the part at first,” says Hoffman. “When my name came across his desk, he was like, The kid from Licorice Pizza?” Hoffman was no longer a teenager, but he was young. Araki, who never met Hoffman’s father, the late actor Philip Seymour Hoffman, saw himself in the young, artistic, wide-eyed role. “I kind of patterned Cooper’s character a little bit after myself as a young, confused person.” Hoffman got an ear piercing for the role, something Araki has, and printed-on hand tattoos, which Araki sports too. His spell out “Now here,” or, when his fists are put together, “Nowhere.” The director sees another part of himself in Wilde’s role. “Like Erika, my work is also rooted in sex and sexuality, not in a titillating or exploitative way.”
Before Hoffman taped his audition, he watched Mysterious Skin. “[He can] handle really kind of intense subjects with levity and empathy and truth,” he says of the filmmaker. “I immediately fell in love with his world and his characters and his style…. He’s someone who…likes to throw caution to the wind, to some degree, but all in favor of telling the most truthful story that he can tell…. Gregg’s not someone to do it any other way.”
I Want Your Sex matches Hoffman’s description, featuring a pegging scene and vaginal art, both played for laughs. The film highlights the generational viewpoints of Wilde’s 40-something artist and Hoffman’s 20-something assistant, as well as the tension between sexual voraciousness and innocence. “We have so much freedom with everything that’s going on in the world of the internet and online dating, and everything’s kind of at your fingertips,” Hoffman says. “And I think that feels scary for people of a different generation, and my generation is just trying to figure it out.”
In our contemporary era of talk about consent, power imbalances, and whether to have sex at all, Araki assures me that he’s not trying to shame young people who are trying to make their way in a rapidly changing and often scary world. “I don’t want to lecture anybody. I don’t want to tell anybody what to do,” he says. “[But] it’s like, what is wrong with you guys? Your generation is all about FOMO, but you don’t care about missing out on the sexual prime of your life. You’re gonna be 45, 50, and are you going to look back with regret?” He hopes the film starts a dialogue about how to get members of a timid generation out of their shell.
He describes himself as having been a young gay kid who was not sure of himself. “I hooked up with very, very few people, but those experiences literally formed me. If I hadn’t had those experiences, I wouldn’t be the person I am today. I certainly wouldn’t have made the films I’ve made. It’s literally those things that made me who I am in terms of trajectory in my life,” he says. “When you think about it, all of your hookups and your relationships and your bad relationships—the bad boyfriends, bad girlfriends, people cheating on you, your heart gets broken—a lot of that stuff is, at the time, not fun. It’s unpleasant. But with the wisdom of age, you look back on it…. I learned so much about myself. It became kind of the major theme of the movie: this whole notion of how important sex is in terms of life—and [what it means] if Gen Z is not participating.”
Still, even when looking back fondly on how his youth, and his enduring interest in that time period, shaped his work, Araki remembers bristling at being called a queer filmmaker. “I used to shy away from it a little bit in the sense that it felt kind of ghettoizing in a way. But in retrospect, with the wisdom of being old, I really appreciate being in the right place at the right time,” he says. He calls going to gay bars for the first time “the biggest seminal moment of my life.” Now he lives in Hollywood, in the same condo he bought in the ’90s, with his landscape designer boyfriend of 13 years, two rescue Chihuahuas, fish tanks, and a lot of plants. He jokes that his life is so low-profile that the couple’s big outings are to Trader Joe’s.
Araki is hoping to get another film made: “The pitch of it is like American Beauty meets Election.” He is enjoying having his films discovered and championed by a younger audience. “Every screening I go to, I always ask how many people are watching [the movie] for the first time. And it’s always like 60%, at least, who are brand new and they’re young,” he says. “I don’t know if it’s word of mouth, the internet, TikTok. A lot of times it’s like, ‘This is my girlfriend or boyfriend’s favorite movie, and they brought me.’”
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