Gregg Araki on I Want Your Sex: “The despair of the bad makes the euphoria of the good even more intense”

Gregg Araki acutely captured the 90s alternative zeitgeist with his ‘Teen Apocalypse Trilogy’ (Totally F***ed Up, The Doom Generation, Nowhere), a trio of pop-punk arthouse hangout movies that established him as a leading beacon of the New Queer Cinema movement. In the 2000s, he attracted mainstream attention with PTSD sci-fi Mysterious Skin (2004) and stoner comedy Smiley Face (2007). Driven by vibes and powered by tastemaking shoegaze soundtracks, Araki’s films are defined by their characters’ liberated sexual adventuring, queer yearning and pervasive, apocalyptic ennui.

After a decade-long detour into television, Araki returns to the big screen with I Want Your Sex, a spunky screwball comedy about a sub-dom S&M arrangement between puppy-eyed intern Elliot (Cooper Hoffman) and his free-spirited artist boss Erika Tracy (Olivia Wilde). The film is as endearingly off-piste as audiences have come to expect from Araki, but its duologues, co-written with Vogue sex columnist Karley Sciortino, are pointed in their challenge to Gen-Z’s repressed attitudes to intimacy. “Erika’s reaction is my reaction: Why is your generation not having sex?,” says Araki. “It’s a sex-positive love letter about that generational divide and the circumstances that Gen-Z are facing in terms of how they grew up.”

Core to the film’s thesis is that getting hurt is intrinsic and important to our personal and interpersonal growth. “It’s something that you work through – all these years of boyfriends, girlfriends, falling in love, breaking up, getting cheated on,” says Araki. “And a lot of it’s not fun – a lot is devastating and heartbreaking – but the despair of the bad makes the euphoria of the good even more intense. I think those highs and lows are so important in life. If you don’t experience them, what are you doing?”

I Want Your Sex began as a spec script by Sciortino. “A version was almost made in 2015,” Araki explains. “It would have been a female intern and a male boss – and it fell apart, like movies do.” The pitch didn’t sit so well in the post-MeToo landscape.

“I’m glad, because I think the sexual politics of the movie as it is now are much more interesting,” he says. “Erika was not in the original script.”

As a sex-positive figure in the film’s art world, Wilde’s Erika is a mouthpiece for Araki past and present. “I don’t want to say she’s a stand-in for me, but a lot of the things she says are things I have said,” says Araki. “When Elliot’s watching her interview, what she says about sex and art are quotations from my past interviews. I very much relate to that character.” Cooper Hoffman’s Elliot is equally Gregg Araki. “I patterned him after myself when I was his age,” says the filmmaker. “I was a young artsy kid, and I wanted to do something; be creative somehow. It’s that level of uncertainty and confusion. I was just coming out, and I didn’t know who I was sexually. In a way, the film is kind of younger me versus older me – a collision between the two.”

The pair’s collision is playful – a romantic comedy where one half of the equation disavows romantic attachment. Erika is objectively abusive in her pursuit of pleasure, but the film – elevated by Wilde, who plays the character as quietly fractured – humanises her, rather than condemning. It’s a soft film about hard people. “She’s fascinating to me,” reflects Araki. “I always thought of her as Robert Mapplethorpe meets Madonna – a super charismatic, larger-than-life ‘sex superhero’. Her behaviour is questionable at best, and terrible at worst, but she has a human side as well.”

In keeping with the majority of Araki’s work, the film culminates in an apocalypse of sorts – though whether you view it that way likely depends on your own attachment. “It’s such a big theme with me, but I feel like this film is more hopeful,” says Araki. “The world is literally like the apocalypse right now, so I didn’t want to put that out there. That’s why the scale of it is more about human moments with these characters. I mean, Elliot feels like it’s the end of the world when he’s hurt by Erika, but it’s more his own personal kind of apocalypse. The ending would definitely be the end of the world for Erika.”

Araki completed restoration work on the culmination of his apocalypse trilogy, Nowhere (1997), right before production on I Want Your Sex began. “The film took a turn towards pop, fantasy fun as a result of that,” says Araki. “It came out in setting it in a more heightened, stylised world.” It’s fascinating how moments from earlier films are revisited in I Want Your Sex. A striking late image echoes the glowing white corridor from Kaboom, Araki’s 2010 inaugural Queer Palm recipient and the first in a chain of works that update Nowhere.

“When we were doing the Kaboom press tour, Thomas Dekker said it was my greatest hits album – because it has Mysterious Skin moments with the aliens; it has the colours, and the young people, and the free-floating sexuality. It’s a return to a lot of my themes,” explains Araki. “But Nowhere at the time was a culmination of a lot of thematic preoccupations and motifs. Its structure was so free floating, and it became a vessel for a lot of very pure artistic tendencies.” 

“I love all my movies, they’re my children. I’ve never made a movie that’s like, oh, I don’t talk about that movie. There are people who like some of my movies and don’t like others. Roger Ebert hated The Doom Generation [1995] so much – he literally put it in a book as one of the worst movies of all time. When he reviewed Mysterious Skin, he’s like, this movie’s amazing, but he wrote about it in a way that was like I’d never made another movie. People love Mysterious Skin, and that’s so fantastic, because I love that movie too. But certain movies of mine are so much my personality. Nowhere is pure me.”

I Want Your Sex is in cinemas from 28 August.