With “I Want Your Sex,” Gregg Araki mounts a long-awaited return to filmmaking in the same surreal, provocative key that long ago cemented his status as a true icon of queer independent cinema.
At the center of his latest is a volatile BDSM relationship that develops between contemporary artist Erika Tracy (Olivia Wilde) and her studio assistant Elliott (Cooper Hoffman), one charged by their obviously exploitative power imbalance and complicated additionally by their failure to communicate across generational lines. Araki’s playfully anarchic comedy—in US theaters starting this week, via Magnolia Pictures—has been broadly described as a “dominatrix drama.” But in typical Araki fashion, it fluctuates boldly between tones and sensibilities, splashily subverting its own premise with elements of art-world satire, film-noir pastiche, and hyper-pop surrealism.
Like Araki’s seminal “Teen Apocalypse” trilogy—“Totally F***ed Up,” “The Doom Generation,” and “Nowhere,” three caustic time capsules of Gen X youth in revolt—and his other best-known work, all considered part of the New Queer Cinema movement of the 1990s—his latest film is exuberantly stylized and at times jarringly provocative. It’s also, as Araki recently discussed in an interview with RogerEbert.com, something of a “love letter” to its target audience, departing from the nihilistically violent endings of his earlier films to suggest something hopeful—if also impish and ironic—about the perpetual plight of sexually confused twentysomethings.
Ahead of the US theatrical release of “I Want Your Sex,” Araki sat down to discuss Wilde’s movie-star mystique, the intersection of artifice and intimacy in his filmmaking, and the fire of sexual desire he prays is still burning inside Gen-Z audiences.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
“I Want Your Sex” is your first theatrically released feature in 12 years, since “White Bird in a Blizzard,” but you’d encountered Karley Sciortino’s original script even earlier than that previous project. How did the character of Erika Tracy emerge over that time, and what changed when Olivia Wilde entered the picture?
It’s been a long journey. I first read Karley’s original spec script in 2012 or 2013; that’s how I first met her. Erika Tracy was not in that script; it was a female intern and a male boss. Erika did not really appear until there was a version of the movie I was trying to make around 2015; it fell apart, as various other movies happened. In 2017, around #MeToo, I remember thinking, “I really don’t want to see a woman get dragged around by the hair, even in a consensual relationship.” I don’t want to kink-shame anybody, but it was just not an image I was comfortable with.
I got the idea to flip-flop the sexual roles and make it a male sub and a female dom, which was so much more interesting, and that gave rise to the Erika Tracy character. I thought of Erika as being a cross between Robert Mapplethorpe and Madonna: this larger-than-life, provocative, polarizing, and charismatic figure—like a movie star—of the art world. That character would so easily draw in Cooper’s character; he obviously wouldn’t be able to resist her. She was, to me, almost a sex superhero; it actually describes her in the script as that.
We had been trying to make the movie, and it had been a long, long journey. Olivia wasn’t even on my radar, but my manager slipped the script to her agent without telling me; then she was like, “Oh, Olivia Wilde read this script and wants to meet.” I was like, “Olivia Wilde? That’s a fucking cool idea.” I’ve been a fan of hers forever, since she was on “The O.C.”
A bisexual icon from the start, on that series.
From the start! Olivia’s totally like a ’40s movie star; she has that presence, those cheekbones. It’s everything about her; she feels like Greta Garbo or Ingrid Bergman. She’s an old-time movie star, and I feel like Hollywood didn’t really know what to do with her. She would just be the wife or the girlfriend or the hot mistress. I think that’s why she read the script and was like, “Oh, this part’s so juicy! It’s so fun! It’s such a cool character to play. It’s not just the hot girlfriend I always am.”
Olivia was so cool and fearless. I told her, in that very first meeting, “Whoever does this part, they have to not give a fuck about what people are gonna think, what they’re gonna say. She told me that she was down, that this was what she wanted to do, and so we met up. 48 hours later, the movie was financed, so it came together very quickly from there. We got Cooper involved because he had such great chemistry with Olivia.
From the start, out of the gate, she knew exactly what she wanted Erika Tracy to be; another aspect of casting Olivia is that she’s that type of actor that can pull off anything: any hair, makeup, costume. And that’s what I wanted her to be like. The different eras of Madonna, all those different kinds of personas and images she’s embodying—Madonna’s coffee table book, Sex—was all a big part of the character.
“I Want Your Sex.” (Magnolia Pictures)You do cultivate this movie-star mystique, to a degree, with the Erika Tracy character, though elements of kink, BDSM, and queer sexuality all subvert it. The film, more broadly, is engaged with ideas of sex, beauty, and desire—as well as with elements of fantasy and role play that seem linked to its engagement with cinema, especially to opening with this film-noir frame reminiscent of “Sunset Boulevard.”
I think of the film as a funhouse, despite being about this dark obsession. I didn’t want to make a movie that was too dark, bleak, or pessimistic, given the hellscape of a world that we’re living in. Personally, as a moviegoer, I can’t watch films that are too dark or dystopian, because the world is so apocalyptic right now. I knew that I wanted it to be very pop and fun.
In all my movies, but this one in particular, there is definitely a reflection on film history. In the script development, the sense of “Sunset Boulevard” came through; the whole film-noir framework of the movie was, for me, very inspired by those ’80s Almodóvar movies “Law of Desire” and “Matador.” I started calling it “preposterous film noir,” with these very convoluted film-noir storylines that—like “The Maltese Falcon”—never really make sense.
The film-noir aspect of the movie comes from those stylized Almodóvar films that aren’t meant to be taken at face value, even though there’s also the interrogation room from “Se7en,” which feels like it’s in a totally different movie. The world of the film is such an entertaining amalgamation of all these things: film history, movies I’ve seen, popular culture.
It’s interesting you bring up Almodóvar because, across a lot of the films that you’ve made and across his films as well, there’s a unique relationship between artifice and authenticity, and with where intimacy and desire exist between those two polarities. In this film, the language of sex constantly sets up contrasts: intimate but not necessarily honest, performative but personal. Tell me about the atmosphere and the aesthetics of “I Want Your Sex,” how one starts to flesh out a world this stylized and expressive.
My movies tend to be “not real.” My movies tend to be heightened, accentuated, stylized. The colors, the compositions, the sets, as with Almodóvar movies, which also aren’t real, feel like you’re in a different world. As a filmmaker, that’s something I really appreciate—particularly “Law of Desire,” which is one of my favorite movies of all time. I first saw it in the late ’80s. I was just starting to make movies, and that was a big influence on me. The authenticity and intimacy of the sex scenes in that movie, and also “Matador,” were very inspiring to me.
That’s, I think, why sex and sexuality, and those intimate moments, have been so much a part of all my movies from the start. There is definitely contrast between these intimate, very real moments and a broader context of the universe around them, which is stylized, surreal, and “not real,” while the intimacy is real on a human level.
That’s a testament to the actors and their ability to sell what the movie is selling; they sell those moments. I never tell my actors, “This is really theatrical and stylized.” It’s like, “It’s real to them.” I remember, when Olivia and Cooper had their first chemistry read, that relationship’s real, and the conflict there is real. Going around them gives me the latitude to do whatever I want to do in terms of lighting, design, color, wardrobe—as long as that central, human part is authentically there.
Director Gregg Araki on the set of “I Want Your Sex.” (Magnolia Pictures)The film is very engaged with our contemporary moment, in how it senses isolation and loneliness in people’s relationships to sex, to performance; the way young generations are constantly mediating their interactions through social-media platforms, performing their identities in many senses. How did you determine the specific types of BDSM, the specific kind of role play, you wanted to include in this film?
Erika is very much a mouthpiece for me; a lot of the things she says in the movie about younger generations not having sex, about the fear of missing out on the formative sexual years of your life, are relevant to my ideas. My whole life—my career, my art, my personality, my character—is all formed through the sexual adventures I’ve had and sexual mistakes I’ve made at confusing times in my life. It all forged me as a person, and it’s been a very important part of my evolution. I definitely relate to Erika’s character in that way.
But what Cooper’s character brings up is that his generation is the first generation that, literally from the time they were babies, had a phone in their hand. They’ve been attached to technology for so long, and it’s the notion that everything—because of social media, because phones are literally a part of people now—is being surveilled. What if I had not been sneaking out to a gay bar when I was nineteen or twenty years old? That was a primal experience in my life. That was the step out of the door into the world that made me the person that I am. I had to do that on my own, and it was sex that drove me there. It was also this private, secret activity.
Would I have done it if there’d been cameras everywhere and everybody was being surveilled? Kids don’t hit on each other in bars or clubs anymore, because they don’t want to be humiliated because somebody’s videotaping them going up to the pretty girl, going, “Would you like to dance?” and she’s like, “Fuck you,” and then you end up on Instagram. It’s why kids don’t drink anymore. They don’t want to get too drunk at the party, throw up on someone’s shoes, get videotaped, and be humiliated.
That’s a new kind of fear around exploring sexuality, and it’s not completely unfounded.
It’s all about fear and anxiety, and it’s absolutely real. People need privacy. They need things that are not public; they shouldn’t be made public. We live in this odd time. I absolutely empathize with that feeling of what Cooper says in the movie: “We’re afraid of making a mistake.” And what Erika tells him is that being young is making mistakes. Being young is fucking up. Being young is doing the wrong thing and learning from it. How else are you going to learn about life? And that’s definitely a paradox.
I don’t want to preach at or lecture anybody, to tell people what to do. I just want to open a conversation for people to talk about this; I want you to go out with your friends to the bar after the movie and just discuss, pick a side, and argue for it or against it.
As you mentioned, Erika is seen quoting sentiments you’ve expressed in interviews, but Elliott is another type of director surrogate for you; Cooper Hoffman had his ear pierced, and he has tattoos on his hands as you do…
That’s very intentional. Erika is very much not based on me. I don’t fuck my interns. I don’t do the stuff that she does. But a lot of her care, her passion, and her feelings about sex and sexuality come from me; literally, that interview on the laptop when Cooper’s character sees her for the first time, that’s Olivia quoting an interview I’d done. Those are literally things I’ve said. I definitely relate to her.
But, at the same time, I relate to him, in the sense that he to me is what I was like when I was twenty-two years old: “I want to be an artist. I don’t know what I’m going to do. I don’t know what my life will be.” Cooper pierced his ear for the movie because I have my ear pierced; then we put tattoos on him, like my tattoos. I did very much base his character, and where he’s at in life as a fledgling artist, on what I was like when I was his age. It’s young me fucking older me.
To take that even further, every character in “I Want Your Sex” refracts a certain version of you, expresses a specific sexual attitude, or in some other way is reminiscent of your past work. So many different past collaborators of yours pop up in small moments—from “Nowhere,” from “Kaboom”—that further heighten this performative art-world setting. In bringing that all together, what conversations did you end up having with yourself about your body of work and its relationship to sexuality, to intimacy, to performance?
It’s definitely true. It’s been true of all my movies. It’s like, with “Doom Generation,” people are always like, “Oh, are you the Jimmy character?” People always think I’m the Jimmy character, because he’s part Asian. I’m always like, “I’m actually all the characters. And, actually, for “The Doom Generation,” I relate more to the Amy Blue character than the other characters, because that’s how I was in the mid-’90s: very snarky, very sarcastic, very fuck-you.”
Definitely, in this movie too, there are parts of me in everything. When the Mason Gooding character is saying, “I’m just fucking gay; I’m not pansexual or whatever,” that literally is something I’ve said before, about myself. When he’s like, “Oh, have you ever sucked a dick? Well, if you haven’t, then you’re straight, so knock it off,” his character is very much me in that moment.
“I Want Your Sex.” (Magnolia Pictures)But there’s a wide array in everybody, in terms of the spectrum of sexuality in the movie. There’s Erika, who’s slept with men and women; she’s very sex-positive, performative, Madonna-esque, and very larger-than-life. She’s, in the truest sense of the term, a sex symbol. There’s Elliott, who’s young, exploring, trying to figure it out. There’s Apple, [played by Chase Sui Wonders,] who’s like—God only fucking knows. She’s just repressed and hasn’t figured out who she is yet. Hopefully she’s going to get there. I hope she is going to have a happy ending or happily ever after. There’s Charli [XCX,], whose character is very uptight, very not into sex at all, but maybe she really is into it—just not with the Cooper character. There are all kinds of colors along the spectrum there. There is definitely a lot going on in the film; it’s like “Nowhere,” in that way, in terms of its range of queer and straight relationships.
And they’re all ricocheting off one another, these embodied facets of you, in this colorful, pop-art space.
I really wanted to do something that was pop, fun, and innocent, as an antidote to the hellish times that we’re living in. It’s a world where kind of anything’s possible, and there are dark moments, but it’s not going to be deadly. I’ve certainly made darker movies in the past, like “The Doom Generation,” which ends on a very dark note. “Mysterious Skin” has a lot of darkness in it. With this movie, I really want people to have a good time. I want them to be provoked. I want them to be challenged. And there’s so much to talk about, I think.
In working with production designers, art directors, costume designers, set decorators, makeup artists, hair stylists, and so on to create the heightened reality of “I Want Your Sex,” tell me about working with limited resources—both in terms of budget and timing, given how quickly the production came together once Olivia was attached—while aiming so high visually.
I have been doing this for 35 years, so I’m very experienced, but the work I have done in television was intense. When we made Now Apocalypse, we shot ten episodes; I directed all ten, and we shot them in 40 days. We were shooting an episode every four days. I am very fast and very resourceful as a director. I had this movie in my head.
I knew what Erika’s office was going to be, and I had that in my head, this black box. The crazy thing about Erika’s office is that we were inside of it for eleven pages. It was a crazy amount of time to spend in this office, so it could not be a boring office. It had to have such life, and so I’d come up with this idea of a video painting behind her desk. I worked with Angelique Clark, an amazing production designer; we’d never worked together before, and she was so nervous about the level of ambition we were talking about, based on the schedule and the budget that we had. But she was so creative and really pulled a rabbit out of a hat to make this stuff happen.
She did a fantastic job, trying to create all of this. She’s the one who came up with that incredible orifice in Cooper’s bedroom, this hole in the wall that looks almost like a vagina; it does not make sense, in terms of what it is and how this kid could afford to live in an apartment that has this feature, but she saw a picture of it and brought it to me. She really got what we were trying to do. I want Charli’s bedroom to be monochromatic, with paint on the wall the same color as the sheets, and so she understood that. We were in this stylized world, and she brought so much to that vision.
In terms of actualizing it with Ari Phillips and Monica Chamberlain, the costume designers: Ari was Olivia’s idea, because they had worked together on “Don’t Worry, Darling.” I told Olivia, “Ari Phillips is never going to do this movie. She’s an Oscar-nominated costume designer. She is used to big-budget productions; she doesn’t do indie movies.” But she’d done “Hedwig and the Angry Inch,” so I said, “Let’s see.” Ari loved the script, she loved Olivia, and so she agreed.
“I Want Your Sex.” (Magnolia Pictures)My favorite Ari story is that there’s that piece that Mason wears at the art show; it’s a one-piece mesh—it’s not mesh, it’s plastic, but you can see his body through it. I was at a fashion show, and I sent a picture of it to Ari, and I asked if we could find something like that for Mason. And Ari just responded, “Oh, that’s Christian Siriano. He’s a friend of mine.” And literally two days later, it was in the office, fresh off the runway. That’s how Ari is; she’s amazing. We got so fortunate with this movie in terms of all the right people at the right time.
“I Want Your Sex” features discussions of pornography, of contemporary art, of BDSM dynamics—but, at one point, the character of Yvette (Roxane Mesquida) comes into play as this European acquaintance of Erika’s, who draws a distinction between sex as performance and real eroticism. Where do you see eroticism existing in culture today and, if we’re proposing that Gen Z is struggling with sex and desire, where are they with eroticism?
I love the Yvette character—who was written for Roxane Mesquida, who’s been with me in “Now Apocalypse” and “Kaboom”—and her French outlook on eroticism. We live in such a crazy time right now. In the movie I’m working on right now, I invoke the Charles Dickens quote—“It was the best of times; it was the worst of times”—because there’s so much that’s terrible. The way social media is depleting everyone; you’re constantly being surveilled by the police; there’s this total lack of privacy. Nothing’s real anymore, nothing’s true anymore. It’s all breaking down. But, at the same time, there’s so much freedom and openness—at least for now, until the fascism really kicks in and the freedoms fall away, as they already have started to.
But eroticism… I do think, particularly for young people, there is a real sense of eroticism in pop culture. “Heated Rivalry” is such a phenomenon, which is fascinating to me. I love it, of course, but it’s so fascinating to me that it’s found mainstream success. As somebody who made “The Living End” in 1992, now wine moms in Santa Monica are obsessed with “Heated Rivalry.” The level of queer sex is essentially the same. It’s not porn, and it doesn’t cross that line into that kind of eroticism.
But I think porn, in a way, has been liberating, because of its accessibility. It is accessible to everybody—except children, of course. Children shouldn’t be watching porn—but if you were a closeted guy in like the ’40s or ’50s, what did you do for sex? What did you do for desire? Were you looking at Sears underwear ads? Now, every DL guy—and this is obviously true all over America—is watching gay porn; they have figured out this is what they want, and they’re on Grindr, trying to get it in real life. That’s so much bigger than it ever was. They’re not necessarily out. They’re not necessarily bi or pan; they’re still married with their kids and under homophobic laws, but there is a level of participation. They’re having gay sex. In this modern world, where everything is a free-for-all, there is still eroticism.
That’s true, too, for Gen Z. I do think of “I Want Your Sex” as a sex-positive love letter to Gen Z, saying, “Kids, I’m not going to tell you what to do, but think about this, discuss it, talk about it.” There is this level of access they have. Think about somebody like Lil Nas X; he’s a little bit of a tragic character, but his version of Black queer sexuality never would have happened in ’60s, ’70s, even ’80s culture. Prince in the ’80s, at the height of his androgyny, was not where Lil Nas is: so unapologetically queer and so out there with it. That’s a sign, for Gen Z in particular, that they have an awareness of it, which is so important, because that openness is critical for any progressive nature to move us forward.
It’s easier for us as older people to forget they live in a different world. I was talking to Cooper about this; for my generation, as a post-sexual-liberation generation, lust or sexual desire is the catalyst. It’s the trigger. It gets you out of the door. It gets you out of the house. It gets you on Grindr. It gets you wherever you’re going to seek out that contact, that encounter, whatever it is.
Does Gen Z not have as strong a sex drive? Do they lack that desire, which is how they can sit back and think dating’s too hard? I wonder if technology’s somehow dampened that. When we were growing up, sex was all you’d ever think about. As a teenager, as an adolescent, full of hormones, you’re just constantly going to the next party, going to the dance, going wherever you’re going, seeking contact with that desire, that crush, that person: “I’m so in love with that person.” I wonder if it’s internal, if the fire of desire is not burning as intensely for them. But let us hope that fire is still there.
“I Want Your Sex” is in theaters July 31, via Magnolia Pictures.
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