A friend recently quipped that Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day was “Mysterious Skin for straight people.” Joking aside, it’s an apt comparison beyond the whole alien-trauma thing: both Spielberg and queer punk iconoclast Gregg Araki share a fascination for characters driven by their search for connection and fulfillment in broken homes and fractured societies. And though their sensibilities diverge, both are in a moment of looking backwards—taking stock of what’s changed and how they, as artists, have evolved.
For Araki, the rebellious spirit is still intact in his newest comic thriller I Want Your Sex, the premise of which—broke intern (Cooper Hoffman) begins an affair with his provocateur artist boss (Olivia Wilde)—becomes a vessel for the director to examine how much the sexual and artistic marketplaces have been cratered by hyper consumption, social alienation, and cyber monopolization of all forms of connection since his explosive entrance into the film world with The Living End and the Teen Apocalypse Trilogy. With a rousingly acid sense of humor and candy-colored brightness, Araki grapples with a culture that’s pumped with more sex, social fluidity, and neuroses about sex than when he was at Sundance in 1992, in the midst of the AIDS epidemic.
Ahead of Friday’s theatrical release, I spoke with the queer cinema renegade about Madonna, Mapplethorpe, and gooning.
The Film Stage: You premiered I Want Your Sex at the Sundance Film Festival, where you also won the Grand Jury Prize for The Living End. What was it like to debut your newest work at the last hurrah in Park City?
Gregg Araki: It was amazing. It was so awesome. I was so happy to be there. The Living End was in Sundance in ’92, and so it’s, what—34 years? For I Want Your Sex, we were at the Eccles [Theater] opening weekend. It was just so amazing. It was packed, and the audience was so into it. It was really the best Sundance time ever.
You also did Now Apocalypse there as well, correct?
I’ve had—I lost track—I think 11 or 12 [at Sundance], if you include Now Apocalypse. We showed three episodes; it was basically like a movie. And then I’ve been there a few times on a jury or on a panel. Yeah, so I’ve been there a lot of times.
And you worked with I Want Your Sex‘s co-writer Karley Sciortino on Now Apocalypse. What was it like transitioning from working together on a TV show to working on a feature film?
The genesis of I Want Your Sex kind of actually predates Now Apocalypse. This was actually Carly’s spec script; it was the first thing I read of hers. That was way back in 2013, 2014. It was kind of this spec that she wrote based on an experience that she had. She [had] slept with her boss when she was in her 20s, so it was kind of pitched to me at the time as a comic Fifty Shades of Grey, and so it was. It had a female intern and a male boss, and over the 12 years, it’s changed a lot. There was a version of the movie that was going to be made in, like, 2015 that had a female intern and a male boss, but it fell apart—like a lot movies do—and so, through the years, it’s changed: the whole thing of the Sunset Boulevard body in the pool, and then in 2016 I flipped the sex roles because I really didn’t want to have a woman getting dragged around there. It was just after Me Too and all that.
Not to kink-shame anybody, but I just didn’t want to put that into the world. It’s trickier. To me, it’s so much more fun and richer for it to be a male sub and a female dom. A lot of things in the film shifted, and a lot of the things in the movie now—where it’s sort of addressing Gen Z and a lack of sexuality in that generation—all that came about [during this gestation period]. I mean, the article they talk about in the film is a real article that I read while I was working on script, and I was like, “This is fucked up.” So I wanted to make a comment on that, and so that became a very important part of the story.
Gregg Araki on the set of I Want Your Sex
Something the film touches on is how the Internet and social media have not only shaped our social and sexual interactions, but taste. Erica talks a lot about how you have to break through the noise. A lot of people have said your films have proved a sort of ground zero for how they cultivated their own taste through music and fashion and film. Were you and Carly having conversations about how taste has become subject to the algorithm at all during the process of development? And how do you discover new, exciting things to engage with?
The first part of this question is: I didn’t really think about taste in particular. I think, just as a participant in the culture, just subject to whatever comes your way a lot of times through the algorithm. I’m thinking like Heated Rivalry; I read those books before the show was even done and I know that genre came to me. I just remember reading about it on Queerty or something—like, “these crazy books”—and so I started reading those books, and then when I heard their show, I was like, “Oh, I want to watch this show” and it became this whole thing, obviously.
So where that new stuff comes from, I don’t really know. It’s a little bit like how it’s always been. People are like, “How do you find out about new band?” Just kind of around. My boyfriend listens to KCRW a lot. It’s obviously now so subject to the algorithm. It comes your way, sped to you. But at the same time, it still feels kind of organic to me. Just whatever falls into my orbit. When it does, when I really connect with it, it becomes very intense.
When you were crafting Erica Tracy, what kind of artist did you want her to be? I know you have a background in visual arts.
My background is so long ago. I used to draw and paint, and I used to want to be a comic book artist. For this, though, I always thought of Erica as Robert Mapplethorpe meets Madonna. Okay, she’s like that provocateur: the person that’s transgressive, that you know is out to, like, not necessarily shock, but to definitely make an impact. So the idea being that they’re being very courageous and very just unafraid to ruffle some feathers. It was interesting as part of the development of the script over the twelve years I was working on it. A lot of the things that Erica Tracy says in the film are actually, like, word-for-word things I’ve said in interviews because my work is also thought of as provocative, like enfant terrible, and my work is also very focused on sex, sexuality, sexual identity, and how those experiences are such an important part of your roles as a character and a person.
What went into making those pieces of art, like the gum vulva, and the POV video of Cooper Hoffman?
We had a fantastic production designer, Angelique Clark, and she was so stressed about the movie because it was so much art to make and we didn’t have a big budget or a lot of time to do it. So she was just super creative and resourceful, and we had a lot of CalArts kids doing a lot of the art with us. It was just between her and me; there’s certain pieces, like the gum vagina, that’s in the script, and then certain things, like free-standing penises, that are in the galleries. That was literally an idea I had one Saturday. I was literally like, “You could take these plungers or baseball bats and papier-mâché them.”
I wanted bright colors, like these kinds of gardens for people to walk through, and so we would just come up with these crazy ideas, and then it was up to them to execute them and make them alive. It was a lot of art to create. When she did that video installation, that was incredible in real life. It was literally a bunch of monitors that she got comped, so we had all these different monitors, and then she used this weird plastic tubing or something and just created this whole kind of monstrosity out of it. It was really kind of amazing.
The Madonna / Mapplethorpe connection is really interesting. One thing I’ve noticed in the last decade or so is how the artifacts of kink and BDSM have become signifiers of cultural cachet, like wearing leather at the Met Gala or wearing a harness at the Oscars. Was your team having any of those conversations, as far as those artifacts not becoming mainstream per se, but becoming sort of implied forms of not just transgression, but of almost wealth of some sort?
Yeah, I think that is in the culture today, because it’s Fifty Shades of Grey. Like, BDSM is kind of mainstream. It’s like a blockbuster. It’s not like it was in Mapplethorpe’s day, when it was actually like, “Whoa, that’s underground.” That’s something that people don’t see. You know, it’s something that’s secret and forbidden. So the fact that, in this day and age, there’s certain iconography there that is instantly kind of recognizable and more accessible. Madonna’s always been the queen of that for her whole career: taking things that are underground or mainstream and turning them into populism.
Kaboom was 2010, and that was the first thing that you shot digitally. And what I love about I Want Your Sex is that there’s, on the one hand, this crisp, colorful brightness, but then there are some shots that are very crunchy and very blown out, and the saturation is all over the place. What has it been like finding your visual sensibility with this technology, especially as it’s evolved since Kaboom?
My favorite topic! I love—unlike a lot of directors; unlike Chris Nolan or Quentin or whatever—digital technology. I love digital images. I love what you can do with them. And in this movie in particular, in post-production we did this sort of, kind of revolutionary new thing for post-production, and we edited the whole movie in this program called DaVinci Resolve, which is actually a coloring program. It’s not made to edit with, but it has an editing capability. And so for this movie, we were able to basically do all posts—from the dailies and the workprint and all the first assemblages, all the way through the finish—in DaVinci Resolve, which meant we were in one timeline and never left.
And the movie was never broken into reels. It was literally just one continuous thing, and what that allowed us to do is that you can kind of work on the imagery throughout the whole process, as opposed to a usual movie where you’re editing in AVID or whatever, and then you finish the movie, and then doing the coloring pass, which is a short amount of time because it’s expensive.
For this movie, we were able to basically stretch all of that out for the whole process. This is the first movie I’ve done this way, and for my future movies, there’ll be a lot more of it. There are so many tools and so many things you can do. For instance: I don’t want to do spoilers, but at the end of the movie there’s a scene that happens in a church, and the light is this kind of glowing—like, it’s almost radioactive—and that’s actually something that I created myself with a button and flipped it. It’s all so easy that you can go, “Oh, let’s try this. Oh, that’s cool.” Or, “Oh, that looks terrible,” and take it off. You can really do anything you want to the images.
After we made this movie, I went back and remastered Mysterious Skin, which was shot on 35mm back in fucking old days for no money—like, a million dollars—and there’s stuff in it that’s always bothered me. So we took it and dropped it into Resolve, and basically did that to Mysterious Skin. There were people who were like, “Oh, you tainted Mysterious Skin!” But for me, I’m the artist—I created it, and that’s what I want it to be. It’s not like the movie’s desecrated or something. But there’s just a richness to it and a level of intention. It’s now what it actually should have been, and that’s what this toolbox opens up. It really makes me want to make a movie on, like, a fucking iPhone or something because it’s like you can really do anything to it.
You’ve talked a lot about this contradictory time as far as the way that we deal with sex in culture and media. I mean, we have both Heated Rivalry and PrEP, Grindr, and Sniffies, and yet all the funding for AIDS research is being cut, and your film is addressing a younger generation not really having as much sex. Do you have any feelings with regards to how stuff like gooning culture fits within that matrix of things that are at once codified by a level of shame, in which that is still part of a secret part of people’s lives, yet there is an entire subculture built around them?
I think there’s a huge difference between, like, gooning culture and fucking Sniffies. You know what I mean? Well, sniffing to me is sex-positive, and gooning is kind of sex-negative. I guess it’s a form of sexuality. Somebody wants to just have sex with a machine. I guess I don’t know. There are gay guys that are on whatever app and sleep with a ton of people. There’s no shame in that.
I think it’s sad, the idea of these young guys not having sex with boys, girls, anybody. I mean, it’s like: have sex with somebody besides yourself and a machine. It’s like: go out of your house and experience a life while you’re young, as opposed to you’re going to be, like, 50 one day and go, “I’ve only jerked off a billion times.” Now I’m an old man and I feel like there’s so much. You know, the culture that we live in now is so awful and so full of pain and fear and war-mongering and I think so much of that is this weird repression. Yeah, I mean: I feel like people are not happy. They’re not fulfilled. Like, incel culture is so awful and hateful and misogynistic because it’s like: these guys are just not getting fucking laid. I just think that it’s a super-unhelpful culture.
I was thinking of the way your camera occupies different class spaces. A lot of your work concerns downwardly mobile, sometimes criminal people on the lam. There’s the sort of suburban malaise and splendor in Nowhere. Then in White Bird in a Blizzard and this, there’s clearly an upper-class space, but all of these people are miserable to some degree, or at least feel unfulfilled or alienated. What’s it like?
I think they’re searching. They don’t know who they are. Erica is older, but I think she is still searching, too. Like, she’s kind of restless and kind of always looking for that next thing. I do feel like that’s a big theme. After I’m dead, if they go back and look at [my movies], that’s something from the very start: it’s these young people in search of something. You know: in search of love, in search of fulfillment.
In your 1992 interview with Lawrence Chua for BOMB Magazine —
Oh, geez…
You said, “I never think about things like who is the audience for this movie? It comes from going to U.S.C., which is a very industry-oriented school, and all they really cared about was what does your audience want? It doesn’t matter what you want. It doesn’t matter what you have to say. What does your audience want? My reaction to that was, fuck the audience. They’re my films. I’m just going to make them, and if people like them, that’s great, and if they don’t, well, I’m not going to kill myself over it.” How do you keep that sense of independence, especially in hyper-data Hollywood?
[Laughs] That interview was so controversial, and my distributors were so mad about it because they were like, “It makes it sound like this movie’s only for you, but not for anybody else.” [Laughs] But I’ve been so fortunate in my career, just to be able to do the movies and do things. I’ve never made a movie I’ve not been super-passionate about. But they’ve all been these small, independent movies, although it’s never easy. I mean, I’m trying to make a movie right now; it’s not like people are jumping out of the bushes to give me money. It’s like: because they’re small, because I can do them on a budget, and they definitely have an appeal to audiences. It’s not like I just want to alienate the audience. I want to make a movie that’s entertaining and watchable, and that hopefully people who share my sensibility are going to get it and going to like this.
I’m just very fortunate because, you know, I’ve never made that movie that’s, like, the $30 million Gregg Araki movie that lost $25 million. All my movies have made some money back. In general, as an artist, I’m not money-oriented. I’ve lived in a condo I lived in since I made The Doom Generation. I don’t have kids. My movies are my kids. I don’t have a huge amount. Like I told my agent when I signed to her: “I don’t really need to make money.” I’m not in this for the money, so it’s unfortunate—because most people don’t have that luxury.
I Want Your Sex opens on Friday, July 31.
The post Gregg Araki on I Want Your Sex, Madonna, Mapplethorpe, and Gooning first appeared on The Film Stage.
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