Gregg Araki Thinks It’s Good to Get Your Heart Broken
Gregg Araki never misses an opportunity to remind the public that he is the buffest of the auteurs. He frequently appears on red carpets in a tank top; on set, he’s been known to man the monitors shirtless. A pioneer of the “new queer cinema” of the early nineties, Araki has built a career crafting audacious, existential, often graphic films about marginalized desire and the listless ennui of his native Los Angeles. The fact that he embodies the life style he depicts has earned him considerable street cred. He wrote, shot, and edited his first two features by himself, for five thousand dollars apiece; his third, “The Living End,” is a road movie about two H.I.V.-positive lovers who go on the lam after one of them kills a cop—the closest Araki gets to traditional romance. Next came the series for which he would become known: the “Teen Apocalypse Trilogy” of “Totally F***ed Up” (1993), “The Doom Generation” (1995), and “Nowhere” (1997), which include such adolescent exploits as falling in love, hallucinating a monstrous Godzilla that may be an allegory for homosexual yearning, and downing a full glass of whiskey and Drano. Whether he’s shooting on a spring-wound Bolex or on a studio backlot, his work is lurid, bloody, and alive with youthful nihilism.
At sixty-six, Araki maintains his mop of boyish dark hair and arch, flirtatious disposition. (He began our video call the other day, from his bedroom, wearing another tank top, by telling me that I look like Timothée Chalamet.) Araki’s new feature, “I Want Your Sex,” follows in the tradition of his comedies—recalcitrant, slapstick, psychedelically technicolor—and takes on the contemporary-art world. Olivia Wilde plays the swaggering multidisciplinary artist Erika Tracy, whose portfolio includes a pointillist vulva composed of chewed gum, an audio loop of her own orgasm, and an enormous, Claes Oldenburg-esque sculpture of a spiked fetish collar. She hires a new studio assistant—the wayward recent college grad Elliot, played with naïve bluster by a scruffy, flannelled Cooper Hoffman—then makes him the willing object of her sadomasochistic pedagogy. It’s clear from the outset that their dalliance won’t end well for him: the film opens with Elliot waking up, smeared with blood, to find a naked body floating in Erika’s pool.
Over Zoom, Araki and I talked about the transformative potential of threesomes, whether Gen Z is having enough sex, and his use of an intimacy coördinator after years of D.I.Y. shooting. Our conversation has been edited and condensed.
The first thing that struck me about the movie was the framing structure. The narrative mode by which you tell this story is a police interrogation, which is so much fun because it turns a comedy into this cheeky procedural.
Somebody said Margaret Cho and Johnny Knoxville are our Stabler and Benson [from “Law and Order: SVU”].
Seeing Johnny Knoxville in that role is such a great reveal. But I also thought that the device was really interesting for a film that’s about the ambiguities of S & M relationships—who holds the power, how much you can trust your own perspective. Obviously the cops want Elliot to indict himself as a suspect, so they’re looking for a motive. They want him to evince passion or irrationality in his telling, but these are things that are intrinsic to that kind of dynamic. For a film that is about a relationship where power is unclear, guilt is unclear, responsibility is unclear, agency is unclear . . .
A lot of lines are getting crossed.
Exactly. It’s the perfect dramatic juxtaposition. How did you arrive at that structure?
I’ve been working on this movie for eleven, twelve years. In the original spec script that was sent to me, way back in, like, 2012, 2013, there was no police framing device. There was no body in the pool. There was no mansion. A lot of the stuff through the years has been sort of part of the development as I’ve been working on the story, because the original script was a female intern and a male boss. It was more like “Fifty Shades of Grey” or the movie “Secretary.” It had a completely different attitude. But it became much more interesting to me to have a male intern and a female boss, which sort of led to the impetus for Erika. There was a version of the movie with a female intern that was supposed to happen around 2015, and it fell apart, as indie movies do. The movie just kept evolving. That cop thing came about as what I’ve been calling “preposterous film noir.” It’s a bit like those old Almodóvar movies, which were a big influence, like “Law of Desire” and “Matador,” where there’s this very convoluted film-noir plot going on that kind of makes sense but doesn’t really make sense.
Right—there’s a certain disorientation that I think mirrors the ambiguity of Elliot’s reliability. Are we supposed to believe his perspective?
Well, I mean, Elliot is our narrator. He’s our entry into the story. I think he’s a reliable narrator just because I believe his character. But it’s one of those stories where it could be anything. That’s the kind of story we wanted to tell because . . . obviously the relationship is not a “healthy” one. [Laughs.] When Elliot’s, like, “You ruined my fucking life! You destroyed me,” it is what he feels in that moment, but I do feel like a major theme of the movie is that these mistakes that you make, these sort of confusing situations you get yourself into, particularly related to sex, sexuality, desire, attraction, lust—all of it—those adventures in your life are critical to your evolution as a person. So my idea for Elliot is that when he’s, like, forty-five, he’ll look back on that relationship and go, “That was so fucked up and crazy. I can’t believe I did that. I can’t believe that happened. But, at the same time, I’m glad it happened.” You know what I mean? Like, “That experience, I learned from it, I grew from it, and it was painful and confusing and fucked me up for a while, but at the end of the day, it was something that has a positive effect on my life.”
Which is what she says to him! She’s, like, I know you’re not going to believe me, but you’re going to look back on this and be grateful. I want to talk about that moment you’re referring to, when his life crumbles and he’s blaming her. The threesome is what catalyzes this. You’re always interested in triangulations of people, these groups of threes.
My very first movie was called “Three Bewildered People in the Night”! It was also about a kind of threesome with a bisexual character in the middle. It’s funny because, if you look back at my very, very first movies, there’s definitely a through line—that movie is a lot about sexual confusion, and “Who am I?” and “What am I?”
Something that interests me about that triangular dynamic in particular is that in the early films—“Splendor,” “Doom Generation,” “Nowhere”—it’s about a character needing to explore their latent queerness. Usually a guy who’s gay but doesn’t really know it, and it’s sort of teased out of him. In this one, obviously that’s true for Chase Sui Wonders’s character, Apple.
Everybody sees it but her!
But I think what makes the threesome in this film different, and the reason that it’s so upsetting for Elliot and such a colossal failure, is because it’s not just about someone experimenting sexually. It’s a person attempting to join their fantasy life and their real life, and then the inevitable clash.
I think you’re completely right. It’s the collision of what his normal life is, what his normal relationships are. But that’s kind of what Erika Tracy is. She’s this disruptor. He’s in a relationship with Minerva, the Charli XCX character, and it’s just this stale, unhealthy, terrible thing. And if Erika hadn’t come along, he probably still would be! He’s stagnant, and Erika upends his whole life. It’s the same with his relationship with Apple—they’ve been friends and roommates forever, since college. I love their chemistry; I love the way Chase and Cooper hit it off right out of the gate. They just instantly developed this symbiotic relationship. But because of Erika, he crossed a line that should definitely not be crossed. It’s opening up a Pandora’s box.
I want to talk about what Erika represents, not just as a force of sexual awakening in Elliot’s life but as a contemporary artist, and the way that her practice informed the way the movie looks. The surreal neon aesthetics feel of a piece with a lot of your past work, but you often turn L.A. into this kind of gritty urban nightmare. Setting “I Want Your Sex” in the contemporary-art world, within the white sterile walls of the corporatized gallery space, turns that attitude on its head. I’m curious how you thought about those visuals, and what her own art was going to look like.
It’s definitely having fun with the pop-art world. I wanted to make a movie that had a sort of lightness to it. I feel like the world right now is so fucking dark and nightmarish, beyond anything I could ever imagine as a younger person. I personally don’t like to see stuff that’s too dark or too dystopian, because the world is so dystopian right now. It’s still obviously provocative, and it has a lot going on thematically for people to digest and talk about, but the purpose of the movie for me is to put a little bit of joy in the world.
Do you believe in her as an artist?
Do I believe that she thinks she’s a good artist, or do I think she’s a good artist?
Both. She’s so wry and contrarian, I can never tell if she feels like a hack or if she’s just really alert to irony. Early in the film, she tells Elliot, “Contemporary art is a scam. . . . The real art is convincing people you’re making something meaningful and complex when it’s really just arbitrary masturbation.”
I’ve always thought of her as being a cross between Robert Mapplethorpe and Madonna.
I’d love to meet that person.
Her name is Erika Tracy. Now, she is a figure. She is an icon. She is a personality, a star. A little bit of a showman, you know what I mean? But truly an artist. I think that she’s creative. As the script evolved and progressed, I found that she became much more of—I don’t want to say an autobiographical character for me, but something like it. For instance, in that first interview with her that Cooper watches on his laptop, everything she says is literally, quote for quote, things I’ve said. My work is also about sex, sexuality; it’s also provocative, controversial, polarizing—all the stuff that her work is. And when the whole discussion comes up about Gen Z not having sex and being this sort of puritanical, uptight generation, everything she says is my opinion. She’s my mouthpiece. Going, “You guys are the FOMO generation, but you don’t care that you’re missing out on the sexual prime of your life. You’re gonna be fifty years old one day, and are you gonna look back and go, ‘What was I fucking thinking? When I was young and beautiful, I was fucking sitting in my room texting people when I could have been out falling in love, getting my heart broken.’ ” Having all those fucking adventures that, like Elliot’s experience in the movie, are somewhat traumatizing sometimes, somewhat confusing—you don’t know what you’re doing, it’s uncomfortable. But that’s what life is. It’s such an important part of growing up and becoming a person. When I think of, like, sneaking into a gay bar when I was nineteen, twenty years old, I can’t imagine what my life would be if I didn’t have all of those weird, scary, confusing experiences. Erika says something like, “Don’t get AIDS and don’t get pregnant.” To me, that’s the line. Yeah, protect yourself, but go out and take a chance. That’s what being young is. As an older person—I’m in my sixties now—I’m so glad I did that. That’s what made me who I am. And also, it’s what informs my art and my creativity.
You’ve called the film a “sex-positive love letter for Gen Z”—
That’s my one-liner.
But it feels like actually your perspective is pretty critical. Maybe it’s because of the world I’m in, but I’m not convinced that my generation isn’t having sex.
I hope you’re right! I just know from personal experience that this is a problem for a lot of people I know. I don’t do real “research,” in the sense that I don’t interview people on the street. But, for instance, the way Cooper’s character is so eloquently talking about Gen Z and his generation and where they’re coming from, where this anxiety around sex starts, all of that is literally stuff that I’ve heard from people: “My kids don’t date.” The kids of so many people I know have never had a boyfriend, never had a girlfriend, never been in a relationship—and they’re fucking thirty! They don’t go out, they don’t do all the stupid shit I did when I was a kid. They’re afraid. They don’t want to be uncomfortable. They don’t want to be embarrassed. Because of technology, everybody’s constantly being filmed. I heard the other day that kids don’t hit on each other in bars anymore, because they don’t want to get rejected and filmed getting rejected.
At the gay bars in Brooklyn, this is not what’s happening.
[Laughs.] I know, I know. There are definitely kids having sex out there, but I do think part of that is the queer contingent. I think once you come to terms with your queerness, your queerness is so much a part of your personality. If you’re a closeted person, you probably don’t have that openness. You’re not connected to your sexuality and your desires and who you are inside. But I’ve heard of queer people, too, who don’t have sex. They declare themselves: I’m queer, I’m bisexual, I’m this, that, or the other—pan, or whatever—but still celibate. I’m not saying there’s no Gen Zs having sex, but this is definitely real. Like, my friends tell me, “My kids have never been on a date. They’re in their fuckin’ twenties. They have never gone on a date.”
The other thing is, I don’t intend the movie to be a lecture. I’m not telling anybody what to do. I just want to bring it up, and then you guys talk about it, you guys argue about it. The idea for me with the movie is, have a fun ride, have a fun adventure, enjoy it—I hope! And then afterward, go out with your friends to a bar and argue about it.
The way that sex is or can be depicted onscreen has really changed since the nineties. Hearing you say you wanted this to be kind of a romp because of all the dark stuff going on in the world is interesting to me because in the past you have depicted a lot of really graphic sexual violence. For instance, the rape scene in “Nowhere.” How did you think about how you wanted to show the sex in this movie, and, also, how aware were you of how it would be received?
It was really around MeToo, around 2016, that I was, like, I actually think that even in a consensual relationship, I don’t really want to have a woman getting dragged around by the hair. It’s just not an image I really feel comfortable putting out there. I don’t want to kink-shame anybody, but I just didn’t want to put that image into the world.
I saw you worked with Yehuda Duenyas, the intimacy coördinator. I am really curious how you—as a person who made your first few films by yourself, with just a few actors and a Bolex camera, alone in a room—approached these larger productions?
I mean, honestly, I’ve been doing sex scenes forever. So I’m very comfortable with it. I know this is what everybody says, but it’s not sexy at all. It’s not fun. It’s just work. And it is very much choreography. As a director, for me the priority is always making sure the sets are super safe and as comfortable as they can be for the actors, because they are physically and emotionally naked. The sets are always closed. The other thing is, I always make it really clear what I want—because of the way I work, I know from the start what the sex scene’s going to be. I think it’s harder for actors when the director says, “Well, I don’t really know what it is, we’re just going to figure it out as we go.” When we were casting “Now Apocalypse,” it was just, like, “This is going to be HBO-style, R-rated sex—so boobs, butt, no full frontal, you can wear your little pouch.” So, if you do not want to do that, please don’t come in and audition, because I’m not gonna change it.
For “I Want Your Sex,” it was the same way. I knew what it was, and when I talked to Olivia [Wilde] for the first time she got it. She was, like, I don’t want to be naked the whole movie. And I’m all, No, well, because of the S & M nature of it, there’s a lot of costume going on, looks going on. [Laughs.] . . . It’s not that you’re just walking around naked all the time, but I feel like it’s important that you are naked sometimes. Because—and this is my personal pet peeve—I hate when it feels like nudity clauses everywhere. I watch HBO shows, and all I see are nudity clauses. This actor has one, this actor has one, this actor has one, but this day player will show fucking anything because they don’t have a fucking nudity clause. I don’t want that. I want it to feel real. Again, it’s related to those Almodóvar movies, where the sex scenes always felt so real to me, and that’s what made them cool and interesting. It wasn’t about the genitalia, it was just about the authenticity of those moments. That’s something I shoot for in my movies, and I always have.
The success of a scene is always about the actor’s comfort, and that’s where Yehuda was great, because he really comes in and helps actors feel comfortable, helps the situation, helps the language of it all. I know people have worked with bad intimacy coördinators, and I can’t imagine anything worse than that, where they make it more awkward and more uncomfortable. But it’s completely up to the actor to me. It’s literally, like, Do you want one? Because I’ve worked with actors before, like Roxane Mesquida, when we did “Now Apocalypse,” she was, like, “I don’t need one, I’ve been doing nudity since I was eighteen in France. I know what it is. I don’t need somebody to tell me what to do.” For this movie, Olivia was very comfortable, but Cooper [Hoffman] had never done a sex scene before. So just having someone there that’s not me, to talk to and to talk about any issues with, I felt was really helpful. It’s a case-by-case basis. It’s definitely important to have a good one.
Almodóvar is a great example of a certain type of sensualist. I love the scene in “I Want Your Sex” where Roxane’s character, Yvette, chastises Elliot for his ignorance of eroticism, saying that “Americans treat sex like it’s an animal act, stripped of sensuality, of mystery. This is not erotic, this is performance.” It’s interesting because in the past you’ve shown a lot of very sensual intimacy, but a lot of the sex that Elliot and Erika have is really performance.
It’s definitely theatrical. S & M is a lot of performance. It’s costumes and drama. But that’s the kink of it, that’s what makes it hot, the performative nature of it. I mean, I personally don’t do it, so I don’t know . . . but I’m just thinking, to be a dom or to be a sub and you’re in the role, you’re fulfilling that role, I think that’s a part of its strong, intense appeal.
You’re saying there is a relationship between performance and eroticism, or there can be.
Yehuda was very well versed in that world, and was kind of a technical expert for us.
This relates to something else I want to talk to you about, which is shame, or the role of eradicating shame in your films. There’s often one character who is more comfortable with themselves, trying to bring other characters into their world or encouraging them to let go of shame. My favorite example of this is in “The Living End,” how the H.I.V. status is disclosed. The first time they have sex, Jon tries to tell Luke that he has something he wants to tell him, and Luke cuts him off and just says, “If you’re trying to say what I think you are, don’t worry about it. It’s no big deal. Welcome to the club, partner.” It’s so subtle in the way it dispenses with stigma around being H.I.V.-positive. Maybe this has to do with your own upbringing, because I know you’ve talked about growing up with very accepting parents. How do you think about shame when you’re writing?
My movies have always been very sex-positive, and “I Want Your Sex” is really about sex positivity, and I think you hit the nail on the head, because my own queerness was not villainized. My parents are that generation that they very easily could have had a more adversarial relationship with it. I’ve heard of people who are much younger than me and don’t talk to their parents anymore, and it’s just, like, Really? My parents were raised in the fuckin’ fifties. They obviously would have that heteronormative thing baked into them—but they were always so unconditional with their love for me, and always supported me and my choices. So I think that definitely was a big factor. My queerness was definitely not easy for me, definitely confusing, definitely a lot of . . . I don’t want to say bad experiences, but a lot of bumps in the road. But that was a really formative part of my journey. That’s one thing that really bugged me about that movie “Babygirl,” ’cause I felt it was so sex-negative. I thought that scene where Nicole Kidman’s crying like, I’m a terrible person, what’s wrong with me? I ruined my marriage. I was, like, You are figuring out who you are sexually, and it’s not with your husband, so that’s your journey, figure that out. Don’t be, like, “Sex has destroyed me,” basically.
Another thing I want to talk to you about is your relationship to the end of the world, this sort of eros and thanatos thing. Obviously, nominatively, the “Teen Apocalypse Trilogy” is doing this. “Now Apocalypse” is doing this. But I feel like all your characters, especially as they come of age sexually, are constantly thinking about annihilation in a very particular way. In “Nowhere,” James Duval’s character, Dark, says, “Our generation is going to witness the end of everything.” I really believe that he believes that, and that that was the sense in the late nineties. When Elliot is defending Gen Z to Erika, he says a similar thing, that Gen Z’s sexlessness has a relationship to apocalyptic despondence. Like, “Things are so bad that we are afraid to give ourselves over to this thing,” but in the nineties, your characters were, like, “We feel so bad that we are exclusively giving ourselves over to this thing.”
It was all hedonism and nihilism. Like, Oh fuck it, let’s just have sex.
I feel like you’re trying to get at something that changed in the culture, which is that this fixation on morbidity is now actually turning people away from sex. So what happened?
What happened!
What happened?!
One thing I think that definitely happened is technology. When we made “Nowhere,” back in the nineties, it was, like, these kids of various queerness, sexuality, bisexuality, whatever they are, just roaming free in the world, and now it’s like Cooper talks about in the movie. There’s just a sense with technology that everybody’s being filmed, watched, surveilled; everything’s being judged, everything’s being criticized. You can’t ask a girl to prom without worrying that somebody’s going to post it. You can’t get drunk at a party and throw up all over the place because someone’s going to post it and you’ll be humiliated. This fear and this paranoia is just not a healthy space to grow up in. I feel like so much of it is based on technology, beyond the fact that it’s made people unable to communicate, unable to talk to each other, unable to go out and see your friends, you’re all just texting each other. I think that’s the biggest reason why people are so disconnected and so afraid.
I want to talk about music. Despite the movies themselves being pop confections, your soundtracks always heavily pull from the underground—including this new one, which, like all your movies, features the shoegaze band Slowdive.
I always have to have a Slowdive song!
One song that is conspicuously not on the soundtrack is “I Want Your Sex,” the George Michael song.
Because we couldn’t afford it! There’s no Charli, either, because we can’t afford it! We’re an indie movie. Every movie I make, I’ve never had piles and piles of money for the soundtrack. I remember when we first put Nine Inch Nails in “Doom Generation,” we had a screening for Trent [Reznor]. Perry Farrell [of Jane’s Addiction] came, too. We had a private screening for them, and I was literally begging. And they felt like, Oh, this poor kid, this poor fucking fan, this little weird artsy movie. We’ve always had to beg, borrow, and steal for our music.
But the music in “I Want Your Sex,” just like the way the cast spans my career, the music does, too. That Pretenders song [“Bad Boys Get Spanked”] was from when I was Elliot’s age. I remember seeing the Pretenders in Santa Barbara on that tour. And then they’re at the gallery show and that My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult song is playing. That song also feels so nineties—so me at Club Fuck! when I was in my thirties.
Does the title come from the George Michael song? It’s such a campy, synthy, kind of not-actually-sexy song—that feels maybe related to the tone of your movie.
Oh, absolutely. And it doesn’t really make sense as a sentence, you know what I mean? It’s not, like, “I want your dick.” “I want your sex”? Using sex as the noun in that way is weird. It’s not, like, “I want to have sex with you.” It’s catchy. And because the movie for me is a pop-culture movie, as a pop-culture reference, it’s important to me. But when we were making the movie, people were, like, Gen Z doesn’t even know who George Michael is, like, nobody knows this fucking song but you. And it’s, like, that doesn’t matter to me! When I saw it printed out the first time and then I saw the poster, I was just, like, That’s it.
It’s also a little bit nostalgic, in the sense of, like, when I was growing up, sex was different. The repression and the fucking puritanical weird shit going on in Trump America, that stuff was there. There was always that puritanical contingent, but it was Madonna’s heyday. Prince, George Michael, all of them. Everything was so queer-coded, there was just this level of queer. . . .
Flamboyance.
Flamboyance, or just this fun energy around sex and sexuality. And that’s kind of why, for me, the title makes sense even if Gen Z doesn’t know what the song is. It’s harkening back to that age of innocence, in terms of playing with sex and sexuality, and the door cracking open. I was so fortunate to be born when I was born. That was the time I was having all these adventures. I remember when Prince came out, that album “Controversy” was so huge, because it was this level of the public being, like, Am I gay? Am I straight? The culture was opening up in a way. It’s now the opposite.
The matrix of pop-culture references is also so clear in the casting. Especially because Johnny Knoxville is sort of the peak of feral American masculinity.
But with queer subtext, like, Oh, my God.
“Jackass” is the most homoerotic thing we have.
There have been papers written about “Jackass” and its fucking queerness.
And how did Charli get involved?
Charli was a fan. I guess the “Brat” album art is based on “Smiley Face.” They were, like, Charli’s a big fan, she wants to meet you, da da da . . . so I had a general meeting with her. She was great, super cool, but this is early, when she first started acting. She’s, like, “What are you working on?” I said, “Well, I have this movie . . .” But I said to her agent, “She has to self-tape like everybody else.” I’d never seen her act before! So, she self-taped, and she was fantastic. I love the fact that she’s playing somebody who is completely a million miles from the real Charli. Charli’s so sweet, and she’s such a hard worker, and just to play this real nasty, kind of mean character who’s so uptight . . . and we were just so lucky to get her because she was on the “Sweat” tour when we were filming.
Johnny’s somebody I’ve known for years through John Waters. I saw him at a dinner party, and I was, like, “Oh, hey, I’m doing this movie. I’m not sure if you’re interested, but they can shoot you in one day. It’s in L.A. You just have to show up.” He was, like, “Sure! I would love to be in a Gregg Araki movie!” Fucking cool.
“I Want Your Sex” is about to open on seven hundred screens across the country. What is your wish for the movie as it is unleashed on the masses?
We just had a screening in San Francisco, at Frameline, and it was in the Castro Theatre, and it was fucking nuts. People were screaming and yelling. It was pandemonium. The idea that people can enjoy it like that in a theatre and laugh with other people and talk back to the screen, whatever they want to do, that’s the kind of movie I want it to be. You know, I’m really excited about being in theatres, but I do feel like it’s a movie you could stream. I purposely chose the title because I think it’d be a great tile on a Netflix or HBO homepage. Like, “ ‘I Want Your Sex’?! Click!” ♦