Writer-director Gregg Araki walked into a hero’s ovation at the Castro Theatre at the end of the June Frameline Festival screening of his latest work, I Want Your Sex (opening in Bay Area Theaters Fri/31). As he took the stage for a Q&A, the crowd cheered and screamed as it greeted him with a standing ovation.
“It was like the Beatles, it was so crazy,” Araki says the next afternoon. “The kids were insane. It was nuts, so fun.”
That moment of triumph has been a long time in coming. The New Queer Cinema auteur has been away from the big screen since 2014’s White Bird in a Blizzard, as he spent his time working in episodic television as well as creating a 2019 TV series for Starz, Now Apocalypse.
But Araki is back, delivering a shot of pure, scabrously comic adrenalin. At 66, the filmmaker best known for his Teenage Apocalypse trilogy of Totally F**cked Up (1993), The Doom Generation (1995), and Nowhere (1997), as well as films like The Living End (1992), Splendor (1999), Mysterious Skin (2004), and Kaboom (2010), the Cannes Film Festival’s first Queer Palm winner maintains a steady hand on the pulse of American culture
In Sex, Licorice Pizza’s Cooper Hoffman is Elliot, the naif at the center of a situation for which he in no way prepared. A recent graduate, he is among the interns hired to help Los Angeles artist Erika Tracy (Olivia Wilde in a role she was born to play) get ready for her upcoming show. When she takes a special interest in him, inviting him not just into her world but also her bed and her BDSM kinks, the situation quickly spirals.
Elliot’s not used to the attention: his own girlfriend Minerva (a cast-against-type Charli XCX) is indifferent to him. Erika’s second-in-command Vikktor (Oakland native Daveed Diggs costumed in shorts outfits what show off his lovely gams) unnerves him. And it is not too long before Elliot manages to attract the attention of LAPD Detective Zem (Johnny Knoxville).
Araki received Karley Sciortino’s spec script in 2013, a different beast from what he later developed. Originally, the genders were reversed, more in line with a film like Secretary, with an older male/younger female dom-sub dynamic. After the #MeToo movement burst forth in 2017, exploring that relationship in a movie felt untenable.
“I was thinking I don’t want to see a woman getting dragged around by the hair, even if it’s a consensual relationship. Not to kink shame anybody, but it’s just an image I don’t want to propagate or put out there,” Araki says.
“So, I got this idea after #MeToo of flipping the sex roles and that suddenly became so much more exciting to me. That was the birth of Erika Tracy. That character was so much more fun to write and see and direct and just create than the male version of that character.”
Araki describes Erika as a combination of Madonna (remember her Sex book?) and Robert Mapplethorpe, a provocateur, who is both beautiful and sexual. She is also, Araki says, his mouthpiece in a way. He started seeing articles about Gen Z and the reluctance of some in that cohort to have sex. Araki was in his early 20s when the scourge of AIDS emerged, and even with that threat hovering around him, it never occurred to him to forgo sex. Reading about Gen Z’s issues astonished him.
So, as he worked on Erika’s dialogue, some of what she says are actual quotes culled from Araki’s own interviews.
“I was like, why doesn’t Gen Z have sex anymore? Sex is such an important part of my life, in the evolution of my character, of who I am as a person, like it’s all from sex, it’s all from me being queer, it’s all from me sneaking out of my parents’ house when I was 19 to go to gay bars,” Araki says.
“All of those experiences, all those adventures, all those mistakes, all those confusing times, all those bad boyfriends… all of it is who I am. The idea of a generation that doesn’t experience that is crazy to me. So that theme of the movie became a very important part of that.
“I don’t want to lecture Gen Z on how they should live their lives, but I want to open a conversation, which is why Cooper’s so fantastic, too, because he’s so eloquent in his own way. [The characters] literally sit on the couch and have this conversation that, to me, is the start of hopefully a cultural conversation about sex, and this sort of generational divide of why is sex so different for Gen Z than it was for my generation.”
That particular soapbox is not apparent in the movie, which is funny and buoyant, born aloft by a witty script, Angelique Clark’s vibrant production design, a terrific supporting ensemble, and the delicious chemistry between its leads Hoffman and Wilde. For Araki, it was worth the 12 years between features. I Want Your Sex happened when it was supposed to happen.
“I wanted to put something in the world that was pop and fun and a little optimistic,” he says. “Given the shitty place the world is right now, I wanted to do something that would be an entertaining ride, still obviously provocative with a lot of stuff on its mind. It will hopefully create conversations and give people a lot to chew on, a lot to talk about, but I wanted to do something pop and fun as a sort of antidote for fucking what’s going on in the world.”
I WANT YOUR SEX opens at Bay Area theaters Fri/31. More info here.
