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Is straight sex the most perverse sex of all? Gregg Araki’s new film makes a convincing case. Titled I Want Your Sex, the movie is a deliriously fun and often hilarious study of desire, power and art that features bondage, full-frontal and a vagina made out of pink chewed-up bubble gum. “For me, it is a very queer story,” the director says, speaking the week of the film’s release in a video call from his Los Angeles home. “It’s a take on kink and alternate sexuality that goes right across the straight-queer spectrum.”
While it is not the first heterosexual movie by Gregg Araki – that honor goes to his 1995 acid trip of a road movie The Doom Generation – it features the new queer cinema pioneer’s starriest cast in years, perhaps in a sign that Hollywood at large has caught up to the cult director’s anarchic vision. Forty years into his career, we still want Araki’s sex: the film is set to reach the director’s biggest audience to date, opening to 700 US screens this week, a stunning figure for an independent film and a wider opening than recent films by indie veterans like Nicolas Winding Refn and Jim Jarmusch.
Today, the director is in a buoyant mood; he wears a striped tank top and looks at least two decades younger than his age of 66. “The world’s so fucked up right now with wars and ICE and fucking genocides that I want to put a little queer joy and positivity into the world,” he says.
The film follows Elliot (Cooper Hoffman), a puppyish 23-year-old college graduate whose ambitions in life amount to a vague goal to start a podcast. After he starts working as an assistant for the brash, sexually carnivorous artist Erika (a turbo-charged Olivia Wilde), he instantly falls under her spell, leading to a polymorphous parade of sexual epiphanies as he becomes, as he says of one of Erika’s artworks, “a slave to this vagina”.
There’s an infectious sense of mischief to I Want Your Sex, helped by an ensemble cast that includes Charli xcx as Elliot’s dorky girlfriend, whose idea of a good time between the bedsheets is poring over a neurology textbook, as well as Johnny Knoxville and Margaret Cho as detectives who interrogate Elliot after a body is discovered floating face-first in a swimming pool. My favorite might be Zap, played by Mason Gooding, who cuts down Elliot’s claim of being “queer adjacent” by retorting: “Have you ever sucked a dick?” Araki has a soft spot for the character too. “He’s very much my snarky sensibility,” the director says.
The film was initially scheduled to shoot after Araki wrapped promotion for White Bird in a Blizzard, a 2014 drama starring Shailene Woodley and Eva Green. Back then, the script was something like “a comic 50 Shades of Grey”, he says, with a female intern seduced by her male boss. But after initial funding fell through, the project was put on ice, and when Araki revisited the script after making 2019’s teen TV comedy Now Apocalypse, he worried it felt tone-deaf in the wake of #MeToo. “I started to feel uncomfortable with the [script’s] image of a woman getting dragged around by the hair, even in a consensual situation,” he says. “I don’t want to kink-shame anybody, but as a man, I didn’t really want to put that image out there.
“That’s when I got the idea to flip the sex roles and make it a male sub and a female dom,” he says. “I’ve always been a very hardcore feminist from the time I was in film school in the late 70s, so the Erika Tracy character became much more interesting to me.” The script further crystallized in the wake of a 2022 study that found that gen Z were having less sex than previous generations. “When Erika says [to Elliot]: ‘Your generation’s all about Fomo and you’re missing out on the sexual part,’ that was kind of my reaction to that article,” he says.
The day before our interview, the Hollywood trade magazine Variety tweeted an Araki quote predicting that gen Z will inevitably “regret” not having sex out of fear of getting hurt. While some readers got defensive, others seemed to take it as a metaphorical kick up the butt. “He’s so right let me start fucking for real,” wrote one young cinephile.
When I mention the reaction, Araki seems thrilled about getting people talking. “That is one of the most exciting things about the movie to me,” the director says. “I don’t want to lecture anybody, but I want to open up a conversation.
“I don’t want to say all of gen Z, but a certain number of gen Z live a sheltered life and don’t go out much,” he continues. “It’s like [they have] a fear of making a mistake, or being uncomfortable or of having an experience that’s not wonderful. A lot of those experiences are not wonderful! The first time you ever get your heart broken or someone cheats on you, it really rocks your world. I just can’t imagine going through life without that experience.”
Araki thinks that sex is missing in movies, even the ones that are ostensibly all about it. “There’s this whole talk about [cinema’s] sexual renaissance with Babygirl and Pillion,” he says. “But I didn’t find Babygirl sex-positive at all. The way that the Nicole Kidman character gets punished for exploring her own desires made me a little uncomfortable.”
The hockey-themed gay TV show Heated Rivalry has also been accused of sanitizing sex for the female gaze. “Uh huh,” Araki says with a slight frown. I’m surprised to learn that he is a big fan, but he doesn’t seem to mind a little debate. “I thought the sex scenes were well-handled and not really watered down,” he says. “It’s kind of what a lot of my sex scenes are: ‘R-rated HBO’. You don’t see genitalia but it’s as explicit as you can be without crossing the line into adult entertainment.”
Amid its fiesta of raunch, there’s a sly sweetness to I Want Your Sex. Despite Elliot’s initial reservations, it seems that Erika unlocks the young man’s unexplored desire to fulfill orders. At times, the pair’s rapport is surprisingly touching, even if there are signs this won’t end well. “I kind of like being your toy,” he tells her moonily over lunch as she nonchalantly drags on a cigarette.
“I based Cooper’s character on myself when I was in my early 20s and trying to figure out what my sexual identity was,” Araki says. (The director now identifies as gay but was in a public relationship with actor Kathleen Robertson in the late 90s.) Meanwhile, Erika is partly inspired by post-fame Araki, with much of her dialogue culled from the director’s own past interviews. Before shooting began, he told Wilde that there was no room for nerviness on his set. “I was like: ‘Whoever plays this part needs to be completely fearless and not give a fuck about what people think,’” he says. “She was like: ‘That’s what I want to do.’” (Between this and The Invite, Wilde has emerged as one of the most fun actors to watch this summer.)
The director has always taken audiences out of their comfort zones. Araki’s breakout feature The Living End featured a then unprecedented sex scene between the film’s HIV-positive gay lead characters, while 2004’s Mysterious Skin unflinchingly examined the after-effects of childhood sexual abuse in a film anchored by career-best performances from a young Joseph Gordon-Levitt and future Oscar-nominated director Brady Corbet. He says that the key to his relationships with actors is trust: “I’m not a director that is like: ‘OK, here’s how you’re going to act this scene.’ Once I find the right person and they’re in front of the camera, I just let them have at it.”
While Wilde and Hoffman’s chemistry is both explosive and often outrageously funny, I Want Your Sex is just as cutting in its satire of the commercial art world. Erika’s art is frankly hideous, with her gallery space full of garish pop-feminist sculptures and photography that would be bought by a finance bro trying to impress his co-workers with his hip bona fides. Araki, perhaps a little generously, describes the character as a cross between Robert Mapplethorpe and the “pure provocation” of Madonna circa Sex, the 1992 top-shelf publication that caused much pearl-clutching for its graphic content. Has society gotten any more open-minded about sex, 34 years later?
“In America, things are worse than they’ve ever been,” Araki says. “The level of puritanical tyranny, repression and cancelling of trans people … it is awful right now. That’s why the movie ends with the Jessie Ware song Free Yourself. I’m old school in a sense: I absolutely believe in ‘make love, not war.’
“So much of the hatred, the misery and the aggression and the violence and all the fucking terrible shit in the world right now is from this weird sexual repression,” he goes on. “My movie is my version of Free Yourself, you know what I mean? The sentiment of the song is very positive, inclusive and progressive – the opposite of this culture of oppression and fascism with the dictatorship of our current administration.”
He feels fundamentally hopeful about the next generation, despite wishing they would get laid more. “Whenever we do screenings in New York, [the audience is] all these Letterboxd kids,” he says, referring to the social platform for movie fans. “And they’re very sophisticated cinephiles – Charli xcx is one of them! They have very discerning taste in auteurs. It really gives me hope that this younger generation seeks out films that are not your standard popcorn multiplex movies.”
While a recent Glaad report found that LGBTQ+ inclusion is at a three-year low in films from the 10 largest distributors, Araki says that queer cinema is in great shape if you know where to look. “At Cannes this year, it was like a bonanza of queer movies,” he says. “It’s amazing that that is the state of where we are at. That’s kind of where the queer new wave came from in the first place, way back in the early 90s where all of us – Todd [Haynes] and Gus [Van Sant] and I – were just kids.”
Araki says that he can see some similarities between LGBTQ+ life today and that of the early 90s. He leaves me with this slightly grim but necessary thought. “Because of the Aids crisis, queer people were kind of being exterminated, so there was a need for expression,” he says. “I think that exists today as well. Queer film-makers that can see the writing on the wall, and that the right wing in this country are not going to stop at trans people. We’re not safe.
“It’s very important to be able to have a queer voice and be unfiltered about it,” he says. “That’s where almost all my movies come from. You know, that’s the magic.”
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I Want Your Sex is out now in the US, on 27 August in Australia and on 28 August in the UK
