Gregg Araki at the Los Angeles premiere of I Want Your Sex on Tuesday. Photograph: Richard Shotwell/AP View image in fullscreen Gregg Araki at the Los Angeles premiere of I Want Your Sex on Tuesday. Photograph: Richard Shotwell/AP Gregg Araki Interview Gregg Araki on sex, film and queer resistance: ‘All the terrible shit in the world is because of sexual repression’ Owen Myers As his 12th feature film, I Want Your Sex, hits theaters, the cult gay film-maker is as fired up as ever
Prefer the Guardian on Google I s 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”.
Read more 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.
T he 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…