To say the journey Gregg Araki’s been on to make his newest film, I Want Your Sex, has been winding is an understatement. This trip technically started in the early 2010s, but one could argue the coming-of-age sex comedy – his first feature film since 2014’s White Bird in a Blizzard – began germinating in Araki’s head the moment he caught lead Olivia Wilde showing bisexual swagger on The O.C. It’s been, in his words, “a long fucking journey.”
What became the tale of a Gen-Z intern, Elliot (Cooper Hoffman), falling for his older, sexually dominating artist boss Erica Tracy (Wilde) started life as a spec script around 2012. At that time, the Doom Generation director recalls, the gender roles were swapped, with a woman intern and a male boss. Revisions continued well into 2017 on the script, with the #MeToo movement as well as his own reservations motivating Araki to make the story suit his own preoccupations. “I was just really feeling like I don’t really want a woman to get dragged around by the hair,” he recalls. “I don’t want to kink-shame anybody, but even as a sensual situation, it was just not an image I was comfortable with. So I flopped the sex roles, and it became much more interesting to me to have a male sub and a female dom.”
That script level switcheroo was also the birthplace of Erica Tracy, a character Araki calls “a cross between Madonna and Robert Mapplethorpe.” When the script passed Wilde’s desk, Araki says she was totally into the “morally dubious” character. He recalls telling her, “Whoever does this part just has to be totally fearless and not give a fuck.” And Olivia’s response? “‘Yeah, I’m down.’”
Erica also represented a little bit of self-insertion on the distinctive director’s part, he admits. “Some of the stuff that she says about art, sex, [and] sexuality literally became very autobiographical for me,” he explains, referring explicitly to Erica pushing her young lover – and by extension, the young audience – toward more sexual liberation.
“Sex is so important to my identity as an artist and a person,” Araki says. “It’s such an important part of my evolution and who I am that I can’t imagine this generation – that’s, you know, the FOMO generation – missing out on the sexual prime of their life.” Through Erica as his “spokesperson,” Araki’s hope is to open a dialogue with the young and sex-fearing. “I don’t want to preach at anybody,” he says. “I’m not lecturing anybody, but I just want to open a conversation.”
But there’s a huge difference between Araki and his leather-clad dominatrix protagonist: He’s actually interested in creating a safe environment for his collaborators. Inspired by the colorful, chaotic worlds of fellow queer cinema icon Pedro Almodóvar, Araki finds moments of intimacy between sexual partners “drives my movies because I’m really interested in what people are like when behind closed doors.” Fostering an environment where those moments can be captured differs film to film, and this production marks his first use of an intimacy coordinator with Yehuda Duenyas, who he previously worked with on Showtime series American Gigolo. “I think for actors, it’s important that they have a sense of where the boundaries are from the start,” Araki says. “Because as a director, the actor’s feeling of safety and comfort is paramount to me.”
“The tone of the movie – the bright pop palette of the movie – was a very conscious choice. I wanted it to be joyful.”
Gregg Araki
What’s produced from that supportive set – which Araki calls “a womb of safety” – is a far cry from the gloom of our current world. “For me as a moviegoer,” he says, “the world is so fucked up right now. America is so fucked up. It’s just been such a fucking hellscape. I don’t want to watch anything like super dark or super dystopian.” Even as Hoffman’s tenderfoot Elliot finds himself out of his depth emotionally and physically with Erica, the film never goes dark and gritty, a purposeful move on Araki’s part. “The tone of the movie – the bright pop palette of the movie – was a very conscious choice,” he says. “I wanted it to be joyful … I wanted it to be sex positive in the most positive way possible.”
In a way, his message to the youths is to look beyond present circumstances – even if that’s being sexually manipulated by Olivia Wilde in an eye patch. “Elliot at some point is like, ‘You destroyed my fucking life. You ruined me.’ At the moment, that’s his truth, but in retrospect it was a crazy, fun, insane adventure,” Araki says. “When he’s 45, he’s gonna look back on it and go, ‘Wow, I can’t believe that fucking happened, and I’m glad it happened. It was cool, and I literally, like, grew up a lot because of that experience.’ And that’s for me the ultimate takeaway of the movie … I wanted it to be optimistic, and I wanted it to be full of queer joy.”
I Want Your Sex opens in Austin theatres on July 31. Find showtimes.
