This story appears in i-D 375, The Beta Issue. Get yours here.
written by DOUGLAS GREENWOOD
photography KEVIN AMATO
styling JAKE SAMMIS
Gregg Araki doesn’t like looking back much—but these days, we’ve all been forcing him to. The American director will be grocery shopping at Trader Joe’s, and walk past a young woman who likely has the red-lipped character Amy Blue, from his 1995 film The Doom Generation, on a Pinterest board. When he goes to the cinema, a new release with flecks of the caustic, stoner mood he’s known for will have its poster hung outside. He might open Instagram, and find a screenshot from 1993’s Totally F***ed Up staring back at him.
Araki made his name in the early ’90s, when he was hailed—alongside directors Gus Van Sant and Todd Haynes—as a pioneer of the New Queer Cinema movement, eviscerating queer clichés and creating intense, experimental, and explicit pictures. His work is often violent, and provocative to the point of being banned (the Australian Family Association dubbed 2004’s Mysterious Skin a “how-to manual” for paedophiles without seeing it). But it’s also catnip for a generation attracted to hyper-stylised ’90s nostalgia, with the era’s fashion playing a key role in his world-building.
For a long time, Araki’s films were hard to find, stuck on bootleg DVDs and damaged film reels. But a younger generation’s appetite for his dreamlike, dangerous cinema, dealing with themes of anxiety, isolation, and desire, stoked their revival—and Araki’s return to cinema after a long hiatus.
Soon, he’ll release his first film since 2014, marking the longest gap between films since the 65–year-old director started his career in the ’80s. (In that time, he’s instead lent his eye to hit teen TV shows, directing episodes of 13 Reasons Why and Riverdale.)
“[Watching them again] is kind of like seeing a new movie,” he says, grinning from his Los Angeles flat. He’s dressed like one of his own characters, in a sexy, tight black vest, looking almost identical to how he did 30 years ago. A gigantic, wide-eyed smiley face decorates the wall behind him. He’s deep in the edit of his forthcoming film, I Want Your Sex—a fun, pop, “love letter to Gen Z” about a young intern, played by Cooper Hoffman, who becomes the S&M suitor of his vampy older boss, played by Olivia Wilde. Charli XCX has a part in it too.
It’s likely to be as sexy and button-pushing as every Araki film before it. As we speak, he goes deep on I Want Your Sex, aphrodisiac cinema, and why right-wing America needs to fuck more.
Douglas Greenwood: I spoke to a guy at a party recently: He was 19 years old and discovered Mysterious Skin online. He didn’t know who you were, but cried so much watching the film that his nose bled.
Gregg Araki: That was one of the cool things from when we did The Doom Generation and Nowhere’s 4K restorations. We travelled around the country a bit, went to a bunch of screenings, and the audience was so young. They were literally younger than the movies. My movies have kind of lived online on social media or through GIFs or whatever. It’s kind of incredible that these younger audiences discover them because these kinds of movies don’t really get made anymore.
Mysterious Skin wasn’t easy to get made at the time, either.
Yeah, we were [almost] banned in Australia. One of the things about it so near to my heart is that we did it for nothing. It was like a million dollars, but I knew how to do it because I’d been in the indie trenches for a long time.
You pulled together many actors who were at such interesting points in their career: Joseph Gordon-Levitt had just voiced a Disney hero in Treasure Planet and had gone on hiatus to study at Columbia. Michelle Trachtenberg was deep in her teen-friendly prime. Was that reframing on your mind when casting?
A lot of my films have young-ish protagonists. These actors—they’re on some TV show or they’ve done a couple of things, and they’re excited to stretch their wings [and] do something different, daring, or controversial. In my new movie, [I cast] Mason Gooding and Chase Sui Wonders. They’re young, fun actors I’ve been tracking for a while. Chase is in I Know What You Did Last Summer; Mason is in the new Scream. Working on a movie like Mysterious Skin, those actors weren’t doing it for the money. They were doing it for the artistic stretch it provided them.
You also cast a very young Brady Corbet to play Brian in Mysterious Skin, and he’s now an auteur in his own right.
Brady was so young he had to have a teacher on set—he was like 14 or 15. He has always been so beyond his years. [When he auditioned] I told him, “This movie is quite controversial, and the subject matter is pretty intense,” and he told me he’d read the book it was based on when he was nine. I remember when it premiered in Venice, Marco Mueller, the head of the Venice Film Festival, took us all to dinner and he was so impressed with Brady [talking about] Michael Haneke and Claire Denis. He’s always been kind of a prodigy.
You’ve spent the last couple of years making your next feature, I Want Your Sex. What can you tell me about it?
It’s kind of punk and sexy and crazy. These times are so dystopian, so I didn’t want to make something super dark. It’s kind of a love letter for Gen Z. There’s this thing going on that’s discussed in the movie: Gen Z doesn’t have sex anymore. But looking back on my life, sexuality, falling in love, and getting your heart broken were what made you a person. The people I slept with and the experiences I’ve had are all a part of being alive. In the times we live in, people are kind of afraid to make mistakes. There’s actually a line of dialogue in the movie that’s like: “Making mistakes is what being young is all about.” You can’t wait till you’re 45.
It’s a little bit like that old movie Secretary: This intern, played by Cooper Hoffman, sleeps with his boss, who’s played by Olivia Wilde, and they have this kind of S&M relationship. We did a lot of stuff to Cooper, because I wanted him to be kind of like my 23-year-old self. So, he got his ear pierced. I have these tattoos on my hands, so he has tattoos that are similar. We made him this artsy kid, similar to the way I was when I was in my early 20s in film school.
“[Right wing America] is so sexually repressed. They have such shitty lives.”
gregg araki
The cast is stacked, but perhaps Charli XCX is the one that took most people by surprise. Who instigated that conversation?
I don’t know if you’ve heard this, but you know the brat [typeface]? she said she took that from [Araki’s 2007 movie] Smiley Face. Her agent, who also represents Olivia, was like, “Charli is dying to be in a Gregg Araki movie.” I loved her, but I didn’t know if she could act or not, so we had a meeting and she auditioned and she was amazing. She was on the “Sweat” tour and only worked for one day, but she’s in quite a few scenes. She plays the girlfriend of Cooper’s character. She’s really funny in the movie. I just love her to death.
Who’s on the soundtrack?
It’s a mix of vintage-y stuff from the ’80s and ’90s—of course there’s a Slow Dive song in it—as well as stuff that’s brand new. The Pretenders are in it. I had to write a letter to Chrissie Hynde and tell her what a fan of hers I am. There’s a Jessie Ware song in the movie, [she’s] my new obsession. And Oliver Sim from The xx is a big fan, so he’s on the soundtrack. Music is such a big part of my movies and a big influence on me that it’s always cool to hear stuff like that, because there’s never enough money for the licences.
Do you feel like movies are an aphrodisiac?
I hope so. Jimmy [Duval] brought it up when we were at Sundance with The Doom Generation’s restoration. He said, “All I remember from when it first played here was what people said [to me] after the screening: ‘As soon as I saw this movie, I wanted to go back to the condo and fuck!’” I took that as a positive review!
I think one of the problems in America right now and it’s kind of what the whole Fox News right-wing stuff feeds into, is there’s such a level of unhappiness. These fucking old people are miserable and hate their fucking lives, so they have to fucking lash out at like immigrants or trans people or whatever it is, just to fucking lash out at something. My theory is a lot of it’s because they’re so sexually repressed and they have such shitty lives. That’s why I think it’s good for people to get out there and experiment a little bit.
What makes you feel sexy?
Music. It really does keep you young. In the late ’90s, early ’00s, I was getting very into dance and electronica. I have such fond memories of being at Coachella, at the dance tent, dancing to Chemical Brothers and Fatboy Slim and Basement Jaxx.
In the credits for Totally F***ed Up, after the “Thank You” section, you give “A Big Fucking No Thanks to You All Know Who You Are.” Does Gregg Araki still have enemies?
[Laughs.] Yeah! I just don’t put it in the credits! I mean, on this movie there’s several people I would put on that fucking list. Every movie you make, there’s always people who make it happen, and then there’s the people who fucking fight you, and the people who drag you down, and the people who try to stop you. Someone else said making any movies is like going to war, and that’s absolutely true. It’s a battle to get to the finish line.
In the lead image, Gregg wears top STYLIST’S OWN, pants CARHARTT WIP
grooming AYAE YAMAMOTO USING OUAI & APOSTLE MAN AT EXCLUSIVE ARTISTS
production THE MORRISON GROUP
location HOLLYWOOD PREMIERE MOTEL