‘I Want Your Sex’ Director Gregg Araki Talks Olivia Wilde, Charli xcx, and Gen Z’s Fear of Intimacy

Few directors have chronicled the glorious mess of youth and desire as faithfully as Gregg Araki. Now, the New Queer Cinema pioneer behind The Living End and Mysterious Skin returns with I Want Your Sex, his first feature in over a decade, co-written with Slutever’s Karley Sciortino and in theaters now.

I Want Your Sex stars Cooper Hoffman as Elliot, an aimless twentysomething who lands a job with the renowned artist and provocateur Erika Tracy (Olivia Wilde, wearing lots of kinkwear by costume designer Arianne Phillips)—and quickly becomes her sexual muse and submissive. Charli xcx plays his comically cold and withholding girlfriend, with Chase Sui Wonders rounding out the cast as Elliot’s sex-repressed roommate and near-threesome partner. In classic Araki style, there is plenty of whimsy to be found, even as the film takes on a crime procedural format when a dead body turns up in an early scene (with Johnny Knoxville and Margaret Cho playing their own buddy-cop B-plot in the background). Beneath the camp, though, the film makes an earnest plea that a risk-averse generation might be missing out on the challenging but formative experience of an actual sex life.

The title of the film is meant to both provoke and evoke—even as Araki admits he thinks his intended audience, Gen Z, might not know George Michael well enough to be familiar with his 1987 hit of the same name. “I knew I wanted to have sex in the title,” the director tells W. “It hearkens back to the ’80s, when I was a young, closeted queer. The door of sexuality—after the sexual liberation, gay liberation, all of that stuff in the ’70s—was opening. That’s when George Michael, Madonna, and David Bowie were pushing the envelope sexually, leading to where we are today. I wanted to pay tribute to that.”

Olivia Wilde and Cooper Hoffman play characters in a dom-sub relationship that would make any HR department blanche. In the original script, the roles were reversed. Why swap them?

Originally it was a female sub and a male dom. Around Me Too, as a man, I started feeling very uncomfortable about a woman getting dragged around by the hair. I don’t want to kink-shame anybody if that’s your thing, but I’m a hardcore feminist, and that image is uncomfortable for me. So we flipped the sex roles, and I felt so much better about it. Erika Tracy was not in the original script, and her character as a woman is so much more interesting to me—to have a female top.

And at this moment it’s so topical because of this whole Gen Z sex recession. Everybody’s talking about it. It’s coming out exactly when it should.

Some of Erika’s dialogue feels like the mission statement of the movie.

When Elliot sees her on that laptop the first time, those are literal quotes I’ve said about how important sex is in my art and in my life journey. When I snuck out to a gay bar for the first time, when I was 19, 20 years old, nobody knew. But it was probably the biggest moment of my life. I don’t want to lecture anybody, but it saddens me, the idea of a generation that does not participate and is afraid to venture outside of their bubble of safety. If you don’t want to have sex, don’t have sex. But I’m concerned that one day you’re going to be 50, and you’ll go, “I wish when I was younger that I had taken a chance.”

I’d say 80, maybe more, percent of my experiences—sexually, romantically, all of it—have been not good: depressing, devastating, confusing. You’re going to go on bad fucking dates. You’re going to have bad sex with somebody. But that is important. It’s trial and error. I’m in my 60s now, and I've been with my boyfriend for 13 years. You get to a point where you figure it out, hopefully. But I wouldn't have done that without going through all the fucking Erika Tracy stuff in my life.

Much of what people are afraid of right now is being recorded—and in the film, Elliot’s worst fear comes true when Erika releases their sex tapes.

I talk about going to a gay bar as a teenager, and it’s that idea: what if someone was filming me? Would I have done that? Probably not. It’s what Cooper’s character talks about, and I think it's the whole point of the movie: how the circumstances of his generation are very different from my generation, from Olivia's generation. The stuff that's going on with them is not just, "Oh, they're uptight." There's a lot of social and cultural pressure on them.

The film is about a young straight man, but there are some amazing performances by women, like Olivia, Charli xcx, and Chase Sui Wonders.

The female characters in the film have always been super fun for me. Working with Olivia and Charli and Chase and Margaret [Cho]—they're all so fantastic, and they're all so different. Chase and Olivia and Cooper were shooting that three-way scene on day two of photography. We didn't have the time or money to put the sex scenes at the end so everyone's comfortable. We shot the film in 17 days, so it was very go, go, go.

The Charli character is so funny and subversive—she’s really playing against type.

I love the Charli thing, because it's the exact opposite of who Charli is. She's known as this sexual free spirit, art person, and then for her to be this uptight, corporate, asexual character, but with a secret life. No spoilers, but there’s stuff going on. She’s not one-dimensional.

Thinking about the way you came up making movies in the ’90s—with tiny indie budgets and a real DIY ethos—do you think there’s a space for that now?

The whole industry is so topsy-turvy right now. There’s a lot of chaos happening, which I think is kind of good. It upsets the status quo. When I started out, it was way harder to make a movie, to shoot on 16 millimeter. You had to be crazy to do it.

I’m going to give a shout-out to two kids who came up to me at a party last night. They were, like, 20 and they made a feature in high school. It was really touching to me, because that’s where I was a million years ago—this filmmaking kid out of film school who made Three Bewildered People for $5,000. The fact that these kids are doing that, and it’s getting so much easier than it was back then to get your stuff out there with YouTube, is fantastic.