The Brooklyn Rail

Since the late eighties, Gregg Araki has been goosing audiences out of their comfort zones with catty humor, art-pop surrealism, and plenty of sex. This July, the ribald queer provocateur is back on the big screen after a twelve-year sojourn to television, and he’s got a lot to say about 2026. In his latest, I Want Your Sex—a glittery, lube-soaked combo of The Devil Wears Prada and Secretary among other things—art world shock-jock, enfant-terrible, and diva-supreme Erika Tracy (a superb Olivia Wilde) starts up a dom-sub situationship with her new personal assistant, Elliot (Cooper Hoffman). Still wet behind the ears and deeply sex-starved by his high-powered girlfriend (Charli XCX), he’s immediately smitten with Erika’s stiletto-clad looks and voracious attitude, diving into her queer high gloss milieu under the watchful eyes of fellow assistants, roommates, and snooty intellectuals. So begins a cutthroat game of sexual self-exploration—until Elliot, clad in nothing but a lacy bra and his own blood, finds Erika naked, face down in her luxe pool, that is.

This pulpy, raunchy comedy throws a dildo at erotic decorum with typical Arakian aplomb. Shortly after the film’s New York City premiere, the Rail chatted with the director about the state of fucking on screen in 2026, what constitutes pornography, and queerness as a superpower.

Gregg Araki: You’re not using the video, are you? It’s just a little bit a lot with video stuff if you don’t know…

Payton McCarty-Simas (Rail): Totally. If you’re not prepared, it’s like, “I didn’t put my face on!”

Araki: You end up on YouTube and shit! I’m old school, and I’ve been making movies for so long that in the old days you would do Village Voice, New York Times, Los Angeles Times—there was a list of like seven outlets, and every press tour it was the same. Now it’s like five billion things, and it’s like, “What kind of shoes do you like?” Not to sound paranoid, it’s just sort of like, “Wait, is this for TV?”

Rail: Oh no, every time the Zoom says “recording in progress” in that ominous robot voice, it completely invites paranoia.

Araki: We’re being surveilled all the time anyway.

Rail: True enough!

Araki: [Laughs] we’re getting off topic here.

Rail: At the same time, we’re actually kind of on topic, right? How has it been for you touring around, doing press for this movie? This is your first feature since 2014.

Araki: I just started! I was in New York this past weekend for our New York premiere, but everything’s been held back because we don’t release ’til July 31—against the new Spider-Man [laughs]. It’s been a little weird because there was so much buzz around Sundance when we premiered way back in January, but then once we got bought it was very much trying to pick a day, and it’s such a crowded summer. It was a bit of a process. Now that we’re finally doing it, though, I’m excited for people to see it! It’s an audience movie. It’s meant to be a joy. For me, it’s supposed to be an antidote to how fucking nightmarish and shitty the world is right now, especially America.

Rail: Let’s talk about sex. I just interviewed Jane Schoenbrun for their next feature, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, with similar themes, and your interviews are actually going to come out together, which I think is kind of perfect.

Araki: Their movie was actually part of the thing when we were trying to figure out a date! I’m very aware of my co-queer-filmmaker Jane’s movie coming out, and I’m super excited! That’s amazing. It’s funny, I interviewed Jane for Filmmaker Magazine when I Saw the TV Glow came out and I remember saying to Jane, “Your movie’s so visionary and cool and subversive, but where’s the sex?” There’s so much weird, dark, crazy shit going on in TV Glow, but there’s no sex, you know? And they were all, “That’s what my next movie is all about!” So I’m excited to see it.

Rail: Exactly, and that’s what I wanted to start thinking about. Yours is a movie about sex now. It’s about the way we talk about sex today in a lot of ways. There’s an early scene where Erika and Elliot are having that classic debate around whether Gen Z fucks, and I’d love to hear your thoughts on how that discourse is evolving. On the one hand, we know from those studies that Olivia Wilde’s character is pointing to, that people my age get hit with a lot, that yes, young people are weird about sex these days. On the other hand, particularly lately in the movies, there’s sex in everything all of a sudden—say what you will about Wuthering Heights, but there’s cunnilingus in 28 Years Later! I’m curious about how you hold those things in conversation.

Araki: There’s definitely been kind of a sex renaissance with Heated Rivalry and Babygirl and all that stuff. And thank goodness! I describe this movie as a sex positive love letter to Gen Z. I don’t want to be the fucking old guy lecturing you like, “This is what you should be doing,” but it’s interesting. This movie is something I’ve been working on for over ten years, and when I first read the script way back in like 2012, it was a spec script about a female intern and a male boss. Erika Tracy wasn’t even in that version. It wasn’t until about 2016 after #MeToo that I was really like, “I don’t really want to see a woman get dragged around by the hair…,” not to kinkshame or anything! But even if it’s consensual, it’s just an image I didn’t want to propagate.

So I started thinking, “What if we swap the sex roles?” It turned out that was actually way more interesting—a female dom or top—and so the Erika Tracy character began to take shape. Then in all the various drafts and how it was evolving, those articles are real articles that I read. I was like, “What, Gen Z’s not having sex? What, 30% of men, young men haven’t had sex in a year?” It got woven into the script.

Plus, because Erika’s work is much about sex and sexuality, she became almost an autobiographical character for me. For instance, when she’s doing that interview at the beginning when Cooper’s character is first watching her on the laptop, all the stuff she says in that interview is literally almost word for word stuff I’ve said in interviews before. So when she’s on the couch with Cooper and they’re talking about fucking and his generation and she’s saying things like, “Aren’t you worried about FOMO? Aren’t you worried about being like forty-five, fifty years old, and you’ve missed the sexual prime of your whole fucking life because you’re too afraid or you’re too nervous?” That’s me.

One thing that came up—and it’s in that scene as well—is I remember being at lunch with the Criterion people when we were doing the Teen Apocalypse Trilogy boxset, and one of the executives has Gen Z kids. He’s all like, “This generation is really terrified of making a mistake because of social media, there’s immediate repercussions, you’re in the town square.” I just said, “Being young is about making mistakes!” That’s the time when you do all that dumb shit, that “I can’t believe I did that, I can’t believe I survived that” shit. So that idea became a very important part of what I Want Your Sex was. If I had done the original version way back, it would have been a completely different movie.

Rail: Because it’s been this long journey to making this movie, what was the thing that compelled you most about it? What pulled you through all of the iterations during that process and what made this the story that you wanted to tell?

Araki: The sex positivity of it and in the humor of it. It’s just the right time for the movie. The first time I read the movie was, like I said, 2012 or 2013. I mean, Barack Obama was president! [Laughs.] We lived in a much more open, free, and optimistic time. Over the years, stuff has changed a lot, so to me the sensibility of the film really suits this time because the pendulum has swung in a hellaciously awful direction: LGBT stuff is getting shut down, trans people are, like, erased… So much terrible shit is going on that this aspect of queer joy is so important. It’s literally a lifeline at this point. So I’m very happy with the fact that the movie is coming out right now, when things are looking so awful.

Rail: The acerbic tone feels right on that score too, right? The idea of queer joy can often be simplified on screen, but here it’s queer joy on the one hand, while on the other, we have Johnny Knoxville asking Elliot about sexual harassment and grooming, which I thought was awesome. I’m so excited for Jackass: Best and Last….

Araki: I can’t wait for Jackass! Although it’s scary to me, being older myself. It’s like, aren’t they gonna get hurt? You don’t bounce back like when you were fucking thirty! Then it’s like, yeah, sure you can fucking fall off a building! Then, it’s like, “I’m fine!” But anyway, Johnny is fantastic.

Rail: Can we talk a little bit about the casting on that note?

Araki: This movie is literally such a dream come true for me with the cast. Olivia is an actress that I’ve been a fan of since The O.C. when she was that bisexual kid fucking Seth Cohen and Marissa Cooper. She’s always been the cool girl and she’s such a movie star. I was so excited when I found out she was into the script and wanted to meet, because I feel like she’s one of those old school movie stars—she’s like Greta Garbo or Ingrid Bergman! She has so much presence, she’s so beautiful with that crazy bone structure. I just feel like contemporary Hollywood doesn’t really know what to do with real old-time movie stars like that anymore! They’re always like the wife or the girlfriend or the lawyer or some fucking shit. I think she saw that this was a juicy part for her and so fun to play. She just jumped right in and was so excited about it.

Cooper, when he was first pitched, I was like, “Cooper Hoffman from Licorice Pizza? That’s so weird and creepy!” The idea of Erika Tracy fucking him was like, “That’s so not right…” But then Cooper came in and chemistry read with Olivia and he was fantastic. The thing about Cooper, too, is that Olivia’s such a movie star that a lot of times her co-stars get knocked off the screen by her. But Cooper has a lot of gravitas, especially for someone so young—he was like twenty when we made the movie. He has a lot of presence, he’s so assured and so fantastic. So as soon as I saw Cooper and Olivia together, I was like, “The movie’s basically done!”

Rail: You have such a great survey of different sexual neuroses going on in this movie across the characters. Without talking too much about the plot, Charli XCX’s character in particular is hilarious. Were there any characters that you had more fun fleshing out?

Araki: Well, one of the things I thought was funny was that Mason Gooding’s character (a fellow assistant at Erika’s gallery) is the most Gregg Arakian one in the story. He’s the hot, snarky, queer guy I love. All my characters are very… I won’t say autobiographical, but there’s a lot of me, you know? That whole speech that character gives about, like, “I’m just fucking gay. I like dick.” It’s very accurate to say that all the characters’ arcs are filled with different degrees of comfort, but I found it funny that his character, being the blatantly queer one, was the most confident and secure.

Rail: Do you think that’s true of queer people right now? Do you think that we’re kind of chilling in a way that straight people aren’t?

Araki: Yeah, I do! I don’t want to sound arrogant or something, but I do feel that. I feel like being queer is like a superpower. I think we have such an advantage over everybody else [laughs], but that’s just my opinion. For me, I’m in my sixties and I’ve reached this point in my life where I’m past all the stuff that Cooper’s character is going through, too. I’ve passed all the trauma and all the confusion and all the breakups and all the drama of young life. I’ve been with my boyfriend for like twelve years. There’s an age in which you sort of figure it out, you know? You’re not struggling anymore.

Rail: How do you think your relationship to erotics on screen has changed?

Araki: In terms of sex in the movies, I think there’s a level of confidence and comfort for me now because I’ve been doing this for so long. This is the first movie I’ve had an intimacy coordinator on, and we had an amazing one: Yehuda Duenyas. He was fantastic and really helped everybody feel more comfortable, but I’ve always had sex scenes; sex and sexuality are major themes in all my movies from the very start.

When I was first starting as a filmmaker back in the late eighties, early nineties, it was intimidating. I knew what I wanted, but getting it was a little bit trickier. Now I’ve done it so much and I’m so used to it that it’s not a big deal to me. I’m purposefully very upfront with what I want actors to do if there’s nudity—what kind of nudity they’d do: boob, butt, whatever. It’s never full-on penetration or anything, but I’ll tell actors that if they’re not comfortable with whatever the part is going to require, don’t even audition. That way I’m always working with actors that know where they’re coming from and what their boundaries are. I think that when what’s expected is murky, that causes actors a lot of anxiety. As far as the sex stuff goes, I have it all in my head before I shoot it.

I also think that the proliferation of porn kind of liberated cinema in a way. Back when I was young, actresses would do an R-rated movie and show their boobs and that’s suddenly pornography. Like, guys are jacking off to one frame of some actress from the seventies or eighties! Now porn is everywhere, so no one’s going to be jacking off to this movie. It’s sexy, but it’s part of the story and part of the art of the film.

Rail: It’s like the line in the movie where a character asks the difference between Erika’s art and porn, and Cooper Hoffman’s character just says “Context.”

Araki: Exactly.