It’s an LA-set broad comedy starring Olivia Wilde as Erika, an art star whose work explores sex, and Cooper Hoffman as Elliot, a 20-something studio assistant who becomes her subordinate in every sense of the word. Chase Sui Wonders, Mason Gooding, Johnny Knoxville, and Margaret Cho round out the cast, as does Charli xcx, who’s such a well-known Araki fan that when the director noticed that “the Brat graphic was inspired by [my film] Smiley Face, like it’s the same font,” he cast her to play Hoffman’s stressed-out med-student girlfriend in this project.
His films range from wacky apocalypse melodramas to stoner comedies, but they share an almost painterly visual design, bold costumes, and an embedded critique (and celebration) of sexual culture. The music is always pulled from what he’s listening to, often shoegaze bands of the ’90s. And then there’s his history of brilliant and unexpected casting, allowing young actors to prove their cool credibility, including Rose McGowan, Parker Posey, Shailene Woodley, Anna Faris, Adam Brody, John Krasinski, Heather Graham, Juno Temple, Denise Richards, Ryan Phillippe, Mena Suvari, and Guillermo Diaz. He cast a young Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Brady Corbet (then a teen actor, now the director of The Brutalist; Araki calls him “a prodigy”) in 2004’s Mysterious Skin, a highly acclaimed, very-difficult-to-watch film about sexual abuse. Its 4K restoration hits theaters on August 14. Up-and-coming actors are so eager to do a turn in an Araki movie that he takes a lot of general meetings, with recent ones including Heated Rivalry stars Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie. (Araki is a big fan of the series.)
“I was born at the exact right moment—[in] ’59—so I am actually like [a] borderline boomer or Gen X. I was 19, 20, 21 right when punk rock music, new-wave music, Talking Heads, X, that whole scene [came around],” Araki says. Perhaps his greatest strength as a filmmaker is his enduring ability to tap into youth, even when the age gap between himself and people in their 20s is now some four decades. It was this awareness of his Gen Z audience that made Araki increasingly think about the world’s changing sexual mores, so much so that he swapped the genders of the characters at the heart of his film—which began as a screenplay written by Araki and Karley Sciortino, a former Vogue sex columnist, that featured a female intern and a male boss. “A version of that was going to happen…and literally fell apart, like indie movies do,” he says of the film, which took about 10 years to make. “And then after MeToo, I was like, I kind of don’t want to have a male dragging a female around by the hair, even in a consensual situation.”
Chase Sui Wonders as Apple in I Want Your Sex.
Magnolia Pictures/Everett Collection
