When Olivia Wilde first read the script for I Want Your Sex, co-written by Karley Sciortino, she had exactly the reaction that any fan of the provocative filmmaker Gregg Araki would hope for: “[I] laughed so hard, just cackling away on my couch, sending them both voice notes about how much I fucking loved it,” the 41-year-old star says, “and said, ‘Yes of course I need to play this insane character, as long as we find the best actor of all time to play Elliot.’”
This would be Araki’s first film in over a decade. Wilde would play Erika Tracy, a boundary-pushing artist in contemporary Los Angeles. She would need to act opposite a fearless younger actor portraying Elliot, Erika’s new intern — oh, and sadomasochistic sexual muse.
Wilde suggested the 22-year-old Cooper Hoffman, a rising star (and son of the late, great Philip Seymour Hoffman) who’s not exactly known for risqué fare. “I’m all, ‘Cooper Hoffman? You mean the kid from Licorice Pizza? That’s so creepy and weird. He’s like a baby!’” Araki says with a cheeky laugh. “But because of his ‘nepo baby’ genes, he has a lot of gravitas. He could really hold his own with Olivia. It was unexpected for him to play a part like this. And as an actor, he is just a director’s dream — he’s so incredibly gifted. He and Olivia were lightning in a bottle.”
For Araki, it’s no small thing for these ingredients to have so ideally come together after such a long gap between movies. The Hollywood native broke out in the ‘80s and ‘90s in the New Queer Cinema movement with bold, unapologetic, and gleefully impolite explorations of sexuality and coming of age; his 21st century output, including critical hits Mysterious Skin (2004) and Kaboom (2010), largely premiered at major European festivals like Venice and Cannes. With I Want Your Sex, Araki will return to Sundance (the film premieres tonight), marking his 11th and final premiere in Park City before the festival moves to Colorado in 2027.
The indie film landscape has changed dramatically in his time off the scene — he’s largely worked in TV in the interim, shepherding 2019’s Now Apocalypse — but Araki managed to make his way back without much of a fight. “I met Olivia on a Friday and I said at the meeting, ‘Can we attach you and try to get financing?’ and she said yes,” Araki says. “I went to my car at like 5:00 PM, and then Black Bear stepped up for [financing] by Monday or Tuesday.”
Wilde explains, “Meeting him as an actress, and being invited to join his cast, was a huge honor.”
This is not to say that I Want Your Sex came together overnight. The project has been in the works almost as long as the time since Araki’s last movie, 2014’s divisive Shailene Woodley vehicle White Bird in a Blizzard. Originally, the genders of the artist and muse characters were reversed. Culture shifted and Araki fell out of love with his own idea. “In the wake of #MeToo and all that, I started to get less and less comfortable making a movie where a woman’s getting dragged around by the hair, even if it is a consensual relationship,” he says. “I didn’t want to see or propagate that image.” The flipped dynamic took root gradually as Araki periodically returned to the script — during which time, he also realized a larger trend he wanted to speak to.
“No one has relationships anymore. Kids don’t have boyfriends, girlfriends; they don’t fall in love, they don’t get their hearts broken, they don’t have that crazy one-night stand. These are the best years of your life — how can you miss out on these experiences?” Araki says. “When I think of my own life, sexuality and relationships and hookups — all of it really forged me and made me the person I’m today…. So that became a major theme of the movie, this important growing experience for Elliot, in terms of the things that happen when you’re young and become a big part of you.”
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What drew Wilde to Cooper Hoffman? “He reminded me of a throwback to the great leading young dudes of the ‘80s — guys like John Cusack and Matthew Broderick,” she says. “Cooper is somehow completely unpretentious while also being the best kind of film geek. He knows his shit but he isn’t annoying about it.”
That said, Hoffman hadn’t heard of Araki when the movie came his way. Then he got into the director’s filmography: “I started with Mysterious Skin and I was obsessed with that movie, and then they were showing Totally F***ed Up at the Metrograph. I kind of fell in love with all of it,” Hoffman says. He was already thrilled at the chance to work with Wilde, meanwhile: “My dad and I used to watch House together, and we were just such a big fan of hers.”
Over a very tight 17-day shoot, Araki asked Hoffman to go to places he’d never before approached as an actor. The film frankly depicts the extreme sub-dom relationship that Erika lures Elliot into, peppered with Araki’s trademark playful-surrealism while committed to a certain, refreshing explicitness. Whenever he arrives at her mansion, you never know what she’s going to ask him to do — only that, as Elliot finds himself quickly and intensely turned on by it, he’ll probably oblige. This presents surprising obstacles in his bonds with his spicy new co-worker (Mason Gooding), his academic-focused girlfriend (Charli xcx) and his easygoing roommate (Chase Sui Wonders).
“I had to be on a set in these strange outfits, doing very vulnerable things with a crew around me, and I had to kind of let go,” Hoffman says. “I was nervous about it — honestly, scared shitless — but there’s no better reason to do something than that.”
He felt protected by both Araki and Wilde throughout. “When she’s spanking me or when I’m yelling out ‘I’m a slut,’ you look at that like, ‘All right, I’ve got to show up today,’” Hoffman says. “But they created such a safe space where I felt like I could let down my guard and not feel like I was being taken advantage of or anything like that. That was comforting.” Hoffman got his ear pierced to get deeper into character and felt game with wherever Araki wanted to take a given sequence. Although, he admits to steeling himself for a few intense days — set up early in the shoot, naturally — where he’d say to himself, “Holy shit, I can’t believe I have to do this.” He called these his “oh, fuck” days.
Araki brought the intimacy coordinator Yehuda Duenyas on, a first for one of his films and a sign of changing times in the industry. Fortunately, he’d met Duenyas while doing episodic work on American Gigolo and knew they could work well together. “I literally searched [Yehuda] out because there are a lot of bad ones out there, I’ve heard, and they can just make it worse — they almost make it more awkward and get in the way of the process,” Araki says. “I’ve done a ton of sex scenes before intimacy coordinators were a thing…. And for me, I didn’t ever feel awkward or uncomfortable about it. And I think the actors all felt the same.”
Hoffman says of working with Duenyas, “Yehuda is the shit, truly. So awesome and could not have been more accommodating. Came up to me after every take like, ‘How you feeling? You good? You okay?’”
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Araki has been mounting graphic, kinky movies for decades, all difficult to make in their own ways. He brings a measured perspective to cultural shifts, both as the moral panics increase and as the reverse takes effect. “It’s a pendulum, and it does seem like there’s an upswing of these more sexually oriented movies,” Araki argues. His case in point: “I’m obsessed with that Heated Rivalry show. I could tell that they made that show in Canada, and I know why — because they didn’t want to get fucking noted to death. It was made similar to my movies, on a fucking low budget. You get a little more freedom. You get the ability to go to these places, to do these things that are niche or risky or controversial or make people uncomfortable.”
Wilde, playing the film’s resident sexual adventurer, embodies that approach wholly in her performance. It’s one thing to say you’ve never seen Hoffman like this — indeed, he’s just getting started — but it’s quite another to say that of his co-star. Yet it’s true: The actress-turned-filmmaker is at her most commanding, attacking every scene with an unhinged authority. “The coolest part about being an actor-director is the unique chance to work for, and observe, other directors, who otherwise work in a silo,” Wilde says. “Acting is a rare chance for me to essentially shadow directors I admire.”
Araki never even made the usual list of actresses to consider for the part. Through a connection, his agent brought Wilde up, and he sparked at the idea. “I literally would never even have thought of that. To me, she’s an old time star — she’s like Ingrid Bergman or Greta Garbo, she has that face and that bone structure and that presence,” he says. “I feel like Hollywood has never known what to do with her. She’s always the girlfriend, the wife, the this or that. I feel like she’s been kind of wasted by Hollywood because they don’t really have great roles for women, usually.” (Wilde is also headed to Sundance with The Invite, which she directed and stars in.)
As for how Wilde felt about this part: “A freak in the best possible way.” She adds, “The script was a subversive, joyful, unpretentious blast.”
It’s a good thing she felt right to Araki, since Erika was the most personal role in the project — at times, rather literally. “A lot of the things she says about sex and sexuality and art are literally quotations from things I’ve said in past interviews,” Araki says. “My point of view as a provocative artist through the years became a big part of her character.
“Clearly she’s a mouthpiece for me,” Araki continues. “I definitely related to her — except, obviously, I’ve never slept with my interns.”
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