Gregg Araki on sex, film and queer resistance: ‘All the terrible shit in the world is because of sexual repression’
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- I Want Your Sex opens on 700 US screens — wider than recent indie releases by Nicolas Winding Refn and Jim Jarmusch — giving Gregg Araki his biggest audience in four decades of filmmaking.
- Araki originally wrote the script as a 'comic 50 Shades of Grey' with a female intern seduced by her male boss, then flipped the dynamic to a male sub/female dom after #MeToo made him uncomfortable with the original scenario of a woman dragged by the hair.
- The film stars Cooper Hoffman as a 23-year-old assistant to brash artist Erika (a turbo-charged Olivia Wilde), with Charli xcx as his dorky girlfriend and Johnny Knoxville and Margaret Cho as detectives investigating a body in a swimming pool.
- Araki frames the movie as a counter to American 'puritanical tyranny,' telling the Guardian: 'all the terrible shit in the world right now is from this weird sexual repression,' and closing the film with Jessie Ware's 'Free Yourself.'
- Araki pushes back on the current 'sexual renaissance' in cinema, saying he found Babygirl 'not sex-positive at all' because its Nicole Kidman character gets punished for exploring desire, and disagreeing with critics who accused Heated Rivalry of sanitizing sex for the female gaze.
- Araki describes Erika's dialogue as culled from his own past interviews and Cooper Hoffman's character as based on himself 'in my early 20s trying to figure out what my sexual identity was,' and calls Cannes 2025 a 'bonanza of queer movies' reminiscent of the early-90s new wave he helped launch alongside Todd Haynes and Gus Van Sant.
Why it matters: A 700-screen opening is a striking commercial milestone for a 66-year-old cult filmmaker whose career was built on outsider provocation, and the interview reveals a real creative pivot — Araki reworking a #MeToo-era power fantasy into a gender-flipped dynamic after sitting on the script for nearly a decade, then releasing it into a cultural climate he describes as marked by 'puritanical tyranny' and anti-trans repression.
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