It was all hedonism and nihilism. Like, Oh fuck it, let’s just have sex.
I feel like you’re trying to get at something that changed in the culture, which is that this fixation on morbidity is now actually turning people away from sex. So what happened?
What happened!
What happened?!
One thing I think that definitely happened is technology. When we made “Nowhere,” back in the nineties, it was, like, these kids of various queerness, sexuality, bisexuality, whatever they are, just roaming free in the world, and now it’s like Cooper talks about in the movie. There’s just a sense with technology that everybody’s being filmed, watched, surveilled; everything’s being judged, everything’s being criticized. You can’t ask a girl to prom without worrying that somebody’s going to post it. You can’t get drunk at a party and throw up all over the place because someone’s going to post it and you’ll be humiliated. This fear and this paranoia is just not a healthy space to grow up in. I feel like so much of it is based on technology, beyond the fact that it’s made people unable to communicate, unable to talk to each other, unable to go out and see your friends, you’re all just texting each other. I think that’s the biggest reason why people are so disconnected and so afraid.
I want to talk about music. Despite the movies themselves being pop confections, your soundtracks always heavily pull from the underground—including this new one, which, like all your movies, features the shoegaze band Slowdive.
I always have to have a Slowdive song!
One song that is conspicuously not on the soundtrack is “I Want Your Sex,” the George Michael song.
Because we couldn’t afford it! There’s no Charli, either, because we can’t afford it! We’re an indie movie. Every movie I make, I’ve never had piles and piles of money for the soundtrack. I remember when we first put Nine Inch Nails in “Doom Generation,” we had a screening for Trent [Reznor]. Perry Farrell [of Jane’s Addiction] came, too. We had a private screening for them, and I was literally begging. And they felt like, Oh, this poor kid, this poor fucking fan, this little weird artsy movie. We’ve always had to beg, borrow, and steal for our music.
But the music in “I Want Your Sex,” just like the way the cast spans my career, the music does, too. That Pretenders song [“Bad Boys Get Spanked”] was from when I was Elliot’s age. I remember seeing the Pretenders in Santa Barbara on that tour. And then they’re at the gallery show and that My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult song is playing. That song also feels so nineties—so me at Club Fuck! when I was in my thirties.
Does the title come from the George Michael song? It’s such a campy, synthy, kind of not-actually-sexy song—that feels maybe related to the tone of your movie.
Oh, absolutely. And it doesn’t really make sense as a sentence, you know what I mean? It’s not, like, “I want your dick.” “I want your sex”? Using sex as the noun in that way is weird. It’s not, like, “I want to have sex with you.” It’s catchy. And because the movie for me is a pop-culture movie, as a pop-culture reference, it’s important to me. But when we were making the movie, people were, like, Gen Z doesn’t even know who George Michael is, like, nobody knows this fucking song but you. And it’s, like, that doesn’t matter to me! When I saw it printed out the first time and then I saw the poster, I was just, like, That’s it.
