Gregg Araki on Perfecting “Mysterious Skin,” Encouraging Olivia Wilde to Push Her Limits, and Tenacity in Indie Film

Gregg Araki learned at an early age that making indie films requires tenacity. He attended the University of Southern California for film grad school at a time when the program was dominated by Hollywood and industry standards. Already developing his radical, hyper-stylized approach to filmmaking, he recalls one professor telling him: “I’m going to flunk you out of this program. You’re such a fucking pretentious, artsy brat.”

“It made me, as a very young filmmaker, just extremely determined,” Araki tells Bazaar on a video call. “To make indie films, especially at the time I was making them, you just had to be a little bit crazy, so confident in yourself, even though you’re so young and you have no right to be that confident. You just have to have a really thick skin and be really tenacious. It was critical to my early education.”

Araki, often considered the shepherd of the New Queer Cinema movement, is known for his cult classic films, particularly the “Teen Apocalypse Trilogy”: Totally Fucked Up (1993), The Doom Generation (1995), and Nowhere (1997). This August, a full 4K restoration of one of those films, Mysterious Skin (starring a young Joseph Gordon-Levitt), will roll out in theaters nationwide this August.

Shortly before the restoration hits theaters, Araki is also releasing his first feature film in 12 years: I Want Your Sex, a bizarre sex comedy about a dom-sub relationship between an artist and her assistant, starring Olivia Wilde and Cooper Hoffman, respectively. The director first started on this film a decade ago, telling me he went through more than 10 drafts before landing on the perfect iteration. The result is a campy, bizarre, at times critical film that uses Wilde’s kooky sex artist and Hoffman’s doe-eyed assistant characters to plumb our various generational neuroses around sex. In other words, it’s exactly what you want from an Araki film.

Harper’s Bazaar’s questionnaire series “First, Now, Next” dives into the past, present, and future of some of our favorite creatives, spotlighting the moments and people that have influenced them. We touched base with Araki about his love of Pedro Almodovar, his so-called “TV school,” the first time he read Mysterious Skin, and casting Wilde in I Want Your Sex.

What’s the first film that cracked something open in you?

Cracked something open inside of me—wow. It was in Montreal, for one of my early, early movies, maybe Three Bewildered People in the Night. I went to see Law and Desire or Matador. I love those early ’80s Pedro Almodovar movies, where there’s just that crazy collision between sex and desire. Matador has that weird serial killer stuff. That was also the time I was exposed to Wong Kar-wai. Both Wong Kar-wai and Almodovar had a big impact on me as a young filmmaker.

Who was your first true friend in the industry?

I’m going to go with my friend Darcy Merida, who is in Three Bewildered People in the Night, my very first feature and one of my first student films at USC. She was in The Living End. And she actually makes a cameo in I Want Your Sex. It was really fun because all of the supporting characters in I Want Your Sex are outside the main cast and are from my old movies—it’s a bit of an Easter egg for the fans.

Have you had a failure that changed your career?

Not necessarily a failure, but I went to USC for grad school, for film school in the ’80s. The film school at that point was very industry-oriented. I remember because I showed up at USC, and in my undergraduate studies, I studied film studies, film history, and film criticism. I was super into Jean-Luc Godard because I’d just taken a Godard class, and I was a very artsy kid, very influenced by punk rock music and new wave music. I was definitely the artsy kid at the school, and USC, at the time, was very industry, Spielberg, Hollywood, and they were very by the book. So I got a lot of pushback. I had a teacher there who was literally like, “I’m going to flunk you out of this program. You’re such a fucking pretentious, artsy brat.”

It’s really funny, though, because I got my revenge on him: In the end, I name-check him as a name that gets dropped in the dialogue.

How did you define success at 16? How would you define it now?

I look back at myself when I was 19, 20 years old, because Cooper Hoffman’s character in I Want Your Sex is roughly based on myself as, like, this artsy kid who’s trying to find his way. He’s trying to figure out what his voice is, what he wants to do, what he wants to say, and sex is an important part of that journey for him. That was very much me back when I was an undergraduate, and I look back on myself at that age and just go, “If I could have told that version of myself, you are going to make 12 movies. You’re going to travel all over the world. You’re going to get a standing ovation at the Cannes Film Festival. You’re going to do all the crazy things I have done and been fortunate enough, privileged enough to have happened to me during these 40 years I’ve been making movies.” I never would have believed it. It’s beyond my wildest dreams.

There is a big gap between your last film and I Want Your Sex. What did you learn in those years?

People are like “Oh my god, Gregg’s first movie in 12 years.” I’ve been here this whole time. “One of the major things I did is I’ve had a dream since I first saw Twin Peaks; I really wanted to have a TV show like it, a crazy auteur TV show. My film Nowhere was actually a pilot for a TV show. Then I was lucky enough, in 2018, to get my own show on Starz called Now Apocalypse. I directed every episode, and it was totally my thing. That was a lot of work, and it almost killed me.

I was directing a lot of episodic TV, and I called that going to “TV school.” There’s cinema, and there’s TV, and there’s similarity there, certainly, especially between indie film and TV, because you have to be very fast, think on your feet, very resourceful.

What lessons did you learn from this so-called TV school?

One of the biggest things I learned from doing TV was from Now Apocalypse. The budget was very tight. The schedule was very tight. We had to shoot 10 episodes in 40 days, so it was very intense because I was directing every single one, and it was just bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. Some days we were shooting like 10, 11, 12 pages—it was crazy, but we did it, and we actually came in under budget. I had all my usual indie film collaborators with me on that, and there’s a level of efficiency there.

The biggest thing I learned, really learned, was how to use two cameras, which is, for the filmmakers out there, huge. It makes the editing so much easier. As I said, I edit too, so I’m always thinking editorially. You always have something to cut to.

LACEY TERRELL

Gregg Araki on the set on I Want Your Sex

What inspired you to jump back in with I Want Your Sex?

I Want Your Sex is a long, long evolution. I first read the spec script for the movie way back before White Bird in a Blizzard, around 2012. I got attached to direct and develop it. It’s a project I’ve been working on for all of this time. For most indie filmmakers, we always have a lot of irons in the fire. So it’s been one of my projects this whole time. There was a version of I Want Your Sex that was supposed to happen in 2015, and the original script was a female intern and a male boss, and it was a different story. It was pitched to me as a comedic Fifty Shades of Grey. After #MeToo, I felt that I don’t really know if I want to watch a woman get dragged around by the hair, you know, because even if it’s consensual—again, I don’t want to kink shame anybody—but it was not an image I felt comfortable putting out there. I flipped the sex roles, made the sub a boy and the dom become a woman, which made the characters so much more interesting to me.

And that’s when Erika Tracy came to be?

That’s how Erika Tracy [played by Olivia Wilde] was born. She became more and more like me as each draft came out. Part of the development is that, because her whole thing is, “My work is about sex and sexuality, and I’m this controversial artist and my work is provocative.” That’s all very much in my DNA. The first interview, when Cooper’s character is watching her on the laptop, it’s line-for-line things I’ve said in past interviews. She became a mouthpiece for me.

Later on in the development, it’s when those articles start coming out about Gen Z not having sex anymore. When she’s going, “What the fuck? You have FOMO, but you don’t care about missing out on the sexual prime of your life?” Cooper’s character was a very eloquent, sort of, spokesperson for his generation’s perspective. I remember a lunch in New York, and one of the Criterion executives was saying, “My kid is Gen-Z, and they are so afraid of making a mistake.” There’s this anxiety in that generation. The intent of the movie is not to preach, really—me telling Gen Z what to do—but it’s really, I hope, opening a conversation. Is the trade-off worth it? Is the safety of not taking a risk, not risking social humiliation, worth the idea that you may be spending the best years of your life on a phone?

How did you land on Olivia Wilde for Erika Tracy?

Olivia came out of the blue. My manager slipped the script to Olivia’s agent without telling me, and then she read it, loved it, and wanted to meet. I’ve been a fan of Olivia’s since she was the bisexual kid on The O.C. I thought, “Olivia Wilde, that’s a really cool idea.” Olivia, to me, is a total ’40s movie star, like Rita Hayworth or Katharine Hepburn. She has that bone structure and that presence.

I’ve always pitched Erika Tracy as Madonna-meets-Robert Mapplethorpe, and when I thought of Olivia, I thought, “That’s fucking amazing.” I met Olivia, and she was so cool, understood exactly what the script was. I told her during that first meeting, “Whoever does this movie, they just have to not give a fuck, literally dive in 110%, go for it.” She said, “That’s totally me. I’m totally down.” And she did. It was such a joy to watch her work and see her embody this character, and for me personally, because my films tend to have this stylized, heightened world. The thing about Olivia is that because of her iconography, the way she looks and the way she carries herself, she can wear anything or put the craziest wig on; she can do anything, and you will buy it. There are so few people who can pull that off—who can walk into a room wearing this crazy shit and not look ridiculous. But she does it.

What are you saying “no” to now? What are you saying “yes” to?

The older I get, I’m a little bit more of a homebody. I don’t go out that much, and I don’t love to travel anymore. I’ve been to so many places and seen the world a million times, but I don’t love traveling. I do stay home a lot. I have a boyfriend and two dogs and have my little life here.

What’s something your mom or dad did that drove you crazy but that you do now too?

This is a tough one. My dad just passed away a year or two ago. My mom is now 94. I’m so lucky to have had them around for as long as I did. Probably their homebody thing—but it doesn’t drive me crazy. One thing I will say about my parents is, I was listening to a podcast that Joel Kim Booster was on, and he was talking about how, as a teenage kid, he got kicked out of the house for being gay, because his parents were super religious. It sounded so traumatizing. I was talking to my boyfriend about it. My parents were married in the prime Leave It to Beaver, true conservative value time. They were that generation that could’ve easily been like, “You’re gay? What?” and gotten pushback. Now, thinking about it, and thinking about the generation they’re in and how they were raised, I can’t believe how lucky I am. I’ve always been the artistic black sheep of the family, the rock kid, the one with the funny haircut, different than my brother and sister. But they always fully accepted me and loved me. And when the gay thing happened, it was a blip, and I’m so grateful for that.

You’re also welcoming a restoration for Mysterious Skin. How has it been reflecting on this movie?

It’s been amazing. For this 4K remaster, we were able to go back to the original negative, and because when Mysterious Skin was originally made over 20 years ago, we didn’t have the money to do proper digital post-production on it and then do digital color timing and all the things you can do—and now it’s so much more sophisticated. There are things in Mysterious Skin that always, technically, kind of bug me. To be able to go back and really get into the film—I revisited every image in the movie and things that bugged me. It was making it as good as it can possibly be for me, personally, as a filmmaker in 2026.

Looking back, can you tell me about the first time you read Mysterious Skin and what it meant to you?

Scott Heim wrote the wonderful novel. I loved it so much, and it was so moving to me. Scott did such an amazing job of capturing this trauma, but also this portrayal of a universal suburban childhood. That’s why the book and the film are so moving to people, because it really, to me, was so specific in the details—those little cereal boxes and all the SpaghettiOs for lunch. That book was so moving, but I didn’t really figure out how to make it into a movie for years. I passed on it a bunch of times, and it wasn’t really until I figured out how to editorially build those sequences that I could think of a way to make the film.

One of the reasons why I think Mysterious Skin, the book, resonated with me so much is because Scott and I are approximately the same age. He’s five years younger or more, but we’re very closely related generationally in terms of being queer men and in terms of music. He was into all the bands that I’m super into, in particular Slowdive and Cocteau Twins, and all the dream-pop shoegaze. He would listen to Slowdive and this music while he was writing, and I think that suffused the atmosphere of the book.

If you could collaborate with anyone next, who would it be and why?

It’s hard to say. I was going to say somebody like David Lynch, but he’s so individual, and I’m so individual. I love him, but would I want to collab with him—probably not because I don’t want to get in his way, and he probably would not necessarily agree with what I was going to say.

I always talk about Zendaya, so I will say Jacob Elordi or somebody. Oh! I have a great one, and I’ve met this person: Connor Storrie.

If you could only wear one outfit for the rest of your life and had to pull it out of your closet right now, what would you reach for?

I’m wearing it. Literally, it’s a tank top and gym shorts. I don’t leave L.A. very often, and the weather is always nice here. The stills of me on the I Want Your Sex set are the same. It’s what I wear every day when it’s nice.

If you retired from the film industry today, what would you do in your next act?

I love dogs. So I’m actually very upset. There are so many dogs being put to sleep now because the shelter system is overcrowded, and all the rescues are overrun. I have two rescue dogs myself. It breaks my heart because I’ve always been such a dog person, so I would say something that’s with dogs.