With his first movie in more than a decade, Gregg Araki found himself working in a whole new era of Hollywood to bring I Want Your Sex to the big screen.
Discussing his new erotic comedy thriller, now playing in theaters, the co-writer and director explained to Deadline how AI tools were particularly useful in post-production on one scene of dialogue filmed with stars Cooper Hoffman and Chase Sui Wonders on a mini golf course next to a freeway.
“For me, one of the coolest things is the technology is so advanced now and it really makes it so filmmaker friendly,” he explained. “I remember talking to Rick Linklater about this; back in the old days, when I was making Three Bewildered People [in the Night] and he was making Slacker, it was really just fucking hard to make a movie, just technically hard with 60 millimeter and loading magazines and torn sprocket holes and tape slices, and all of the stuff that we had to go through. You had to be kind of a crazy obsessive person to even try to make a movie.”
Araki continued, “Whereas now, with the technology and the crazy sensitive cameras and iPhones and all of the software, all the things you can do—I’m not a big supporter of AI in terms of replacing actors and writers, but in terms of the tools you can do in post, there’s stuff that we did in I Want Your Sex. We shot that entire mini golf scene literally next to a freeway. It’s so loud in the rough cuts and stuff, but with tools that are available now in post, it’s like you can hear crickets whenever we’re mixing it. It was literally insane the way these things can work, and the same with the editing stuff, it’s amazing. The effects, all that stuff is really being kind of revolutionized in a way that makes all of that stuff accessible to indie lower budget filmmakers.”
With the success of indie films like Obsession serving “shocks to the system” of a big-budget, IP-driven industry, Araki is “excited for the future” of Hollywood.
Co-writer/director Gregg Araki on the set of ‘I Want Your Sex’
“It’s just crazy times, everything’s so upside down. And for indie film too, it’s really hard to get distribution. It’s hard to get indie film finance, but it’s always been hard, so it’s always a struggle, different struggles,” explained Araki. “I’m personally kind of excited for the future, I think. I do think that a lot of the old formulas aren’t really working anymore. I think Hollywood’s really sort of scrambling—it’s kind of like the Titanic, people just kind of running around. So, the rules are really being rewritten.”
Co-written by Araki and Karley Sciortino, I Want Your Sex stars Olivia Wilde as dominatrix Erika Tracy, an artist and provocateur who enlists her assistant Elliot (Hoffman) as her sexual submissive.
