Since the beginning of his career, director Gregg Araki has made great movies about sex, where the sex scenes move the story forward and tell you something important about the characters. A threesome between James Duval, Rose McGowan, and Johnathon Schaech in “The Doom Generation,” for example, serves the same function as a dance number in “Singin’ in the Rain” or the crop dusting sequence in “North by Northwest.”
The sex in Araki’s movies has always been specific, bold, and relatively explicit, but because he came up in the 1990s, he went most of his career without using an intimacy coordinator. (On several of his early films, Araki barely even had a crew.) The position didn’t even exist when Araki was directing films like “The Living End,” “Totally Fucked Up,” and “Nowhere,” and even if it had he probably wouldn’t have been able to afford the extra crew member.
Araki’s latest film, “I Want Your Sex,” is a typically provocative — and extremely funny — take on sex and power, with kinky artist Erika Tracy (Olivia Wilde) taking her subordinate Elliot (Cooper Hoffman) under her wing as a submissive in a highly inappropriate sexual relationship between boss and employee. Given the sensitive nature of many of the scenes and the generous amount of what Araki calls “HBO nudity” (no genitalia, but plenty of breasts and butts), an intimacy coordinator was a given, and Araki found himself incorporating the new position into a feature film crew for the first time.
Araki did have a bit of a trial run with the role when he directed an episode of the Showtime series “American Gigolo” and met intimacy coordinator Yehuda Duenyas. “To me, it’s completely up to the actors,” Araki told IndieWire on an upcoming episode of the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast. “I’m totally comfortable without [an intimacy coordinator], but I’m comfortable with a good one.” Because Araki enjoyed his collaboration with Duenyas, he asked him to work on “I Want Your Sex,” where he felt Duenyas facilitated specific conversations that made everyone more comfortable.
“It’s helpful with all of those things that are specific and help the scene, like, ‘This is when the penis goes in,’” Araki said, though he added that the way he works with actors isn’t significantly different with or without an intimacy coordinator. “ Since the ’90s, my movies have always had sex scenes in them. They’ve always had these intense, intimate moments, and that requires a lot of trust from the actors. For me, because I’ve been doing it so long, I’m super comfortable with it.”
Araki always makes sure the set is closed for sex scenes, and as safe for the actors as possible. “The actors are so vulnerable,” he said. “They’re physically naked and emotionally naked in these scenes. And sex scenes are not sexy. They’re not fun. It is like a dance, and it is very choreographed and all figured out beforehand. As a director, it’s my job to make that space as comfortable as it could possibly be.”
To that end, Araki always makes sure his actors know he’s available to them, no matter what. “I always tell my actors, ‘No matter how busy I am, even if a light fell over or someone just died on the set, I’m always here for you. If you need me, if you want to talk to me about something, you can always pull me aside. I’m always here, and I always have your back.” Although at this point Araki says shooting sex is second nature to him, he still knows the actors have different levels of experience and require different levels of care.
“It’s really about the actors and their level of comfort,” Araki said. “Olivia had done a lot of sex scenes, a lot of nudity before. She was very comfortable in her body. Cooper was brand new. I don’t think Chase [Sui Wonders] had done too much.” According to Araki, having an intimacy coordinator helped calibrate the varying degrees of comfort. “It’s really a discussion between all of us,” he said of the collaboration between him, the actors, and Duenyas, giving special credit to Hoffman for showing such fearlessness in his first movie with such explicit sex.
“ He’d never shot a sex scene before,” Araki said. “I think he had just turned 21. But just like Olivia, he got it. He got what we were trying to do and was just fully in. He was scared, but I think that’s what excited him about the part. It was new territory, and it worked for his character.” Indeed, many of the biggest laughs in “I Want Your Sex” come from Hoffman’s blend of wide-eyed anticipation and terror, where the actor and character seem to merge.
“His character is just like, ‘What world am I in right now?’” Araki said. “Yeah. I can’t say enough about Cooper.”
“I Want Your Sex” opens in theaters on July 31. The Gregg Araki episode of Filmmaker Toolkit will air later this summer. To hear the entire conversation and make sure you don’t miss a single episode of Filmmaker Toolkit, subscribe to the podcast on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform.