In what sounds like a scene from a Gregg Araki comedy, a cinema made the news when it accidentally screened I Want Your Sex instead of Spider-Man: Brand New Day. Marvel fans were baffled: Araki’s raunchy film starts with Olivia Wilde naked in a swimming pool and Cooper Hoffman declaring, “I’m a slave to this vagina.” A key figure of the New Queer Cinema movement in the 90s, Araki has a diehard following from films like The Doom Generation, Mysterious Skin, and Smiley Face (its poster inspired the brat logo). However, in a viral video capturing the outrage, an audience member heckles the screen, yelling, “WHAT IS THIS! PUT SPIDER-MAN ON!”

Araki was delighted to hear the news. In I Want Your Sex, Wilde’s character, Erika Tracy, frequently complains that Gen Z are too uptight when it comes to sex. You could imagine Erika, an avant-garde artist, directing her ire towards the Spider-Man fans in that theatre. “As a kid, I used to collect comic books,” says Araki. “My visual style is very influenced by the colour and composition of comics. I used to draw my own. I don’t have anything against Marvel and superhero movies. But the way they’re so asexual is odd. The oddest one is Shang-Chi, the way Simu Liu’s character was so hot and sexualised, but it was like he couldn’t touch anybody.”

Araki is speaking to me over Zoom from his house in early August. In a New Yorker interview, the journalist printed that Araki was wearing a tank top. He wants it on the record that, for Dazed, he’s covered his shoulders. “Literally because of that, I’m wearing a shirt today,” he says, laughing and pointing at his top. “It was a Zoom. Was I supposed to wear a suit?” He also clarifies that despite the New Yorker claiming he often directs topless, it’s an extrapolation of photos from 1997 when he shot Nowhere. “It was summer in Los Angeles, and it was hot. I was in my 30s!”

Now 66, Araki has helmed his first feature since 2014. In the intervening years, the Japanese-American auteur spoke to Dazed several times, mainly for retrospectives, as his films have continued to speak to young people. His latest speaks to young people even more directly, practically breaking the fourth wall. When Erika espouses her thoughts on sex, art, and Gen Z’s anxiety around hook-ups, Araki admits they’re really his own opinions. “Like Erika, my work is also controversial, provocative, and about sex. I relate to the character – at least the parts that aren’t crossing moral boundaries.”

Based in LA, Erika is the kind of artist who creates a gigantic vagina out of chewed-up bubblegum; she blasts audio of her masturbation sessions on speakers; she also summons her 23-year-old assistant Elliot (Hoffman) to her office for sex. Exasperated with his workaholic girlfriend Minerva (Charli xcx), Elliot willingly lets Erika introduce him to BDSM, pig masks and pegging (with his flatmate, played by Chase Sui Wonders). Despite Elliot’s moans of mostly pleasure, you know it won’t end well – partly because the film is framed like Sunset Boulevard, working backwards from a dead body in a pool.

Araki and his co-writer Karley Sciortino (also his co-creator on Now Apocalypse) have been working on the script for more than a decade. The gestation period was so long that a 2015 version was nearly greenlit with a male boss and a female intern. He compares the first draft to Secretary and Fifty Shades of Grey. “After #MeToo, it became a male sub and female dom,” he says. “That led to Erika Tracy, who became more and more like me in every draft of the script. But Elliot is also patterned after myself as a young person, wanting to be an artist but not knowing what I was going to be.”

“90 per cent of sex, relationships, and falling in love is bad. It’s traumatising, confusing, and hurtful. It makes you uncomfortable. But that’s what makes the highs so high”

With the genders switched, Erika handcuffs Elliot, inserts objects up his anus, and forbids him from having a safe word. Still, in Elliot’s head, he daydreams about a hentai Minerva (in the end-credits outtakes, Charli xcx struggles to keep a straight face) and, perhaps most perversely, Erika wishing to get married. “His fantasies are borderline bad porn,” says Araki. “Olivia had so much fun doing that – rubbing herself in porn-y moments. I’m a hardcore feminist, so the sexual politics of the movie – how Olivia’s character has the power – is the reversal of the patriarchy. The movie also shows how the objectification of women is so influenced by male-created porn.”

Like an X-rated Spider-Man, I Want Your Sex uses bright, vibrant colours for each outfit and piece of furniture – an exception being the pitch-black leather for Erika’s dominatrix uniform. Similarly, the pace is relentless, demonstrating what Araki learned during his recent stint directing TV (it’s his first film to shoot with two cameras simultaneously). However, it’s also a classically structured narrative that, with Charli xcx’s bedroom scenes, nods to Francois Truffaut’s Bed and Board.

“I studied film history, Howard Hawks, Hitchcock, John Ford, Kurosawa, Godard, Bergman, all of it,” says Araki. “My background’s in critical theory. When I write a script, it all comes out.” He was delighted to hear someone compare Erika to Barbara Stanwyck in The Lady Eve. “It’s such a sexy movie, the way Henry Fonda is filmed, even though Sturgess isn’t gay. I love screwball comedies from the 30s. They always have a strong female protagonist and a passive man who’s dumb and manipulated by the smart woman.”

Even so, Araki tries to keep up with Gen Z, which is why Erika goes on a rant about how young people aren’t having enough sex: “Your generation is all about FOMO, but you don’t care about missing out on the sexual prime of your life?” It was actually Araki’s own response to a New York Times op-ed on the subject.

“A lot of young journalists tell me they’re Gen Z and have sex,” he says. “It’s not that nobody’s having sex, but statistically a larger percentage of Gen Z is not having sex in a way that was different for older generations. Elliot speaks eloquently about his generation: they grew up during COVID and social media; they’ve always had phones in their hand; helicopter parents protect them from anything that makes them uncomfortable; they’re always being filmed and don’t have privacy. There’s a generational divide. I want people to fight and argue about it. For me, as a person and artist, sex, love, dating, all of it, that’s literally my entire life. If I hadn’t had the relationships and heartbreak I’ve gone through – I can’t imagine what my life would be without that.”

He’d be directing the new Spider-Man movie? “Yes, maybe. The thing about sex is, it’s messy and confusing. 90 per cent of sex, relationships, and falling in love is bad. It’s traumatising, confusing, and hurtful. It makes you uncomfortable. But that’s what makes the highs so high. When you have the best sex you’ve ever had in your life, or you fall in love and you’ve never been so in love with somebody as you are with this person right now – those highs and lows are what life is all about. To never experience that, for me, would be unthinkable.”

I Want Your Sex is out in UK & Irish cinemas on August 28