When Gregg Araki last spoke with Slant in 2011, he remarked, “A pet peeve of mine is when filmmakers keep making the same movie over and over without any kind of progression.” As Araki prepares to shoot another film centered around youth culture and sexuality, I Want Your Sex, he continues to bring a fresh perspective to his pet themes. That evolution was evident even within his Teen Apocalypse Trilogy, the series of movies that helped establish his place at the vanguard of the loosely organized New Queer Cinema of the 1990s.
As Araki revealed in a recent conversation with us, the three films weren’t originally mapped out as a trilogy. When the lo-fi charms of his 1993’s Totally F***ed Up—made on a shoestring budget with few additional crew members—struck a chord with festival audiences, new creative possibilities were opened up to the scrappy filmmaker. The language of carnality and carnage leaped from dialogue into Araki’s visuals in 1995’s The Doom Generation, a road trip into the dark heart of Americana centered around three young lovers on the run. Any pent-up energy from those films found orgiastic release in 1997’s Nowhere, a dark and surrealistic comedy where college students celebrate the impending end of the world with a blowout party.
As Araki leveled up, he lost none of the vitality that defined his early DIY work. Taken together, the trilogy represents a course correction to the sanitized version of teenage rambunctiousness and rebellion presented by the John Hughes-inflected cinema of the ’80s. Though they attracted a small but mighty cult audience upon initial release, Araki observed that the theatrical run of their recent restorations found a captive audience among contemporary youth.
I caught up with Araki ahead of the Teen Apocalypse Trilogy’s joining the Criterion Collection—and on a break from preparations for his upcoming production. Our conversation covered how he feels about the films now, where society has and hasn’t caught up with the trilogy, and why Gen Z’s complicated views on sexuality prompted the exploration at the heart of his latest film.
You’ve described your films as being like diaries of where you were in your life at the time of their creation. How does it feel to watch them now?
Trippy! I’m so grateful for all my movies in the sense that they’re a clear snapshot of where I was, who I was, where my head was at. They’re like diaries for me because my movies are so personal. I used to just have notebooks, and I would write down notes, scenes, and ideas. It was so much a part of that time of my life. I feel so fortunate that I can experience that and look back. I’m older now…hopefully a little bit wiser! I’m a little unsure. [laughs] I’m in my 60s now, and I’m at the stage of my life where I just have such an appreciation for the journey I’ve been on, the films I’ve made, the places I’ve been, and the relationships I’ve had. The movies were all such a special experience. They were all their own thing. Because they exist now in a Criterion box set, I’m getting to experience that again. We went back and created all this content for them. We had all these interviews with all the people I worked with, like the crew people and the actors. We did this new commentary track for Nowhere, and it was just reliving all those memories. There’s so much stuff I’ve forgotten. It was really gratifying to look back on.
There’s a quote I love about your friend and contemporary Richard Linklater that posits Dazed and Confused has endured like it has because it’s a period piece about being between the ages of 14 and 17, not one about the ’70s. Do you feel the same could be said about your trilogy not being a period piece about the ’90s?
People are always like, “Why do you always make movies about young people? You’re old now!” As a filmmaker, being like a teenager or [someone in their] early 20s is such a rich territory thematically. You’re still changing, growing, and developing. Every decade that goes by is great because it’s called growing up. You just know yourself, and you become the person that you’ve been growing up to be. When I hit my 60s not that long ago, I could really appreciate stuff that I couldn’t when I was 25. Certainly, when you’re a teenager, everything seems so apocalyptic. The emotions are so big. You just feel so much when you’re young. And it’s not like you don’t feel when you’re older, but you’re more measured and balanced. When everything’s new, it’s the end of the world every fucking day, and that’s where so many of the movies in the box set come from. It’s that feeling like Jimmy’s at the end of Nowhere, being 18 and just so doomed.
And as you were saying about Dazed and Confused, it’s not a period thing. It’s universal. When we were doing these screenings of The Doom Generation and Nowhere in 2023 when the remasters were re-released, at every screening I would ask the audience, “How many people in this audience have never seen these before?” It was always at least 60 to 65%, sometimes 80%. The audience was so young. I thought it’d be a lot of older people who were like, “Nowhere is my favorite movie, and I really want to see it in a theater again.” It was those people, too, but so many new people that I was like, “How do you even know about this movie?” It was so cool and amazing, the idea that the movies were speaking to this new generation. When those movies came out, they were so different, unique, and so unlike anything else. And I still feel there’s not anything like them, so I think that’s why it speaks to this audience.
Have you felt audience responses change to these films over time? The apocalyptic worldview of Nowhere might have felt a bit on the alternative fringes of culture in the ’90s, but that fatalism now feels like a default setting for Gen Z.
In the ’90s, there was just that sense of the world’s fucking ending. But now, with fucking Trump and climate change, it really is fucking going to fucking shit right in front of our eyes. It makes the ’90s look fucking awesome! What were we thinking? Now, it’s Nazis, and every goddamn fucking day people get shot in malls. It’s fucking so crazy. Unfortunately, the apocalyptic theme is much more relevant today. But that’s definitely a part of it.
It was an exercise in imagination to watch The Doom Generation and think of the Nazis at the end shocking people. Now that’s just any day on the news.
That’s what’s so depressing. Making something written in the early ’90s, and it was just like, “Nazis? What’s that? I’ve never heard of that.” Now, that guy’s marching down my fucking street with a fucking Trump banner. Clearly, we’ve made progress on the kind of homophobia that’s in a lot of these movies and the AIDS-phobia is a bit better today. But there’s still so much hate, violence, bigotry, and fucking Nazis. It’s just crazy and so depressing.
You’re now in your third generation of keeping your finger on the pulse of American teens. Do you think anything changed about the nature of being young during that time, or are teens just feeling like Jimmy Duval’s characters today?
Yes and no. I feel like there are definitely universal themes, existential crises, feelings of alienation and fatalism, feelings of “I’m different, I don’t fit in.” All that stuff is definitely the same. The biggest shift, I think, is technology. Alienation and social media have become so accentuated in this age of disinformation that we live in and the chaos of it all.
When you were young in the ’90s and going, “Oh, I’m doomed, the world’s ending,” it was like, “Oh, that’s kind of cute.” But for Gen Z to walk around going, “What’s the point, the world’s fucking ending? Why even bother?”—it’s like, “Yeah, you have a point there!” Things are going to shit so quickly. I feel for Gen Z and the idea of being young in this world because it is really questionable how much longer the world’s going to last. I don’t want to be a downer, but I do think that those themes are definitely prevalent in the trilogy.
We don’t come to the films for the sunny outlook, even though, as you mentioned, it’s not all just pessimism and nihilism. There’s a romanticism to them.
I used to get that a lot in the ’90s, “Oh, your movies are so nihilistic.” And I would always counter it with, “I actually think they’re more romantic than anything.” The Doom Generation came out right around the time of Kids, which to me is fucking nihilistic. Nobody in that movie believes in anything, whereas the character Jimmy plays in all three movies is this bleeding-heart romantic looking for his soulmate in every movie. He’s always looking for his one true love. That romanticism is so much a part of the trilogy and why I think there’s sort of an emotional core to it all that makes it not just pure punk nihilism. I’m so influenced by music, and so much of that is from the music of the time. A lot of that music, particularly the Smiths and the Jesus and Mary Chain, is about this longing for connection in this chaotic and dislocating world. That’s definitely something that comes from that aspect.
How did your collaboration with Jimmy Duval change throughout the trilogy? Was he somewhat of an avatar for you looking for connection and developing an entire trilogy around someone who became a muse?
Essentially, it didn’t start out as a trilogy. It started out as Totally F***ed Up, which I wanted to do as basically a queer version of Masculin Féminin, one of my all-time favorite Godard movies. I made Totally F***ed Up with all non-actors 18 to 20, and they were full of that teenage energy, which was a lot to handle on set. It took about six months because we just shot part-time on the weekends, and the process of hanging out with those kids inspired me to make the trilogy.
From there, I wrote the parts of Jordan and Dark in The Doom Generation and Nowhere, respectively, for Jimmy with the idea that he would be the center of the three films. The characters aren’t Jimmy, per se, but they’re inspired by Jimmy’s character and the funny things he’d say. Jimmy and I have been friends for 30 years now, and I saw Jimmy as this every-teen in this world of heartbreak with crazy, Lynchian, and surreal shit going on. He was the center of it all. I saw him as a good protagonist and entry for the audience into the universe of my movies.
How were you drawing out the performances from Jimmy and others? Where is the balance between acting that’s grounded in the realism in the emotions that it’s conveying yet still fits in with the surrealistic visuals around them?
Directing is 99% casting. The casting process always takes me so long [because I’m] looking at so many people. Totally F***ed Up is different because it was basically cast on drama-logues like a student film. Gilbert Luna, who plays Steven, was the roommate of the girl at the location where we were shooting. It was a lot of non-actors for Totally F***ed Up, but The Doom Generation and Nowhere both had full-on casting sessions with tons of up-and-coming actors of that period. People like Matt Damon and Sarah Michelle Gellar came in because they weren’t famous yet. We just had these giant casting sessions, and it was really finding the people that had the right vibe and chemistry. From there, the performances just come super naturally. I’m not an actor myself, but I like when you show up on set and the actors just bring it, like, “Okay, you’re a lion in a cage!” They’re the actors, and you can adjust and tweak them. You can think of ideas to throw at them, but their performance is theirs. That’s why I cast them.
You just mentioned some of the people who weren’t cast, but when you look at the people who are on screen in the films, so many of them have gone on to such great things. Were you able to see the seeds of their stardom at the time?
Casting is so rewarding and fun. It’s such hard work, though, because I’m an introvert by nature. It’s hard for me because it’s like being at a party and meeting a thousand people. You’re constantly putting yourself out there and trying to get them to be comfortable. It’s really a chemistry thing. The example I give is I remember when I met Juno Temple for Kaboom. She came in, and I just couldn’t take my eyes off her. The character she played in Kaboom is named London, and she was actually not supposed to be British, but I just loved her so much that I adjusted the part a little bit for her. That, to me, is casting a movie star. They come in the room and you’re drawn to them. In a movie, you’re looking at someone’s face for 90 minutes to two hours. You have to want to watch this person read a phone book. That’s what I’m looking for.
I saw Joseph Gordon-Levitt tweeted something a few days ago about Brady Corbet winning best director at Venice: “Brady and I both went to Venice for the first time together with Gregg’s Mysterious Skin. If you had told me then that he’d go on to win best director there, I wouldn’t have been surprised in the slightest.”
We just had an email chain about that going, “Oh my God, Brady’s the Venice prize winner!” Yeah, we first went to Venice, and Brady was a baby. I remember Marco Müller, the festival director at Venice that year, was like, “Who is this fucking kid?” He knew so much about cinema. All Brady would talk about was Michael Haneke and Claire Denis movies. Müller was so amazed by him [that he was] like, “I’m going to invite you back to be on the jury!” That time in Venice was also when I just saw Joe become a movie star right in front of my eyes. It was so crazy to see him grow from the kid in Third Rock from the Sun. He went out and bought, on his own dime, a Helmut Lang suit for the premiere. They were taking pictures of us with a giant Polaroid thing that made six-foot Polaroids of us. Joe looked at the image of himself in this suit, and was literally like, “Is that me?” It was just an amazing trip, and the reception of Mysterious Skin was so fun. I’m so happy for Brady and Joe. They’re just amazing dudes.
How do you feel when you hear a line like Andy’s at the end of Totally F***ed Up: “I want to enjoy life while I’m still young enough to appreciate it. Isn’t that what it’s about?” Is youth really the key to appreciating life?
I think it’s so poignant, just trying to appreciate [life] because it’s so hard as a young person to do that! In retrospect, you look back and are like, “What was I fucking thinking? The world was my fucking oyster, what was I complaining about?” Gus Van Sant introduced one of the Teen Apocalypse screenings of the Academy Museum because we met back in the late ’80s and early ’90s when he was on the festival tour with Mala Noche. He said, “I just remember all you used to do is smoke cigarettes, and you were always just so miserable!” And it was like, “Yeah, I was just so consumed with existential dread.” And it’s like, why? I should have been just like, “Jesus Christ, I’m in my 20s, I got fucking everything going for me.” You can’t see the forest for the trees when you’re that young. And the older you get, the more you see it. That’s what’s so beautiful about it, and that’s what makes the trilogy special. These kids, and [myself] also at that time, were just deep in the fucking forest. All we’re seeing is trees and trees and trees. I think that’s a super valid point of view because that absolutely is how it feels.
Your upcoming film I Want Your Sex is an intergenerational story dealing with some of the same themes you circle in the Teen Apocalypse Trilogy. Do you feel your allegiances split, or do you still feel yourself identifying with the young characters as you were in these films?
It’s funny because the new movie is a lot about generations, and it specifically talks about Gen Z. It’s about sex and sexuality. It’s actually in the script, an article that talks about how Gen Z doesn’t have sex anymore. Kids…now’s the time! It’s a very sex-positive movie. And it’s a comedy, so it’s fun. Olivia Wilde and Cooper Hoffman are in it, and it’s going to be a riot and super cool. At least in the ’90s, there was a lot of angst and existential dread, but kids were having sex! That’s what was so exciting [about it]. It was a time of exploration. It was a time of finding yourself and experimenting. You didn’t know anything about yourself. [Everything was] such a big question mark, and that [was] so important to go through. There are some kids in Gen Z who are afraid or too busy being glued to their phones. I don’t know what they’re doing, but you don’t want to miss out on this time, kids. You don’t want to be 45 and go, “I haven’t ever kissed anyone, fucked anyone, or had my heart broken.” All the things you need to do when you’re your teenager, in your 20s, in your 30s, you’ve gotta figure out all that shit. It’s not until later that you go, “Okay, I’ve got it figured out, and now I’m ready for whatever.”
As you mentioned earlier about the odd nature of progress, Gen Z’s culture is nominally accepting of different expressions of sexuality, but they’re not having it and don’t want to see it on screen either.
That’s all in the movie. There’s a lot of other shit going on too, but it’s something that is definitely a topic of the conversation.
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