Charlie xcx made it a brat summer. But it’s writer and director Gregg Araki who helped inspire the brat ethos. A graduate of USC Film School, Araki weaved his subversive, queer-positive ‘90s movies into an industry that, quite literally, tried to pay him to make straight movies.
Throughout the ‘90s, Araki was a working, successful queer Asian American filmmaker — long before the industry prized diversity like it does today. His aesthetic resonates so much that Charlie xcx told Billboard her brat album cover was inspired by “a 1990s neon rave flyer and the title credits to Gregg Araki’s 2007 comedy, Smiley Face.” What started as inspiration has led to collaboration, as the English singer will star in Araki’s new film “I Want Your Sex.”
An icon of New Queer Cinema, Araki launched his provocative career alongside fellow filmmakers Richard Linklater, Gus Van Sant, and Todd Haynes.
“Their careers were taking off all around me. It was such an exciting scene to be a part of,” says Araki. “If I had been born later, and come out of the closet later, I think I would have had a different filmmaking experience.”
His third movie, 1992’s The Living End, kicked off a trio of movies lovingly dubbed the Teen Apocalypse Trilogy, including 1993’s Totally Fucked Up and 1995’s The Doom Generation.
In honor of the trilogy’s 30-ish birthday, The Criterion Collection will release a box set of Araki’s ‘90s hedonist classics on September 24 with new restorations and all of the fixins’ you come to expect from a Criterion release. We talked with Araki about making movies when Sundance exploded, how TikTok resurrected his movies, and the most beautiful and profane elements of The Doom Generation.
Joshua Encinias: How have your projects like the Teen Apocalypse Trilogy remained relevant to moviegoers?
Gregg Araki: To this day, I’m amazed at the cult following and the devoted fans of all of my movies. But in particular, the Teen Apocalypse Trilogy. My movies have always been for outsiders, weirdos, people who feel like they don’t fit in, queer people, punk rock people. People who feel different and march to their own drummer.
It’s where I come from, it’s what my sensibility is. It comes from the punk rock alternative music that I listen to, it’s just my culture. It’s where I come from. I think that resonates with all stripes of people. The people that really get it, it’s meaningful to them and that’s why I make movies in the first place.
When we screened The Doom Generation restoration at Sundance in 2023, I asked the audience who had seen it before. It was a packed audience at the Egyptian Theatre and literally 80% of the audience raised their hand! I was shocked because I thought it would be like old fans who wanted to see the movie again. But there’s a real curiosity amongst Gen Z because the audience was also quite young. They’ve heard about my movies but they haven’t seen them.
The Academy Museum in Los Angeles has a teenage committee or something, and The Doom Generation was at the top of their list of the movies they want to see. Apparently, the movie has a huge following on Pinterest and TikTok. So people have seen shots and glimpses of the movie and there’s a huge curiosity about them, and I’m really hopeful that the audience is going to be able to find the movie and finally see it in its entirety.
Joshua Encinias: I read that your producer for The Doom Generation said if you make a straight movie they could get you a bigger budget. Is that why the movie was marketed as “A Heterosexual Movie by Gregg Araki”?
Gregg Araki: I feel it’s very punk rock and subversive. When I made The Living End and Totally Fucked Up, when you make these gay movies that are too punk even for gay people, they’re just polarizing movies. When The Living End came out, people either loved it or they just hated it. When it premiered at The Castro Theatre in San Francisco, people were protesting outside.
Looking back on it, it was kinda cool and exciting. But the producer did come to me and say, “If you make a heterosexual movie, I’ll produce it and I can get you a $750,000 budget.” The Living End and Totally Fucked Up were made for like $20,000 each, and I did them myself basically with a crew of maybe two to five people. It was always this little tiny gorilla operation.
So I literally called it “A Heterosexual Movie by Gregg Araki,” but in a punk rock, kinda bratty way.
I always intended it to be the queerest straight movie ever made. The homoerotic subtext of the movie is so exaggerated that I always thought of The Doom Generation as a trojan horse of a movie. It wasn’t queer like how Totally Fucked Up is called “Another homo movie by Gregg Araki.”
The idea of calling The Doom Generation “A Heterosexual Movie by Gregg Araki” is that people who would maybe not go see a gay movie would go see this movie because it’s straight. They would go see it and be like, “Oh, what’s this queer feeling I’m getting?”
Joshua Encinias: When I first watched Doom Generation, I was like, “I wonder if Jordan (James Duval) is bi, or gender fluid.” But he’s also just really naive and innocent, so he just goes wherever the moment takes him.
Gregg Araki: Yeah, very much. It’s funny watching the movie again because I hadn’t seen it for years before it was remastered. There’s a reading of the movie that it’s an unrequited love story between X (Johnathon Schaech) and Jordan. They definitely play that up a lot, particularly because Johnathon was a young method actor when we made the movie. He and James used to hang out a lot and there was just a lot invested in that relationship.
Joshua Encinias: It’s interesting because Amy (Rose McGowan) makes a lot of homophobic comments.
Gregg Araki: She makes a lot of angry comments in general [laughs.] She’s an angry character.
Joshua Encinias: Xavier and Amy are the only characters who’ve done really bad stuff, but Jordan is the one who ends up paying for their sins, in a way. I say that because there’s so much Christian apocalyptic imagery in the movie, and you sacrifice the innocent one.
Gregg Araki: The film’s idea is the sacrifice of the lamb. The universe of the movie is a chaotic, violent, and irrational universe and my thought of his character is that he’s too innocent for this world. He’s almost a Christ-like character. There’s a definite symbolic reading of his character as that figure.
Joshua Encinias: Will you talk about the apocalyptic imagery throughout your other movies? Where does your religious influence come from, and were you raised religious?
Gregg Araki: No, I was not raised religious at all. When people ask me what religion I am, I always tell them I’m a bowler because my family used to go bowling on Sunday mornings. It was always a family thing in the same way that other families go to church. I’m so grateful to my parents for the upbringing that I had because I didn’t grow up with that fire and brimstone, “You’re gay so you’re going to hell” angst and anxiety that you would put on a young person.
The imagery comes from that sense of being young and in existential gloom and doom. I look back at the ‘90s and ask, “What were we so worried about?” It was actually a cheerful and utopian place versus the 2020s, where it’s literally like the apocalypse is at our doorstep. I think every age has its level of that sense of despair.
Joshua Encinias: I want to talk about how you use color in this movie. There’s a scene where the trio is running from a convenience store…
Gregg Araki: That’s one of my favorite shots of my entire career!
Joshua Encinias: … and the walls are lit with different colors. I feel like you’re a filmmaker who really appreciates color.
Gregg Araki: One of the things about my movies, and The Doom Generation in particular, is I grew up reading comic books. I wanted to be a comic book artist and I used to draw my own when I was a kid. I’ve always been super interested in this stylized reality. I’m just not of that school of quasi-documentary, shaky camera, ugly lighting, everybody-looks-green kind of filmmaking.
That’s like the opposite of what my movies are and that’s why filmmakers like David Lynch are such a huge influence on me. The world created by my movies is specifically one that is created. I mean, it’s a subjective reality. It’s stylized. It’s beautiful. It’s carefully composed. The hairstyles, the colors, the costumes, everything is designed not to be real.
This hyper-reality or this meta-reality is more like expressionism and expresses the interior states of the characters. It’s just what I’ve been interested in as long as I’ve been making movies. Nothing is really accidental. It’s all created and it’s all intentional.
But the scene you’re talking about is one of those accidental things in the sense that it was just a location that we found. We didn’t paint those walls; those walls were those colors. The DP lit them to accentuate that, but this location that we found just happened to work out. It was one of those happy accidents and I was so excited when I saw it come to life.
Joshua Encinias: The way you construct your images reminds me of Jean-Luc Godard’s work during his first 10 years making movies. Are you still a big Godard fan all these years later? And how did you react to his assisted suicide?
Gregg Araki: Well, I was sad, but what a fucking life! He’s a giant of cinema. During my undergraduate, right before I started at USC film school in the ‘80s, one of my last classes was a Godard class and we watched his early movies from ‘59 to ‘69, as well as some of the later ‘70s stuff.
I was 20 years old and really at the peak of my absorbing the things that were going to make me who I am as a filmmaker, and I spent a whole quarter watching Godard movies. I was just so inspired and excited and blown away. As a wannabe filmmaker, it was one of the most important things that could ever happen to me. The idea that he would just create these movies that were revolutionary and completely changed the language of cinema.
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It was funny, though, because I had a teacher at USC who was like ‘Godard-schmudard.’ But both experiences were super important to me because I was learning the impact of someone like Godard, and then also figuring out how to navigate that within the USC system which was structured very much like Hollywood. I was the artsy indie kid in this structure of “We want to turn out these mainstream filmmakers.” It was all seminal to my development.
Joshua Encinias: How do you explain the state of the industry right now?
Gregg Araki: Streaming has created fragmentation in the industry. When I was in film school, TV was over here and films were over here. Filmmakers worked from the paradigm of wanting to be an auteur and now it’s shifted, and I just find it’s a really exciting time in terms of cinema because nobody knows what the rules are. The whole landscape is just shifting astronomically.
Joshua Encinias: What’s an example of what you’re talking about?
Gregg Araki: I was reading this interview with Mike White because I love The White Lotus, especially Season 2. I found it just so brilliantly written. White said he’s doing the same thing he’s been doing for 25 years, it just so happens that all of a sudden he’s in the zeitgeist, and he doesn’t know how that even happened.
Because if you look at The White Lotus, it’s very indie, it’s very Mike White. It’s not like he’s trying to sell out or anything. It just so happens that it became the flavor of the moment. When you look at Everything Everywhere All at Once, that’s a fucking crazy, weird, indie movie, and all of a sudden it won Best Picture at the Oscars.
I remember when No Country for Old Men won the Oscar, it was also like, “How did this happen? How did this movie just win Best Picture?” Nobody knows what’s happening, especially now with the bottom falling out of the industry.
I got to make Now Apocalypse, my dream TV show. It’s the thing I’ve always wanted to do. It happened because of the TV explosion and those circumstances let me make the craziest show I could possibly make. So it’s really an interesting time to be a filmmaker. It’s scary in the sense that nobody knows what’s happening, but as an indie filmmaker, you never know what’s going to happen. It’s a crazy time, but it’s just like… we soldier on.
Main image: The Doom Generation, by Gregg Araki. Courtesy of the Criterion Collection.