- Desire Is the Catalyst: Gregg Araki on “I Want Your Sex” (July 30, 2026)
With “I Want Your Sex,” Gregg Araki mounts a long-awaited return to filmmaking in the same surreal, provocative key that long ago cemented his status as a true icon of queer independent cinema.
At the center of his latest is a volatile BDSM relationship that develops between contemporary artist Erika Tracy (Olivia Wilde) and her studio assistant Elliott (Cooper Hoffman), one charged by their obviously exploitative power imbalance and complicated additionally by their failure to communicate across generational lines. Araki’s playfully anarchic comedy—in US theaters starting this week, via Magnolia Pictures—has been broadly described as a “dominatrix drama.” But in typical Araki fashion, it fluctuates boldly between tones and sensibilities, splashily subverting its own premise with elements of art-world satire, film-noir pastiche, and hyper-pop surrealism.
Like Araki’s seminal “Teen Apocalypse” trilogy—“Totally F***ed Up,” “The Doom Generation,” and “Nowhere,” three caustic time capsules of Gen X youth in revolt—and his other best-known work, all considered part of the New Queer Cinema movement of the 1990s—his latest film is exuberantly stylized and at times jarringly provocative. It’s also, as Araki recently discussed in an interview with RogerEbert.com, something of a “love letter” to its target audience, departing from the nihilistically violent endings of his earlier films to suggest something hopeful—if also impish and ironic—about the perpetual plight of sexually confused twentysomethings.
Ahead of the US theatrical release of “I Want Your Sex,” Araki sat down to discuss Wilde’s movie-star mystique, the intersection of artifice and intimacy in his filmmaking, and the fire of sexual desire he prays is still burning inside Gen-Z audiences.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
“I Want Your Sex” is your first theatrically released feature in 12 years, since “White Bird in a Blizzard,” but you’d encountered Karley Sciortino’s original script even earlier than that previous project. How did the character of Erika Tracy emerge over that time, and what changed when Olivia Wilde entered the picture?
It’s been a long journey. I first read Karley’s original spec script in 2012 or 2013; that’s how I first met her. Erika Tracy was not in that script; it was a female intern and a male boss. Erika did not really appear until there was a version of the movie I was trying to make around 2015; it fell apart, as various other movies happened. In 2017, around #MeToo, I remember thinking, “I really don’t want to see a woman get dragged around by the hair, even in a consensual relationship.” I don’t want to kink-shame anybody, but it was just not an image I was comfortable with.
I got the idea to flip-flop the sexual roles and make it a male sub and a female dom, which was so much more interesting, and that gave rise to the Erika Tracy character. I thought of Erika as being a cross between Robert Mapplethorpe and Madonna: this larger-than-life, provocative, polarizing, and charismatic figure—like a movie star—of the art world. That character would so easily draw in Cooper’s character; he obviously wouldn’t be able to resist her. She was, to me, almost a sex superhero; it actually describes her in the script as that.
We had been trying to make the movie, and it had been a long, long journey. Olivia wasn’t even on my radar, but my manager slipped the script to her agent without telling me; then she was like, “Oh, Olivia Wilde read this script and wants to meet.” I was like, “Olivia Wilde? That’s a fucking cool idea.” I’ve been a fan of hers forever, since she was on “The O.C.”
A bisexual icon from the start, on that series.
From the start! Olivia’s totally like a ’40s movie star; she has that presence, those cheekbones. It’s everything about her; she feels like Greta Garbo or Ingrid Bergman. She’s an old-time movie star, and I feel like Hollywood didn’t really know what to do with her. She would just be the wife or the girlfriend or the hot mistress. I think that’s why she read the script and was like, “Oh, this part’s so juicy! It’s so fun! It’s such a cool character to play. It’s not just the hot girlfriend I always am.”
Olivia was so cool and fearless. I told her, in that very first meeting, “Whoever does this part, they have to not give a fuck about what people are gonna think, what they’re gonna say. She told me that she was down, that this was what she wanted to do, and so we met up. 48 hours later, the movie was financed, so it came together very quickly from there. We got Cooper involved because he had such great chemistry with Olivia.
From the start, out of the gate, she knew exactly what she wanted Erika Tracy to be; another aspect of casting Olivia is that she’s that type of actor that can pull off anything: any hair, makeup, costume. And that’s what I wanted her to be like. The different eras of Madonna, all those different kinds of personas and images she’s embodying—Madonna’s coffee table book, Sex—was all a big part of the character.
“I Want Your Sex.” (Magnolia Pictures)
You do cultivate this movie-star mystique, to a degree, with the Erika Tracy character, though elements of kink, BDSM, and queer sexuality all subvert it. The film, more broadly, is engaged with ideas of sex, beauty, and desire—as well as with elements of fantasy and role play that seem linked to its engagement with cinema, especially to opening with this film-noir frame reminiscent of “Sunset Boulevard.”
I think of the film as a funhouse, despite being about this dark obsession. I didn’t want to make a movie that was too dark, bleak, or pessimistic, given the hellscape of a world that we’re living in. Personally, as a moviegoer, I can’t watch films that are too dark or dystopian, because the world is so apocalyptic right now. I knew that I wanted it to be very pop and fun.
In all my movies, but this one in particular, there is definitely a reflection on film history. In the script development, the sense of “Sunset Boulevard” came through; the whole film-noir framework of the movie was, for me, very inspired by those ’80s Almodóvar movies “Law of Desire” and “Matador.” I started calling it “preposterous film noir,” with these very convoluted film-noir storylines that—like “The Maltese Falcon”—never really make sense.
The film-noir aspect of the movie comes from those stylized Almodóvar films that aren’t meant to be taken at face value, even though there’s also the interrogation room from “Se7en,” which feels like it’s in a totally different movie. The world of the film is such an entertaining amalgamation of all these things: film history, movies I’ve seen, popular culture.
It’s interesting you bring up Almodóvar because, across a lot of the films that you’ve made and across his films as well, there’s a unique relationship between artifice and authenticity, and with where intimacy and desire exist between those two polarities. In this film, the language of sex constantly sets up contrasts: intimate but not necessarily honest, performative but personal. Tell me about the atmosphere and the aesthetics of “I Want Your Sex,” how one starts to flesh out a world this stylized and expressive.
My movies tend to be “not real.” My movies tend to be heightened, accentuated, stylized. The colors, the compositions, the sets, as with Almodóvar movies, which also aren’t real, feel like you’re in a different world. As a filmmaker, that’s something I really appreciate—particularly “Law of Desire,” which is one of my favorite movies of all time. I first saw it in the late ’80s. I was just starting to make movies, and that was a big influence on me. The authenticity and intimacy of the sex scenes in that movie, and also “Matador,” were very inspiring to me.
That’s, I think, why sex and sexuality, and those intimate moments, have been so much a part of all my movies from the start. There is definitely contrast between these intimate, very real moments and a broader context of the universe around them, which is stylized, surreal, and “not real,” while the intimacy is real on a human level.
That’s a testament to the actors and their ability to sell what the movie is selling; they sell those moments. I never tell my actors, “This is really theatrical and stylized.” It’s like, “It’s real to them.” I remember, when Olivia and Cooper had their first chemistry read, that relationship’s real, and the conflict there is real. Going around them gives me the latitude to do whatever I want to do in terms of lighting, design, color, wardrobe—as long as that central, human part is authentically there.
Director Gregg Araki on the set of “I Want Your Sex.” (Magnolia Pictures)
The film is very engaged with our contemporary moment, in how it senses isolation and loneliness in people’s relationships to sex, to performance; the way young generations are constantly mediating their interactions through social-media platforms, performing their identities in many senses. How did you determine the specific types of BDSM, the specific kind of role play, you wanted to include in this film?
Erika is very much a mouthpiece for me; a lot of the things she says in the movie about younger generations not having sex, about the fear of missing out on the formative sexual years of your life, are relevant to my ideas. My whole life—my career, my art, my personality, my character—is all formed through the sexual adventures I’ve had and sexual mistakes I’ve made at confusing times in my life. It all forged me as a person, and it’s been a very important part of my evolution. I definitely relate to Erika’s character in that way.
But what Cooper’s character brings up is that his generation is the first generation that, literally from the time they were babies, had a phone in their hand. They’ve been attached to technology for so long, and it’s the notion that everything—because of social media, because phones are literally a part of people now—is being surveilled. What if I had not been sneaking out to a gay bar when I was nineteen or twenty years old? That was a primal experience in my life. That was the step out of the door into the world that made me the person that I am. I had to do that on my own, and it was sex that drove me there. It was also this private, secret activity.
Would I have done it if there’d been cameras everywhere and everybody was being surveilled? Kids don’t hit on each other in bars or clubs anymore, because they don’t want to be humiliated because somebody’s videotaping them going up to the pretty girl, going, “Would you like to dance?” and she’s like, “Fuck you,” and then you end up on Instagram. It’s why kids don’t drink anymore. They don’t want to get too drunk at the party, throw up on someone’s shoes, get videotaped, and be humiliated.
That’s a new kind of fear around exploring sexuality, and it’s not completely unfounded.
It’s all about fear and anxiety, and it’s absolutely real. People need privacy. They need things that are not public; they shouldn’t be made public. We live in this odd time. I absolutely empathize with that feeling of what Cooper says in the movie: “We’re afraid of making a mistake.” And what Erika tells him is that being young is making mistakes. Being young is fucking up. Being young is doing the wrong thing and learning from it. How else are you going to learn about life? And that’s definitely a paradox.
I don’t want to preach at or lecture anybody, to tell people what to do. I just want to open a conversation for people to talk about this; I want you to go out with your friends to the bar after the movie and just discuss, pick a side, and argue for it or against it.
As you mentioned, Erika is seen quoting sentiments you’ve expressed in interviews, but Elliott is another type of director surrogate for you; Cooper Hoffman had his ear pierced, and he has tattoos on his hands as you do…
That’s very intentional. Erika is very much not based on me. I don’t fuck my interns. I don’t do the stuff that she does. But a lot of her care, her passion, and her feelings about sex and sexuality come from me; literally, that interview on the laptop when Cooper’s character sees her for the first time, that’s Olivia quoting an interview I’d done. Those are literally things I’ve said. I definitely relate to her.
But, at the same time, I relate to him, in the sense that he to me is what I was like when I was twenty-two years old: “I want to be an artist. I don’t know what I’m going to do. I don’t know what my life will be.” Cooper pierced his ear for the movie because I have my ear pierced; then we put tattoos on him, like my tattoos. I did very much base his character, and where he’s at in life as a fledgling artist, on what I was like when I was his age. It’s young me fucking older me.
To take that even further, every character in “I Want Your Sex” refracts a certain version of you, expresses a specific sexual attitude, or in some other way is reminiscent of your past work. So many different past collaborators of yours pop up in small moments—from “Nowhere,” from “Kaboom”—that further heighten this performative art-world setting. In bringing that all together, what conversations did you end up having with yourself about your body of work and its relationship to sexuality, to intimacy, to performance?
It’s definitely true. It’s been true of all my movies. It’s like, with “Doom Generation,” people are always like, “Oh, are you the Jimmy character?” People always think I’m the Jimmy character, because he’s part Asian. I’m always like, “I’m actually all the characters. And, actually, for “The Doom Generation,” I relate more to the Amy Blue character than the other characters, because that’s how I was in the mid-’90s: very snarky, very sarcastic, very fuck-you.”
Definitely, in this movie too, there are parts of me in everything. When the Mason Gooding character is saying, “I’m just fucking gay; I’m not pansexual or whatever,” that literally is something I’ve said before, about myself. When he’s like, “Oh, have you ever sucked a dick? Well, if you haven’t, then you’re straight, so knock it off,” his character is very much me in that moment.
“I Want Your Sex.” (Magnolia Pictures)
But there’s a wide array in everybody, in terms of the spectrum of sexuality in the movie. There’s Erika, who’s slept with men and women; she’s very sex-positive, performative, Madonna-esque, and very larger-than-life. She’s, in the truest sense of the term, a sex symbol. There’s Elliott, who’s young, exploring, trying to figure it out. There’s Apple, [played by Chase Sui Wonders,] who’s like—God only fucking knows. She’s just repressed and hasn’t figured out who she is yet. Hopefully she’s going to get there. I hope she is going to have a happy ending or happily ever after. There’s Charli [XCX,], whose character is very uptight, very not into sex at all, but maybe she really is into it—just not with the Cooper character. There are all kinds of colors along the spectrum there. There is definitely a lot going on in the film; it’s like “Nowhere,” in that way, in terms of its range of queer and straight relationships.
And they’re all ricocheting off one another, these embodied facets of you, in this colorful, pop-art space.
I really wanted to do something that was pop, fun, and innocent, as an antidote to the hellish times that we’re living in. It’s a world where kind of anything’s possible, and there are dark moments, but it’s not going to be deadly. I’ve certainly made darker movies in the past, like “The Doom Generation,” which ends on a very dark note. “Mysterious Skin” has a lot of darkness in it. With this movie, I really want people to have a good time. I want them to be provoked. I want them to be challenged. And there’s so much to talk about, I think.
In working with production designers, art directors, costume designers, set decorators, makeup artists, hair stylists, and so on to create the heightened reality of “I Want Your Sex,” tell me about working with limited resources—both in terms of budget and timing, given how quickly the production came together once Olivia was attached—while aiming so high visually.
I have been doing this for 35 years, so I’m very experienced, but the work I have done in television was intense. When we made Now Apocalypse, we shot ten episodes; I directed all ten, and we shot them in 40 days. We were shooting an episode every four days. I am very fast and very resourceful as a director. I had this movie in my head.
I knew what Erika’s office was going to be, and I had that in my head, this black box. The crazy thing about Erika’s office is that we were inside of it for eleven pages. It was a crazy amount of time to spend in this office, so it could not be a boring office. It had to have such life, and so I’d come up with this idea of a video painting behind her desk. I worked with Angelique Clark, an amazing production designer; we’d never worked together before, and she was so nervous about the level of ambition we were talking about, based on the schedule and the budget that we had. But she was so creative and really pulled a rabbit out of a hat to make this stuff happen.
She did a fantastic job, trying to create all of this. She’s the one who came up with that incredible orifice in Cooper’s bedroom, this hole in the wall that looks almost like a vagina; it does not make sense, in terms of what it is and how this kid could afford to live in an apartment that has this feature, but she saw a picture of it and brought it to me. She really got what we were trying to do. I want Charli’s bedroom to be monochromatic, with paint on the wall the same color as the sheets, and so she understood that. We were in this stylized world, and she brought so much to that vision.
In terms of actualizing it with Ari Phillips and Monica Chamberlain, the costume designers: Ari was Olivia’s idea, because they had worked together on “Don’t Worry, Darling.” I told Olivia, “Ari Phillips is never going to do this movie. She’s an Oscar-nominated costume designer. She is used to big-budget productions; she doesn’t do indie movies.” But she’d done “Hedwig and the Angry Inch,” so I said, “Let’s see.” Ari loved the script, she loved Olivia, and so she agreed.
“I Want Your Sex.” (Magnolia Pictures)
My favorite Ari story is that there’s that piece that Mason wears at the art show; it’s a one-piece mesh—it’s not mesh, it’s plastic, but you can see his body through it. I was at a fashion show, and I sent a picture of it to Ari, and I asked if we could find something like that for Mason. And Ari just responded, “Oh, that’s Christian Siriano. He’s a friend of mine.” And literally two days later, it was in the office, fresh off the runway. That’s how Ari is; she’s amazing. We got so fortunate with this movie in terms of all the right people at the right time.
“I Want Your Sex” features discussions of pornography, of contemporary art, of BDSM dynamics—but, at one point, the character of Yvette (Roxane Mesquida) comes into play as this European acquaintance of Erika’s, who draws a distinction between sex as performance and real eroticism. Where do you see eroticism existing in culture today and, if we’re proposing that Gen Z is struggling with sex and desire, where are they with eroticism?
I love the Yvette character—who was written for Roxane Mesquida, who’s been with me in “Now Apocalypse” and “Kaboom”—and her French outlook on eroticism. We live in such a crazy time right now. In the movie I’m working on right now, I invoke the Charles Dickens quote—“It was the best of times; it was the worst of times”—because there’s so much that’s terrible. The way social media is depleting everyone; you’re constantly being surveilled by the police; there’s this total lack of privacy. Nothing’s real anymore, nothing’s true anymore. It’s all breaking down. But, at the same time, there’s so much freedom and openness—at least for now, until the fascism really kicks in and the freedoms fall away, as they already have started to.
But eroticism… I do think, particularly for young people, there is a real sense of eroticism in pop culture. “Heated Rivalry” is such a phenomenon, which is fascinating to me. I love it, of course, but it’s so fascinating to me that it’s found mainstream success. As somebody who made “The Living End” in 1992, now wine moms in Santa Monica are obsessed with “Heated Rivalry.” The level of queer sex is essentially the same. It’s not porn, and it doesn’t cross that line into that kind of eroticism.
But I think porn, in a way, has been liberating, because of its accessibility. It is accessible to everybody—except children, of course. Children shouldn’t be watching porn—but if you were a closeted guy in like the ’40s or ’50s, what did you do for sex? What did you do for desire? Were you looking at Sears underwear ads? Now, every DL guy—and this is obviously true all over America—is watching gay porn; they have figured out this is what they want, and they’re on Grindr, trying to get it in real life. That’s so much bigger than it ever was. They’re not necessarily out. They’re not necessarily bi or pan; they’re still married with their kids and under homophobic laws, but there is a level of participation. They’re having gay sex. In this modern world, where everything is a free-for-all, there is still eroticism.
That’s true, too, for Gen Z. I do think of “I Want Your Sex” as a sex-positive love letter to Gen Z, saying, “Kids, I’m not going to tell you what to do, but think about this, discuss it, talk about it.” There is this level of access they have. Think about somebody like Lil Nas X; he’s a little bit of a tragic character, but his version of Black queer sexuality never would have happened in ’60s, ’70s, even ’80s culture. Prince in the ’80s, at the height of his androgyny, was not where Lil Nas is: so unapologetically queer and so out there with it. That’s a sign, for Gen Z in particular, that they have an awareness of it, which is so important, because that openness is critical for any progressive nature to move us forward.
It’s easier for us as older people to forget they live in a different world. I was talking to Cooper about this; for my generation, as a post-sexual-liberation generation, lust or sexual desire is the catalyst. It’s the trigger. It gets you out of the door. It gets you out of the house. It gets you on Grindr. It gets you wherever you’re going to seek out that contact, that encounter, whatever it is.
Does Gen Z not have as strong a sex drive? Do they lack that desire, which is how they can sit back and think dating’s too hard? I wonder if technology’s somehow dampened that. When we were growing up, sex was all you’d ever think about. As a teenager, as an adolescent, full of hormones, you’re just constantly going to the next party, going to the dance, going wherever you’re going, seeking contact with that desire, that crush, that person: “I’m so in love with that person.” I wonder if it’s internal, if the fire of desire is not burning as intensely for them. But let us hope that fire is still there.
“I Want Your Sex” is in theaters July 31, via Magnolia Pictures.
- Fantasia 2026: Permanent Damage, Godhead, Sour Minnows (July 29, 2026)
After a verrry long and fruitful week in Montreal, I’m now back in Chicago. Festivals can wear and tear on even the most sleep-deprived critic, especially at a fest like Fantasia, where the sheer volume of films on display can be downright overwhelming. Even so, I was grateful for my time there, catching up with old critic friends, meeting distant faces for the first time, and most importantly, partaking in some crucial Fantasia Fest traditions.
Every year, the audience collectively picks some pre-show ad to go gaga over. In years past, it was an old ramen commercial that the crowds performatively hoot and holler over. We’ve also sung along to the Teotaxi jingle. This year, our target of collective ritual was the commercial for Montreal’s Montréal-Trudeau International Airport; the ad comes on, the audience goes wild, and we get to work clapping along with the slick, corporate thump of the ad’s backing track. (RogerEbert.com contributor Katie Rife, shouting at full volume: “I love the airport!”) Then, of course, the universal chorus of meows that happens before any Fantasia screening, an annual tradition that sparked (allegedly) when a 2007 screening of “Simon’s Cat” went dark, leaving audiences to meow at the screen while the projector figured it out.
Good vibes all around, right? Well, today’s dispatch lets us swim in the ocean of decidedly bad vibes, with a tryptich of tales of people living or moving in filth, or otherwise realizing the world around them is coming apart at the seams and there’s nothing we can do about it.
I’ve been a fan of Canadian filmmaker Seth A. Smith since I saw his slimy, claustrophobic sci-fi thriller “Tin Can” at a previous Fantasia; his latest, “Permanent Damage,” feels like if Harmony Korine directed an episode of “Letterkenny,” and I mean that with all the love and confusion that entails. Emerging as if reborn from a garbage bag dropped in a badbug-infested landfill, escaped convict Tommy Gods (Calem MacDonald) makes a mad dash for safety, only to get caught trying to steal clothes from a dollar store. The only thing that saves him is the intervention of old Mrs. Whynot (Clare Coulter), who rolls up to him and assures the security guard that this is her son, Donnie. Of course, she’s not playacting; she’s deeply senile, but Tommy sees a chance for respite and goes with her to her run-down home.
The rowhome becomes the setting for Smith’s queasy, surreal hangout crime picture, as Tommy adopts Donnie’s old life and starts spending time with the other crazy characters who sit and while away their lives among the flotsam that collects on their front lawn. He even starts falling in love with the beautiful young Joe (Olivia Scriven), a match made in heaven if not for the fact that her uncle, LL (Stephen Dorff), is their maniacal landlord, who’s all too eager to kick out Mrs. Whynot and tear the place down as tribute to the almighty gods of gentrification. All the while, Tommy and Joe look for a way to escape their life of poverty and save their flop house from LL’s white-hot sociopathy—a scheme that might involve a magic drug whose provenance is a highly lucrative secret, and a spoiler it’s best not shared here. (At the screening, they handed out ‘brown dot’s in little baggies and instructed us to take them at a particular point in the movie; once you find out what they actually are, you grow to regret it.)
Smith’s film is steeped in the modes of pop-punk slacker films from the 1990s, with crunchy EDM tracks sitting nicely alongside Julien Ferland’s ambient drone-heavy score. There’s a thick, ill fog in the film’s atmosphere, from the sight of wrecking balls slowly demolishing people’s homes to the hypnotic expansion of insulation foam being sprayed from a gun (an image Smith returns to several times with great effect; it’s everything from subtextual whitewashing of the realities of poverty to a comical weapon in the right hands). The cast inhabits their roles with delightful strangeness, including Dorff at his most pent-up and angry and one-scene wonder Stephen McHattie as an oddball drug kingpin who spends his time in a hot tub murmuring nonsense about crypto while a furry gives him an underwater blowjob.
It doesn’t all quite hold together, and “Permanent Damage”‘s quirks start to grow a bit stale as the film goes on. But I love the way Smith cares for these working-class characters, even as they shit, piss, and stick themselves to chairs; they’re doing everything they can to cling to what little the world leaves them, and finding what little happiness they can find. Decidedly welcome anti-landlord cinema.
Another returning golden boy from the fest is Mark H. Rapaport, whose previous film “Hippo” has frequently been compared to “Dogtooth” in its tale of stunted fucked-up childhoods; now, he’s back with “Godhead,” a religious thriller that feels like another Yorgos joint, “Bugonia,” with its tale of a pair of dangerous, oddball siblings (Sarah Coffey, “Hippo” star Kimball Farley) holding a middle-aged priest (Al Warren) with his own secrets hostage in his own church. The pair have a holy mission for Father: They know that one of them is the physical manifestation of the Holy Ghost, and require him to judge which one fits the Godhead. Then, by sunrise tomorrow, he must shoot them dead with the Smith & Wesson they helpfully bring along.
Rapoport lays down the building blocks of his tight, cohesive script so elegantly, sitting with Warren’s lonely, conflicted priest for a good long while before Firstborn and Secondborn are even introduced. William Babcock’s black-and-white cinematography, boxed in true Academy ratio, keeps us confined in the staid, austere walls of the lonely country church that is our stage. We see Father raising a young boy (Luke Speakman) dropped on his doorstep as a baby, clearly with love but with disquieting protectiveness, as he keeps the boy locked in a windowless room and blares apocalyptic sounds from loudspeakers to sell the notion that the world outside his walls is naught but hellfire.
Then the twins arrive, and “Godhead” turns into a locked-room psychological thriller that feels at once like a particularly potent episode of “The Twilight Zone” and evokes some of the best works of folk horror and religious torment. The cast is uniformly excellent; Green plays Father as a man sprinting toward faith to avoid the difficult choices, both past and present, he’s had to make. Coffey and Farley, for their part, are suitably macabre, the former all wily impulse and Farley as the twitchy, childlike counterpart. The script’s twists and turns remain surprising, even as some third-act developments teeter towards the absurd in ways that let down the sizzling tension of the first two acts. Even so, this is a film playing merrily with ideas of faith, certainty, guilt, and responsibility towards our fellow creatures. It’s also one of the best films I’ve seen at the fest.
Closing off our bad vibes trilogy is “Sour Minnows,” a film which also pairs nicely with fellow Fantasia entry “Dance Freak” in that they’re depictions of flagging men slowly watching in horror as their worlds implode around them in increasingly refractive ways. It begins, as all movies should, with the sight of several humans frantically licking the concrete of a Los Angeles street; the sight is witnesed by two slacker roommates, Ricky (David Brown) and Tepper (Chase Williamson), who can barely comprehend what they’ve just seen. Ricky, for his part, blocks it from his memory.
But the two slack-jawed zennials are forever changed by this sight, and as Harrison Atkin’s feel-bad comedy continues, the walls between time and memory and sanity start to collapse in ways that challenge even “Sour Minnows”‘ most willing viewers.
Speaking honestly, it would almost be folly to try to explain the linear plot beats of “Sour Minnows,” as Ricky, in particular, disappears down Lynchian rabbit holes of recursion and lost time and the collapse of all sense of reality, Atkins dragging us along for every blackout chapter and surreal encounter. This makes the actual film itself hard to parse, the only real throughline being watching Ricky’s slack-jawed descent into dissociation, with only friend and love interest Aura (Suzanna Son) offering tidbits of coherence in the form of a “Yellow Thing” that unravels your reality and gives you a “permanent state of déjà vu.”
Of course, the impulses behind Atkins’ madness are deeply relatable: Ricky’s day job is to help train an AI therapy chatbot, while he desperately tries to get a filmmaking career off the ground (he’s got plans for two shorts and a music video, none of which are explained in great detail). All the while, the news sputters nonsense at us and content comes and goes without us even remembering we’ve watched it (as evidenced by Ricky and Tapper trying to watch the signature film of a famous actor the news tell them has died; By the time Ricky’s plugging in the laptop to watch their torrented copy, Tapper is telling him they watched it already).
Watching “Sour Minnows” feels like experiencing a nervous breakdown; as someone who’s had them before, Atkins nails the sensation of your own understanding of yourself and the world being unmoored. Have you watched that movie already? How long have we been seeing each other? Did what I just experience really happen? What did I even do yesterday? For all its confusion, Atkins’ film does capture that feeling of being trapped in your own existential collapse. And for that, it’s a strangely comforting feeling. The world makes less sense every day, but at least we’re not alone.
- Raise Your Hopeful Voice: Glen Hansard (1970-2026) (July 29, 2026)
“They love music, and they’re not faking it. We sense to a rare degree the real feelings of the two of them; there’s no overlay of technique, effect or style.” – Roger Ebert on “Once”
The world was shocked by the tragic passing of Glen Hansard on Wednesday, July 29, 2026, after an early morning motorcycle accident in Dublin. In the review quoted above, Roger nails what so many loved about the frontman of the Frames and Oscar winner for “Once”: Real feelings. You could sense the emotion in his voice every time he chose to gift it to people. “Once” was a perfect amalgamation of musician and filmmaker as writer/director John Carney used his growing filmmaking skills to spotlight the raw emotion of Hansard and his co-star Marketa Irglova. It’s a beautiful, perfect movie, one that means a great deal to me personally, and one that no one will be able to watch again in quite the same way, as it’s now going to have an undercurrent of tragedy at a life taken far too young.
Hansard was already a star in some circles, certainly in Ireland, when “Once” dropped at Sundance in early 2007. In the ‘90s, the Dublin-based musician fronted the Frames, who released six albums, and he appeared memorably in Alan Parker’s “The Commitments,” a movie that has gained cult status in the years since its release, often on lists of the best Irish films of all time. But Hansard dedicated himself to music for the 16 years between Parker and Carney’s films, segueing to a project called The Swell Season in 2006, which led into the success of “Once.”
Made for almost nothing, “Once” is really a collaboration between bandmates. Carney was the bassist for the Frames, and Hansard was initially just a creative partner on the film, sharing stories about his days as a busker to inform the narrative. It was originally intended to star Cillian Murphy, but Hansard eventually stepped into the role, collaborating completely with Irglova and Carney on the low-budget production, which shot in just over two weeks with a shoestring crew. The improvised, DIY nature of “Once” fit the material perfectly. It’s a film about the power of collaboration—how a person can bring out the best in you through art—and it’s a mirror of that theme through its own existence. It’s no wonder Michael Phillips named it the best film of 2007, a year that also included modern masterpieces like “There Will Be Blood,” “No Country for Old Men,” and “Zodiac,” along with Roger’s 2007 #1, “Juno.” It’s that powerful.
Personally, “Once” was a turning point for this specific film lover. The theater kid who thrives on creative collaboration was always going to adore Carney’s movie, but it also launched at a time when I was really trying to find my voice as a critic. Being able to speak to Carney, Hansard, and Irglova about a movie I loved was inspiring, teaching me to often embrace a writing style that emphasized how a movie made me feel as much as anything. I owe them a great deal that I can never repay.
“Once” would go on to win the Oscar for Best Original Song (despite some controversy given it had appeared on The Swell Season album before the movie) and took home the Independent Spirit Award for Best Foreign Film before being adapted into a hit Broadway musical.
Hansard used the success of “Once” to explore his own creative interests. He did a song for “I’m Not There” for Todd Haynes, often appeared on stage with Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam, and popped up on soundtracks like “The Hunger Games” and “Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet.” He had sporadic acting appearances like episodes of “Parenthood,” “The Last Man on Earth,” and Joe Wright’s underrated “Cyrano,” and he recorded music consistently, releasing five solo albums and collaborations with the Frames and The Swell Season.
Collin Souter, one of our writers, was also a huge Hansard fan, and shared the following:
“I first saw Glen’s band, the Frames, in 1998 in a small bar somewhere near New Lenox, IL. I had never heard of them, but my friend told me the long-haired guitar player from ‘The Commitments’ is the lead singer. That sold me enough. When we got there, we saw this six-piece band (with a violin player, unheard of in 1998) tucked away in a corner of the place. It wouldn’t surprise me if they were all plugged into the same outlet. That lead singer no longer had his long, curly hair, but he charmed the hell out of all of us with funny stories to go along with almost every song. His performance for each tune was magnetic. His eyes were often closed for the slower songs, wide open with joy for the more upbeat ones, and always commanding every drinker’s attention. You just felt that this setting was wrong for this band. Their sound was too big for a small, rustic place like this. I became an instant fan and immediately bought their latest album, Dance the Devil, which did not disappoint.
I think the moment I knew I was a fan was when he told the story of the song “Fitzcarraldo,” which was also the name of their second album (and where you’ll also hear the first version of “Say It To Me Now,” the song that opens “Once”). He told the story of the Werner Herzog film that inspired it. “It’s the story of a man pulling a ship over a mountain. I thought that was a lovely idea, so I wrote a song about it. I think we’re all pulling stuff over mountains.”
One of my favorite Hansard moments unfolded at Shane MacGowan’s funeral, where the singer covered The Pogues’ timeless “Fairytale of New York” in a way that made the event unforgettable. It’s somehow both melancholic and joyful at the same time; it’s a celebration and a eulogy. It is so Irish. And so powerful. I’ve watched it 100 times, and it has never failed to move me, and I share it with you below as a final tribute.
Listen to music in Glen’s honor today. Heck, maybe even create some of your own.
- Season Two of “Diarra from Detroit” is Nancy Drew for Grown-Ups (July 29, 2026)
Sprinkled throughout the narrative of the sophomore season of “Diarra from Detroit” (relocated to Paramount+ after the shuttering of BET+ this year) are references to beloved stories in which a gang of friends comes together to solve a puzzle. “Scooby-Doo” gets a shoutout, so does “The Goonies.” But in the opinion of this writer, season two, which changes course from Diarra’s schoolteacher career to life as a burgeoning private eye, shares considerable DNA with Nancy Drew. There’s a hunt for an antique desk, secret societies, shifting alliances, and wisecracking friends at one’s side the whole way through.
And as an inveterate Nancy Drew fanatic, I gobbled this up like summertime TV catnip. Like most mysteries starring the Mustang-driving P.I., “Diarra from Detroit” does have one subplot too many, and more side characters than necessary. Despite its flaws, the series succeeds almost entirely on the basis of its cast’s crackerjack comedic timing and endless charm. It might be the year’s best hangout sitcom, if the definition of hangout sitcom can be expanded to include gang wars, conspiracy theories, and ticking biological clocks.
Season one ended with Diarra Brickland (Kilpatrick) successfully locating her missing Tinder date Chris (Shannon Wallace). Now she finds herself wrestling with existential questions that make hunting for a good partner seem tame in comparison. For example, was Chris’s mother Vonda (the inimitable Phylicia Rashad) involved in his kidnapping? Does she (Diarra) want to become a mother? How will she and Chris make rent until school starts in the fall? With few options left, the pair agree to find Chris’s Uncle Ron’s missing desk, last seen being hauled (read: stolen) out of Ron’s home by his nephew, Booker.
And thus begins an absolute citywide whirlwind, almost none of which I am permitted to discuss in this review. “Diarra from Detroit” is as much a dark comedy as it is a crash course in Detroit history: every episode sports a dizzying array of facts about the city during different periods, including its role in the Underground Railroad, Prohibition, its Motown heyday, even its urban design, not to mention thoughts on the city’s more remote areas. Woven throughout all this is the quest for a handcrafted desk concealing a secret, warring factions hunting for both the secret and for Diarra, and enough physical comedy to keep things light.
As good as the writing is—and it is indeed very good, with rapid-fire jokes and plenty of running gags—it is the cast that really delivers on this show. I breathed a sigh of relief when I saw DomiNque Perry and Bryan Terrell Clark return as Aja and Tea, respectively; there is no Diarra without her best friends (just as there is no Nancy Drew without Bess Marvin or George Fayne). I could do with more Aja than I got this season, because when Perry, Clark, and Kilpatrick fill the frame, something wonderful happens. One sequence in particular involves Perry and Kilpatrick in disguise, while another involves the trio in a kiddie pool; both are comedy gold and made my sides hurt from laughing. Above all else, this is the friendship that would drive a viewer to return to the series, which is why there ought to have been more of it this season.
Each episode is guided by Diarra’s voiceover; she rewinds the narration to go back in time, she gives “adventure tips,” explains her choices, and overall reminds the viewer that she cannot always make the healthy, sound choice. This could be a crutch in a lesser show, but combined with the no-nonsense attitude of Diarra’s friends, this device winds up making the writing deeply attuned to the audience’s expectations. If you’re thinking it, there’s a good chance that in the next minute or two a character might be saying it. There is a surprising level of relatability in the choices these characters make, especially since this is a story where little is going well, and a lot of people are dropping dead.
Kilpatrick, for her part, brings a good deal of the pathos this season. Attired in Dominique Dawson’s eye-catching costumes (the mango minidress, gold trench coat, rust pencil skirt, velvet teal bodycon dress, and countless other looks are all exquisite), she shifts easily from withering sarcasm with cops who don’t take her seriously to tense vulnerability with her traumatized boyfriend. Still, juggling as many narrative plates as the story demands would be tough for anyone, let alone a performer half as charming as Kilpatrick, so it does all come apart a bit by the end. But no matter. It’s still compelling watching Diarra trying to talk her way out of the hairiest of situations, even when she knows that sometimes, there simply is no exit strategy.
“Diarra from Detroit” gets a bit convoluted this season, but its production design, hilarity, and charm cannot take away from a central truth: this series is pure entertainment. Its soundtrack, its sensibility, its jokes all create a greater whole, one that feels energizing and comforting all at once. Watch weekly, instead of bingeing, to see what kind of hijinks the gang is up to this time. There might be no better antidote to the end-of-summer blues.
Entire season screened for review. Streams July 29 on Paramount+.
- Movies Aren’t Therapy: “Mike Mills” on Parents, Children, and Filmmaking (July 29, 2026)
In concept, Mike Mills is a comprehensive chronicler of his own fractured family dynamics. Three of his most recent (and well-known) films—2010’s “Beginners,” 2016’s “20th Century Women,” and 2021’s “C’Mon C’Mon”—tap into Mills’ anxieties around his strained, challenging relationships to his parents and the neuroticisms that come from the impossible act of parenthood.
In “Beginners,” thirtysomething graphic designer Oliver (Ewan McGregor) thinks back on his relationship to his father (Christopher Plummer, in an Oscar-winning performance) in his late coming out of the closet while he wrestles with his own commitment issues to his girlfriend (Melanie Laurent). The 1979-set “20th Century Women” looks back on a fictionalized version of Mills’ mother (played by Annette Bening), a child of the Depression so desperate to understand her rebellious teenage son that she recruits two younger women (Greta Gerwig and Elle Fanning) to help her guide his development. And “C’Mon C’Mon” follows a radio producer (Joaquin Phoenix) learning the challenges of parenthood when a family emergency requires him to take in his precocious nephew (Woody Norman).
In his films, parents and children are constantly figuring each other out in ways that surprise, delight, and sometimes disappoint them. And no matter what progress they may make, or how much effort they put in, there’s a melancholic acceptance that some gulfs will be impossible to reconcile.
These stories graft naturally onto Mills’ own life story: He grew up in 1970s Southern California to a mother and father he had difficulty connecting to. The former died of cancer in 1999; the latter came out as gay in the last years of his life, dying in 2004.
Mills worked as a graphic designer for clients like the Beastie Boys, Sonic Youth, and X-Girl before starting a career in music videos for acts like Air and Yoko Ono. His first film, 2005’s “Thumbsucker,” explored somewhat similar gulfs between parents and children. But this triptych of films feels like the purest expression of his ethos: gentle, experiential works that situate incredibly universal pulls for family and understanding in the broader context of America’s cultural shifts.
The Criterion Collection recognized these connections, too, which led to the recent release of “I’ll Remind You of Everything: The Films of Mike Mills,” a 4K UHD box set which includes remastered versions of all three films, and a bevy of extras that include several short films by Mills and two of his music videos.
For RogerEbert.com, Mike Mills sat down in the lead-up to the box set’s release to look back on these works within the broader context of his career, to probe the cultural contexts and formal evolutions he’s made in the ensuing years, and to ponder whether the kids are truly all right.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Obviously, we’re talking to you in the context of a big section of your work being packaged and celebrated in a Criterion box set, a distinction that cineastes often point to as inaugurating your work in a grand Canon of sorts. How do you feel about your works being, for lack of a better term, anointed in that way?
Really lucky; it’s lovely. They do such a great job, and Kim Hendrickson, who was my editor over there, did such a thorough job studying everything. You feel so taken care of and so seen. It’s a radically therapeutic process, and I’m really happy they did it. It has the last three features, but it also has a lot of my short films and music videos, which are really important to me. To be taken seriously as a filmmaker like that is quite something. It doesn’t get better, really, right? Honestly, the Academy is sort of like your alcoholic parent, and when they award you, you’re like, “Why?” Criterion is a kind of sage by contrast. To be in the company of all the other things they make and champion… I can’t even really look at it straight.
“Thumbsucker” is notably absent here. Was it a rights thing, or is it that these films feel so much like a unit?
It’s that they feel like a unit. Kim started talking to be around “Beginners,” and then “20th Century Women” came out, and she says, “Oh, it’s like a diptych.” And then “C’Mon C’Mon came out, and we realized it’s a triptych.
I didn’t intend this at all, but those three films are really a singular project, with lots of different avenues and doors to it. Kim saw that, and I was happy with that distinction. We were thinking of calling it “Parents and Children,” because it’s really all different ways of looking at the same parent-child dynamics. “Thumbsucker” feels like my starter marriage, you know? I learned how to be a filmmaker there, and I owe so much to all those actors. But it just didn’t fit the brief.
I’m sure that same calculus had to be made when figuring out which music videos or shorts to include, as well. You used the word ‘therapeutic’ earlier; obviously, these films feel therapeutic to watch, but were they therapeutic for you to make, considering how closely they hew to your relationship to your parents and parenthood?
So that’s interesting. I do a lot of therapy, and therapy’s been really important to me, and I’ve had these intense, complicated family situations with benefited from and qualified me for therapy. [Laughs.] But it’s really important to understand that the films aren’t therapy. They’re films. If I were really doing therapy in these films, I would be screwed. I’ve taken things I’ve learned about, processed, and churned over for a long time, and figured out a way to share them. The film part is the sharing part. It’s not like a therapy process. It’s much more chaotic, internal, and multi-layered.
I’m very interested in intersubjectivity, how two people change and affect and impact each other, which is in the zone of therapy. And I’m interested in the history, politics, and power of our emotions and emotional lives. Without therapy, I would not be the same filmmaker at all. But a lot of younger filmmakers come up to me and say, “I want to do therapy in a film,” and I’m like, “Don’t do that! You’re going to make the most self-concerned movie ever.” And I’m sure a lot of people find my movies to be like that.
There’s a real magical transformation that happens when you give a story to an actor and invite their authorship, invite their soul and life history to alter it, to transform it. There’s something really weird and deep about doing that. Having Christopher Plummer play my dad, or Annette Bening play my mom—they’re no longer solely my mom and my dad. These are characters and performances. And yet they teach me shit about my mom and my dad that I didn’t know about before I met those two souls.
It feels like you’re starting from the germ of those experiences with your parents, but in the course of creation, they’re abstracted into these broader ideas that feel universal—the struggle to understand your parents and where you fit in, and how they parent you. In “Beginners,” there’s a lot there about how late is too late to start your life over again…
Never! It’s never too late.
Right, but then you move into “20th Century Women,” and even “C’Mon C’Mon,” where there is a sense of urgency in the parent characters to make sure the kids are all right, to raise them in traditions and values that will set them up for success.
I don’t think there’s a neglectful parent in that world. I became a parent as I was writing “20th Century Women,” and a lot of what Annette says is what I said. That line, “You get to see him out in the world as a person; I never will”? I dropped my kid off at preschool when they were three, and watched them waddle off into this teacher’s arms, and I was suddenly out of their mind; they didn’t know I was still watching. I thought, “Oh, that person gets to see my kid in ways I never do.” I went home and wrote that line for Annette to say about me. You can start to play with these positions.
It’s interesting to speed-run these films and see your evolution as a filmmaker in microcosm. “Beginners” feels like this rougher, more immediate thing, with more handheld, whereas there’s something a little more structured and elegant about “20th Century Women.” Then “C’Mon C’Mon” plays out in this elegaic black and white. How did you, as a filmmaker, feel you were refining or adjusting your style as you progressed? Or was it a case of fitting the style to the project?
There are a lot of layers to answer that. One is that I am getting better over time. For this set, I had to recolor them all, so I looked at them all back-to-back, just as you did. I haven’t looked at those films since I finished them, and I realized I’m a lot better at background and camera placement and nuts-and-bolts things than I was during “Beginners.” I make a living not by doing these films, but by doing a couple ads a year, which throw you into all sorts of weird situations. It’s not a bad film school at all. You get tested all the time. So by the time I got to “C’Mon,” I felt a lot better about camera movement and placement, relationship to a location. Background actors are hard to get right. That’s an underrated part of the craft.
Another part, just to be real, is money. I made “Beginners” for $3 million, for 30 days of shooting. It was lucky it looks as good as it does. I had more money for “20th,” and then “C’Mon” was in the same budget realm, if you account for inflation. It’s funny, there’s a short film in the set called “Deformers,” one of the very first things I ever did, about [skateboarder] Ed Templeton. I watched that and thought, “Holy shit, I have not changed!” I still love to do a portrait; I love people’s objects. I really love using empty space as a way to talk about the person in that space. I like natural light; I like things to not feel heavy on the cinematic sauce. For as much as I’ve evolved, I’m really very much the same person.
Speaking of that notion of portraiture and ephemera, your first two films in particular use these montages and monologues to position your characters in cultural and political contexts: magazine ads, political photos, certain types of music. What do you get out of building these character beats through external materials?
The films are all about parents and children, and the back-and-forth of when each becomes the other. Back to “Beginners,” my dad’s innermost, personal part of his erotic life, his emotional life, was also part of 20th-century American oppression against queer people. The personal being political is always something that excited me. In the interview I did with Kirsten Johnson [in the set], I talk a lot about the book The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which does this all the time. There’s this constant trafficking across that spectrum of how those two things co-shape each other. How the most mysterious inner part of your being is actually part of history, gender, power.
I went to a very theory-laden, materialist kind of art school, so I’ve been thinking like this since I was 18. One of my first loves was the whole Godard French New Wave world, which was a lot about how we’re a part of history—albeit in a pop, irreverent, but also very Marxist way.
Going back to your thoughts on the engine and economics of filmmaking, where you make a lot of your personal money doing a couple ads a year…
And my health insurance, so I can be a dad. I’m a union member, but I get the union minimum each time. So for a five-year film, I get, like, minimum wage.
But I’m also thinking about how you got your feet wet doing music videos, which is a really interesting school of filmmaking for people of your generation. It feels like a bit of a dying art, because it’s harder and harder for music videos to get budgets and visibility.
Yeah, but people are still doing it. I have a lot of young filmmaker friends who are still coming up through music videos. In the American late capitalist model of trying to be an independent filmmaker, you have very few options. You don’t have government-funded arts or anything like that. So unless you go right into features, or come into filmmaking late (I was in my late twenties, watching Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry use ads and videos to get in on the filmmaking life), that was the hustle I learned. That’s the only way I’m gonna be able to do this game. When I started, it was film, and a lot of lights; you couldn’t edit on your Mac, and you needed money. It’s a bit more accessible now.
I think also the channels for visibility for those videos are different now—back then, when you were making them, they were often shown on MTV…
Barely on MTV. It’s really funny; I was a bit, but not much. As a filmmaker, you don’t exist unless you have an audience of some kind, and all the energy and effort that goes into making any film thing doesn’t exist unless people are watching it and reacting. So I did that Air video for “All I Need,” which is this documentary with this couple; I made it just thinking I was being a clever conceptual artist, and it happened to really connect with the couple in it because they live in the next town, and we’re all skaters. But people watch it, and they’re emotional about it; I didn’t know I could do that. The audience taught me what I was doing, and videos are great for that. They’re often an idea contest; even when I did the Talking Heads [“Psycho Killer”] video, I competed against, I don’t know how many directors. The band sees your treatment, which is a written script. It’s like writer-director school. How good is your idea? Then, I’ll let you direct.
It’s an interesting crash course, I’m sure. It feels like we’re existing in an age where that is happening in different channels as well, like the YouTuber-to-filmmaker pipeline, where you have to be scrappy and independent and craft that way.
But look at all the young director reels or young DP reels, and we’re really in the same boat. They’re still using music videos to get their reels going and get attention.
Going back to the films, though, we’ve talked about reinventing your parents through these characters in “Beginners” and “20th Century Women,” but all of these films also have a character that feels so intensely you, where your perspective is seen. What was it like giving yourself an avenue to re-explore yourself at various stages of your life through these projects?
My parents are pretty fucking fascinating; they really are. While we were close in lots of ways when I was a child, we’re not as close as I wanted, so I have a tremendous internal emotional engine to keep wanting to commune with them. And their moment in history is really crazy, loaded, and different from mine. But an important thing to note is that things that Christopher Plummer says in “Beginners” can be things that I, as the child, feel and say, and the same with Annette as things that I wrote as a parent. They all circle each other. One thing I often do in rehearsal is that I’ll have the parent and child switch lines. They’ll do each other’s dialogue, and it’s weird how some things suddenly make total sense. Like we co-make each other in these intense personal relationships.
The more I do these films, the more I realize that the children are the parents. Parents are the children. You are the enemy. The enemy is you. It’s a co-created identity. Ewan McGregor’s played me, Joaquin kind of played me, and Lucas played me. I don’t feel super tied to any of these characters; it doesn’t feel super personal. Obviously, it is in some ways, but when I see it, I think, there’s Joaquin doing his thing.
So much of these films are about people who are thrown together by familial ties trying to figure each other out, knowing you guys are fixtures in each other’s lives but not understanding each other. There are these gulfs, as you mentioned, of history and generation and political dimensions; Dorothea in “20th Century Women,” for instance, is both a product of the Great Depression and also struggling to get on board with the counterculture moment. I still think of the scene where she and Billy Crudup sit and really try to figure out Black Flag as a band.
That is very literally actually my mom; she totally did that and had the same critique.
But no one’s the bad guy. Everyone’s just trying to figure each other out, and there are just these walls.
I should probably have some more villains in these movies. Some more conflict would probably be good.
I don’t know if you thrive in that mode, honestly; I think you love this observational space where there’s empathy for every one of your characters, even when they cause pain.
Yeah, I guess even with empathy and love, you still cause each other pain. It’s impossible to understand the other person as much as you would like, or get everything that you want. That micro-scale is sort of my zone of interest.
Honestly, the villains of your movies are just broader concepts like capitalism and climate change and heteropatriarchy.
Or biological family.
True, and not even the family members; it’s the ties themselves.
They bring us together and tear us apart. All the families are broken too in my movies, so they have a non-traditional element to them.
Even Scoot McNairy in “C’Mon,” who is ostensibly the source of that film’s conflict, gets great empathy because he’s just struggling with mental illness.
He was so good, so visceral in that movie. But “Beginners” is a queer family, and there are other people in the family, like Hal’s friends and his lover. There’s the Billy character in “20th,” and “C’Mon” has an estranged brother and sister with a mother who caused problems, and the dad is gone. It’s like the families are on a spaceship, and it’s about how to keep the spaceship flying when it’s broken. It’s interesting because when someone says, “I make my films about family,” I say, “Wait a second!” Family means lots of things. I’m really interested in constructed families, not biological families.
I asked you this question five years ago when I talked to you for “C’Mon C’Mon,” and it’s related to a question Johnny asks the kids. I’m curious if your answer has changed. When you think about the future, how do you imagine it’ll be?
I have a 14-year-old kid, and when I hang out with them and their friends, I see all their amazing gender neurodiversity explorations, their politics, their awareness, their expansive digital Internet diaspora minds. And I feel great hope. They’re really exciting and interesting, and then they’re under so many crazy pressures I didn’t have to understand. All the same, I sense a great vitality and dexterity of mind and heart that feels new and interesting. There’s a fluidity and empathy that’s very 2.0 compared to the structures that created this person. I, and all my peers in my generation, feel positive when I think about the young folks.
