Gregg Araki, still L.A.'s homegrown punk provocateur, returns to remind us to be bold

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Set us as preferred At one of their earliest meetings before shooting “I Want Your Sex” (in theaters July 31), filmmaker Gregg Araki and actor Olivia Wilde got together at the historic Chateau Marmont, the ultra-hip hangout for entertainment’s cool crowd.Almost immediately, Araki began making fun of the shamelessness of the place, and before Wilde could feel self-conscious, she came around to laughing too.“Gregg is so completely un-Hollywood,” Wilde recalls during a recent video call, “that even just having a coffee at this place deserved to be remarked upon in a really hilarious way.”Though some actors might have been set back by the moment, for Wilde it helped seal her desire to star in an Araki movie.

“I Want Your Sex” is his first in 12 years, marking a brash and welcome return for a key figure from the revelatory New Queer Cinema movement of the 1990s.A recent Criterion Collection box set of Araki’s “Teen Apocalypse Trilogy,” three of his most influential ’90s movies, has helped bring his work — giddy and angry, graphically stylized, playfully provocative and steeped in pop-culture ephemera — to a whole new generation of audiences.“He’s just a different breed,” Wilde says of Araki.

“There’s absolutely nothing Hollywood about Gregg.”Except, of course, that he has long lived in Hollywood itself.Born to a Japanese American family in Los Angeles, Araki grew up mostly in Santa Barbara and returned to L.A.

to attend graduate film school at USC and has lived here ever since.All 12 of his feature films, including those not set in Los Angeles, have been shot here.

He recently told his manager he doesn’t want to take any TV directing jobs that require him to be out of town.“One of the things I’ve always loved about L.A.is it’s very surreal and kind of cartoon-like,” says Araki...