A throuple on the run from the law after a convenience store mishap becomes a murder. Gregg Araki’s 1995 cult hit The Doom Generation served as the middle entrant in his “Teenage Apocalypse” trilogy, bookended by 1993’s Totally Fucked Up and 1997’s Nowhere. In each, the filmmaker captured the pervading sense of ostracization that the emerging generation felt, rounding the ’90s on the heels of Reagan and the AIDS crisis continuing to push the belief that if you didn’t fit the perceived status quo then you didn’t have a place in America.

Graduating from USC’s School of Cinematic Arts with a deep bench of film knowledge, Araki came through the ranks alongside other of what would be dubbed the ‘Queer New Wave’ (folks like Todd Haynes, Gus Van Sant and producer Christine Vachon). These distinctive minds recognized film as the great equalizer—the North Star that brings those on the outskirts of society into a communal safe space—and crafted wholly unique additions into the cinematic canon.

Araki’s oeuvre is certainly something that resonated with me. Growing up in a small town in Delaware without another queer person in sight (that I knew of), I was introduced to The Doom Generation and felt a sense of recognition, that there was some part of myself reflected on the screen that I hadn’t even been fully aware of yet.

The Doom Generation centers on Amy Blue (Rose McGowan), her boyfriend Jordan White (James Duval) and the chaotic id of drifter Xavier Red (Johnathan Schaech), who s them on a road trip through strikingly colored motel rooms, violence-filled convenience stores and any number of anarchic ’90s clubs. Letterboxd reviews over the years have hit it with descriptors ranging from “a scathing indictment of the bigotry, homophobia and misogyny that exists within American society” to “John Waters’ Scott Pilgrim”, with the film existing firmly in a “love it or hate it” zone.

That’s exactly where Araki likes it, as you can see in the above video where we asked him to read what folks on Letterboxd have said about The Doom Generation. One review, from Diana, states “I just watched the director’s cut and I’m pretty traumatized but hey still my favorite movie,” referencing the several different versions of the film that have existed over the years. Originally premiering at the 1995 Sundance Film Festival, it was cut to smithereens in order to get into video rental stores, dismantling it beyond Araki’s vision. An unrated version has made the rounds on DVD for the past few decades, but even that rarity has poor sound and image quality, and leaves out a few crucial minutes.

At last, thanks to the help of longtime friend Marcus Hu and Strand Releasing, 2023 sees the arrival of a 4K restoration of Araki’s true cut of The Doom Generation, with the ideal sound mix and color palette he always intended for it to have. The new version premiered at this year’s Sundance, in the same theater he first bestowed his madcap vision upon audiences 28 years ago.

With the restoration making the rounds in select theaters now, I connected with Araki for a deep conversation on queer cinema, the nourishing process of bringing The Doom Generation back to life after all this time and what the film says about America and sexuality.

I have a friend of mine who lives here in LA. He grew up in South Dakota and has a similar story. He was sixteen and he saw Nowhere on a VHS tape or something, became obsessed with it, and eventually moved here. I always think of these kids in these red states, growing up so isolated and feeling like there’s no hope or anything. The idea that my films could bring some hope to those kids is huge for me.

You can see it all over the Letterboxd reviews, people who have those stories and can bond over how much Gregg Araki fucking rules.
That’s why I’m so excited about the remaster of Doom Generation because it can now be available for a whole new generation. The film hasn’t really been available for years. It’s on whatever, YouTube or something, [a] bootleg thing. I guess you saw the DVD of it?

Yeah, my friend had the DVD that was in circulation for a while, which I think is pretty similar to the new restoration, at least in of content.
There are three versions of the movie. There’s the kind of widely seen, unrated one, which was on the DVD and all that, but the problem with that one is it’s not properly mastered. It’s a pan and scan. It’s not even letterbox. It’s okay, but we recolored and remastered the whole movie. We remixed the whole thing, so the sound is so much better now, and the dialogue’s clearer. Especially the music is much more there and it’s much more rocking.

So, that version you grew up with was just this pan and scan. It’s a really, really beautifully shot movie. The DP and the production designer, Jim Fealy and the late Thérèse DePrez, they did such a fantastic job on it. I’m so thrilled that it’s restored. The difference in the new cut is actually mainly in the last reel: it’s the intensity of that final nightmarish scene. That scene is slightly longer now, because it was cut down a bit after premiering at Sundance. The distributors asked us to trim it down a little bit. It’s probably less than a minute longer, but it’s definitely a little more intense.

I’d say more than a little. [Laughs]
[Laughs] For people who felt the ending was not intense enough, it’s got a little more intensity to it. But the other version, the third one, is this horrible R-rated version that is literally under an hour. They cut twenty minutes out, and it’s so butchered. It was made without my approval. The distributors just took it because they needed to get it into Blockbuster to make five dollars or whatever. So there’s this version… It was on IMDb. I’ve seen it pop up, and I’m horrified every time I see it.

I’m really super glad about this new version, which can lay to rest all of the old versions. From here on, this is the only version that is approved. It was so great to get to go back and work on it again. I’ve learned a lot of stuff since 1995. It’s the same movie, but I got a chance to go back and tweak the colors a bit and tweak the sound and make it more, to me, contemporary and what I would’ve done if I’d made the movie today. It was really fun to go back and revisit it.

Seeing it with that crowd at Sundance this year, was there any noticeable difference for you in how that crowd was responding to it versus the original crowd back at the ’95 premiere?
I guess, yes and no. Not really, because the movie is such an intense ride. That’s one of the aspects of it, that it’s such a roller coaster when you’re watching it. It’s 83 minutes or something, so it just blasts off and you’re on this crazy trip. So in all the moments that are crazy or shocking or surreal or intense or sexy or whatever they are, that all got the reaction that I’m used to it getting.

One thing I did notice is that I the first time it screened, the last scene is so violent and so intense, and I just people being so shocked, but also just destroyed by it. I people walking out of the movie and being like zombies. We got more walkouts probably in ’95 than we got this year. We literally, I think, had one walkout. I think maybe because of the legend of the movie, people were more braced for it, as opposed to when they first showed up in ’95 and had no idea what to expect. There were almost no walkouts and the audience was … definitely blown away by the ending, but they were really excited. It was not just zombies walking out of the theater.

Your films introduced me to shoegaze and to Jesus and Mary Chain—they’re one of my all-time favorite bands. Your music taste very much informed my music taste.
Well, in the new version you can actually hear the music. It’s really cool seeing it in the theater; the music really propels the movie. One of the things that I love so much about the movie is that it’s pop and fun, you know what I mean?

I’ve always been of the mindset that you can make indie movies and you can make art films, but they can still be pop. Some art films are really hard. They kind of feel like they’re work, whereas I’ve always gravitated towards pop culture, like these fun, poppy art films that are still crazy and subversive and transgressive and all that. They’re fun to watch; they’re not chores to sit through.

While The Doom Generation remains incredibly relevant, it does aesthetically feel super ’90s, like this cultural tour of America at the time. We spend a lot of time in convenience stores, in motel rooms with the pervasive box TV glow. Tell me about the spirit you wanted to capture with the production design.
The production designer was the late, great Thérèse DePrez. It was one of her early movies, and she was so incredibly artistic and talented. The budget was like $750,000 or something. We were all working on a shoestring, and one of the things that drove the movie was the design, the locations, the lighting, everything. I was always looking towards surrealism. I always wanted it to feel a little bit like a dream or a nightmare. It’s definitely got the David Lynch influence there.

Whenever we would go anywhere or pick out a location, or when we were talking about the motel rooms and stuff, it was always taking it to a place of meta-reality or this stylized reality. Thérèse did a fantastic job in creating this space that was based in reality, but amped up several notches. That’s how we got to the red room. I the checkered room—we did the red room first, and then we were like, ‘What are we going to do in the second room?’ Thérèse had a postcard on her desk that was all checkered like that. I was like, ‘How about that?’ and so she literally did that; she hand-painted basically everything in that room. It was a lot of work, and she did an amazing job.

Speaking of it as this surreal, dreamlike experience that we’re going through, there’s a bunch of cameos in the film and I’m curious for new people seeing it, how much some of these cameos will be recognizable for them. Like, Heidi Fleiss showing up—
Heidi Fleiss, definitely of that time.

Totally. What was your mindset in popping in these blink-and-you-miss-it cameos like her and Margaret Cho and Christopher Knight?
Yeah, that level of surrealism carried over to the casting. I telling casting that I wanted all of the ing characters to be these weird appearances. I didn’t think of them as like, ‘Oh yeah, stunt cameos.’ I really thought of them as like when you’re dreaming and the way people from TV or whatever, random people will show up in your dream. Like Lindsay Lohan appearing in your dream or something. It’s not even people that are necessarily important to you, but your mind somehow has logged them.

I two of the Nazi f–g bashers at the end, they’re actually from gay porn. [Laughs] The casting director was like, ‘I found these guys and blah, blah.’ It was cool because there was a familiarity there, and also this level of it being unsettling from recognizing those faces.

So, I came up with that basic structure, and I knew I wanted to make a couple-on-the-run movie about America and these kids on the road, and I knew where it was going. I knew the ending of the movie, which is actually based on something that really happened in my hometown, and so I knew that it was heading in that direction. That was all set up, but beyond that, I just vomited and it came out with all this crazy stuff, the 666 and all of that. I knew it was going to be this surreal and strange thing where all this whacky, nutty stuff was going to happen.

You gave the film a title card of “A Heterosexual Movie by Gregg Araki”, which follows on from The Living End being “An Irresponsible Film by Gregg Araki” and Totally Fucked Up being “Another Homo Movie by Gregg Araki”.
Yeah, those days I used to have these little subtitles.

There are a ton of Letterboxd reviews that delightfully point out how this is the gayest “heterosexual movie” that’s ever been made.
[Laughs] That’s the exact point of it. What happened was that after Living End and Totally Fucked Up, this producer—Jim Stark, who had produced Stranger Than Paradise, which is one of my all-time favorite movies—helped us raise some money and bump it up to 35mm. After the experience of those two movies, he said, “You make these gay movies that are too punk for gay audiences and gay people hate them.” When Living End came out, the audience was so polarized. People loved it, but there were a lot of gay people that hated it because it’s so punk and so politically incorrect. It just doesn’t give a fuck.

Jim told me, “If you make a heterosexual movie, I’ll produce it and I can raise you a million dollars for a real budget,” because the other movies were, like, $20,000 or whatever. So in my punk rock way, it was like, ‘Yeah, okay, I’ll make you a heterosexual movie, but it’s going to be the queerest heterosexual movie ever made.’ The homoerotic subtext is purposely so exaggerated.

I always thought it was cool, because it’s like a Trojan horse in that way. People who have never seen a gay movie, super conservative people—or even people who have never even thought about queerness—will see the movie as being heterosexual. They’ll see a straight movie because Rose is beautiful and hot and everything. Then they watch it and are like, ‘Oh, what’s going on?’ A lot of people tell me that my movies made them gay, because it unlocks a thing that they’ve never acknowledged or had access to before.

That’s the biggest badge of honor, right? If your movie can make somebody gay.
[Laughs] Yeah, that’s a high compliment, I guess.

When I made Living End in particular, it was all we were thinking about. It’s hard for young people today to really understand what it was like to be in your twenties and just feel like this black cloud of doom is hanging over you every fucking day, and people are just dropping dead in the street. Everybody’s dying. It was just such a horrible time. Out of that darkness, Living End is absolutely a diary for me of my thoughts and my feelings, my emotions and me processing the AIDS crisis.

It was really just all of us simultaneously working totally separately. Most of them were in New York, I was in LA, Gus was in Portland. Everybody was just doing their own thing, but it had this common thread, a political thread and a thematic thread of necessity. Historically, the importance of it is so huge in the sense that at that time—this was before Will & Grace and before Philadelphia, before all that stuff—it was really shocking to see two gay guys hold hands or kiss.

When Living End came out, people were so outraged by it. There were riots in the theaters. Then, I remastered it in 2008, and found myself thinking this movie’s actually just sweet and romantic and so tame. There’s the scene in the shower, which is a little out there, but for the most part it seemed so mild. All of that controversy was because there was almost zero visibility in the culture. Consequently, as time’s gone on, there’s more visibility and more representation and all that, which is great.

That’s the huge thing about the Queer New Wave starting. Hollywood had tried to make a gay movie with Making Love back in the [’80s]. It was a huge deal. The attempts at representation were so sporadic, and so milquetoast. This was a whole different world than trying to make a studio movie about gay people, which never really worked. It was a huge cultural shift in the ’90s.