Name: Karley Sciortino
Notable past credits: Sciortino has written about sex and sexuality in a column for Vogue; in a memoir, “Slutever: Dispatches From an Autonomous Woman in a Post Shame World,” and on her site “Slutever,” which became a series for Viceland by the same name in 2018. She and Gregg Araki cowrote the comedy series “Now Apocalypse,” which had its premiere at Sundance in 2019.
Sundance project: “I Want Your Sex,” which she cowrote with Araki, the film’s director. Starring Olivia Wilde, Cooper Hoffman, Chase Sui Wonders, Mason Gooding and Charli XCX, the raunchy comedy follows a dom-sub relationship between a provocative artist (Wilde) and her assistant (Hoffman).
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“It’s based on a really core sexual coming-of-age moment for me,” Sciortino says. “I had this kind of dom-sub relationship with an older guy who was an editor of mine at the time, and I was only 24, 25. And it really opened my mind to what dom-sub dynamics could be.”
Sciortino wrote the first version of the script 13 years ago, when she was 27.
“People say it over and over, how hard it is to get a movie made, but it is a surreal experience for me to be here for a movie that I wrote 13 years ago,” she says.
After finishing the initial version, she went out to directors and Araki came on board. The two rewrote the script together, and then after the #MeToo movement decided to gender swap the two main characters, so the older, dominant character was a woman and the submissive assistant was the man.
“It has changed, but I think that the core piece is the same. I still think that it’s about this young person having this really transcendent, heartbreaking, eye-opening sexual experience that changes his life forever,” Sciortino says. “There’s something about when you’re young and you’re not looking for something serious, the world opens to opportunities to have these adventurous, kind of stupid, maybe totally wrong for you relationships. They can teach you a lot where you grow a lot, that might hurt you in ways that hopefully you grow from. And even if they end up crashing and burning so hard, you’re glad that they’re part of the story.”
“I Want Your Sex” is one of Sundance’s most talked-about titles, and the mix of kinky sex scenes with humor had the audience cheering at its premiere.
“If there’s anything that I have tried to do with my work, at the center of it is to bring humor to the topic of sexuality and sexual exploration. And I really hope that people are able to laugh along with this even in the dark moments,” Sciortino says. “When we as a culture talk about sexuality, we’ve gotten so much better at being open to talking about sex, but often there can still be a sensationalism or a seriousness to it. I think we need to be able to make jokes and laugh at the fact that we all have no f–king idea what we’re doing a lot of the time.
“I think this movie, at its core, is about this character who’s really willing to put himself out there, take sexual risks and make mistakes and be heartbroken,” she adds. “And I think watching a character with that ability is always inspiring.”
