It’s been 21 years since Greg Araki’s masterpiece “Mysterious Skin” debuted. This predates the apocalypse-defying adolescent characters that appear in nearly all of his films, and was enough time for Araki to level up as an artist, even going back to the project using a post-production tool called DaVinci Resolve to fix small things in the film that Araki had been bothering about for years.
“I’m just a better filmmaker than I was in 2003,” Araki tells me over coffee at Toluca Lake, six days after releasing his day-and-night 4K restoration at Sundance. The director had agreed to meet me at a local Starbucks, where I found him holding court with a young actor I was in awe of. Araki, still toned and muscular at age 66, wore a loose blue tank top, suggesting that the filmmaker is putting as much effort into his biceps as he does in his films.
I praised Araki’s brilliant “Skin” — an unapologetically queer masterpiece made the year before “Brokeback Mountain” — as the brightest ever, and he began listing its flaws. That’s why he’s never satisfied with the film’s iconic opening credits, shots that aren’t framed properly, and substandard visual effects for the UFO scene. That’s all resolved now that digital tools exist to polish what was shot 20 years ago on 35mm, he claimed.
Following the acclaimed restoration of Lisa Cholodenko’s “High Art,” Strand Releasing plans to release “Mysterious Skin” nationally in theaters in 2026 at venues including New York’s IFC Center, Los Angeles’ Vidiots, San Francisco’s Roxy, and Alamo Drafthouse across North America. MK2 Films will handle international sales and will also handle the film’s release in France in 2026. 4AD Records is also planning a vinyl release of the soundtrack featuring Slowdive and Cocteau Twins.
Araki discovered the potential of DaVinci Resolve while working on his latest feature, “I Want Your Sex,” which premiered at Sundance this year. The new album is irreverent and perverted, a return from the ultimate rebels of ’80s queer new wave, while Mysterious Skin is an anomaly. It’s a literary adaptation (his first) that covers nearly all of the filmmaker’s obsessions, from sexual self-discovery (Totally F***ed Up) to alien abduction (Nowhere).
In Scott Heim’s 1995 novel, two teenagers in a small Kansas town discover a shared history of childhood sexual abuse. The first hustler, Neil (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), spends his days chasing the feelings his little league coach awakened in him years ago, while his shy, developmentally disabled ex-teammate Brian (Brady Corbett) can’t shake the belief that he was abducted by aliens as a child.
“‘Mysterious Skin’ was made on a very small budget, say $1 million or less, because I was very determined that I didn’t want to compromise my vision for the film. I didn’t want to water it down for a television audience,” said Araki, who received a copy of Heim’s book in a galley before it was published. The director really liked this work, but could not think of a way to express its “rawness” on screen.
At the time, Araki recalled, “I didn’t want to traumatize children in order to make a film about childhood trauma,” Araki recalled at an Academy Museum screening last summer. Then a solution came to him. “I had just produced this pilot from TV and was playing around with a lot of POV and direct-to-camera eyeliner in the edit,” he explained. Director Araki said, “There was literally a different script” for the children. “The set was a very safe place and the children were very protected from any adult themes in the film.”
These days, half of the films invited to screen at Sundance feature characters facing or trying to deal with trauma. In that sense, “Mysterious Skin” was ahead of its time.
“Honestly, I can’t watch ‘Trauma’ right now,” Araki said, while ‘I Want Your Sex’ is a wild piece of work that celebrates loosening and testing your boundaries, and is the director’s response to everything going on in the world. “I just wanted to make something poppy and upbeat. I wanted to make something that shed a little light on the world, because shit is like a super dystopia or something, where civilians are being shot in the streets.”
Through the production of “I Want Your Sex,” Araki demonstrated the potential of DaVinci Resolve, a finishing tool that can manipulate footage in countless ways. “We were able to do all sorts of effects: reframe, resize, relight, etc.,” says Araki. During editing, we had unprecedented freedom to adjust what we shot for “I Want Your Sex.”
So when it came time to upgrade the “Mysterious Skin”, Araki didn’t hesitate to apply the same trick. We further refined the process we used to restore the Teen Apocalypse Trilogy for the Criterion Collection the previous year. With support from Strand Releasing head Marcus Hu, Araki contacted Bo Geno, who handled post-production on the original film.
“We took the original negative and put it into Resolve, which basically allowed us to see the entire movie and touch every shot,” Araki said. “I was able to really work on it and improve things visually. I was always thinking, ‘Could this be any better?'” I often do this with the sound off, so I can see how the images interact with each other, like a pure visual language. And with this program you will be able to do literally anything you want. I think I controlled every shot in the movie. ”
Director Araki’s restoration of Mysterious Skin is an uncompromising realization of the film he originally envisioned. This isn’t a George Lucas overhaul of what fans know and love, nor is it an elaborate Francis Ford Coppola-esque re-editing (though it’s interesting to compare the names of two punk kids-turned-indie doyennes like Araki).
Director Araki miraculously made this movie in 2005, but he didn’t have the technology to get certain things right. At least not with the micro-budgets he was working on at the time. “I love this movie, but there’s always something about it that bothers me, for example, because the flying saucer looks like a Dixie cup, so I removed the effect of the light coming from the flash,” he said. He also tweaked the moment when Brian and his mother react to the UFO outside the window to match the lighting.
In one scene (the night before Levitt’s character returns home for Christmas), Araki adjusted two shots that didn’t match up perfectly. Neil is sitting in the passenger seat of a sadistic man’s car, melting into Neil as he sleeps in the same position, except: “In the original, you were just guessing where he was in the frame. Now they’re lined up exactly. You can move the frame around, so his head doesn’t move much,” said director Araki, who also admitted that he reversed the shot in the scene before Neil leaves the sandwich shop. In keeping with the child actor playing young Neil, Levitt wears blue contacts over his natural brown eyes, but they’re not too distracting in this pass. “It’s just perfecting those things,” he said.
The director’s most significant improvement was in the opening credits, which featured white text on a stark white background, showing brightly colored breakfast cereal cascading down a young boy’s upturned face in slow motion. Twenty years ago, the effect he wanted could only be achieved with optical printing, which introduces all kinds of debris. “It’s supposed to be like this abstract white church,” Araki said. “But I was concerned about scratches and dirt and hair in the gate and shit flying around the frame.”
For the restoration, Araki went back to the negative and completely reconstructed the sequence, using digital text to achieve what he had always intended. In doing so, he made a surprising discovery. There are areas on the frame that you have never seen before. This is because there is a level of trimming that always occurs when going through every generation. “Mysterious Skin” had some of the weirdest cropping mistakes I’ve ever seen. I was like, “What’s going on?” That seems wrong. ” So we were able to basically reconstruct the entire movie. ”
He was also able to color Time It exactly as he had always imagined, or in some cases even more so. “Blue in particular is at a level that didn’t exist 20 years ago. I don’t understand exactly, but it’s like a blue that literally goes beyond what the eye can see, and there are some colors that weren’t possible before,” Araki said. In the early 2000s, studio productions began creating digital intermediate versions to more accurately represent color palettes. “But we didn’t have the budget. At that time, it was about 1 million yen.”
By importing the 35mm original into Resolve, Araki was able to take his time to get the look just right and be as artistic as he wanted, instead of rushing through a two-day color timing session (as he did for the recent Nowhere restoration). “I said to the colorist, ‘I want it to look very painterly.’ My background is in the visual arts, so I approached the colors like a painting and everything about the image like a composition,” he explained.
In most cases, this meant making the colors richer, which helped reinforce the candy-bright feeling of childhood that Araki wanted in the flashbacks. Other times, he lets his tricks go, like when Neil encounters his first trick in the park. “We shot the entire movie in the summer, when it was about 110 degrees, and in that scene it was supposed to be November or December-like weather. So we went in and killed all the greenery, took all the greenery off the plants. We brought it all into the cool, frigid air, kind of a winter glow.”
The way he sees it, Araki hasn’t betrayed anything in the past – just as William Friedkin approved the Blu-ray release of The French Connection, which completely changed the film’s vintage celluloid look. Rather, it served its original purpose by compensating for the limitations of 35mm. These days, Araki prefers to shoot digitally, as he did for “I Want Your Sex.”
“There’s only a certain level of control,” he says. “I’m not Christopher Nolan. I love digital. I just love color and how pretty it is. And most of all, I love the creative possibilities of digital. They’re kind of endless.”
Before and After: Opening credits as shown on DVD (top) and restored version (bottom).
