Gregg Araki Breaks Down All That Went Into Restoring ‘Mysterious Skin’

It’s been 21 years since Gregg Araki debuted his masterpiece, “Mysterious Skin.” That’s older than the apocalypse-defying adolescent characters in nearly every one of his movies — and ample time for Araki to level up as an artist, to the point that diving back into the project using a post-production tool called DaVinci Resolve allowed Araki to fix the little things that had bothered him about the film over the years.

“I’m just a better filmmaker than I was in 2003,” Araki told me over coffee in Toluca Lake, six days after unveiling his night-and-day 4K restoration at the Sundance Film Festival. The director had agreed to meet me at his neighborhood Starbucks, where I found him holding court with an awestruck young actor. Still lean and muscular at 66, Araki wore a loose blue tank top, which suggests the filmmaker puts as much work into his biceps as he does his movies.

I complimented Araki on his radiant “Skin” — an unapologetically queer classic, made the year before “Brokeback Mountain” — which glows like never before, and he started to enumerate its imperfections: the reasons he’s never been satisfied with the film’s iconic opening credits, shots that weren’t framed quite right, sub-par visual effects in the UFO scene. That’s all been fixed, he insisted, now that digital tools exist to polish what was shot on 35mm two decades ago.

Following the acclaimed restoration of Lisa Cholodenko’s “High Art,” Strand Releasing plans for a national theatrical release of ”Mysterious Skin” in 2026, with venues including the IFC Center in New York, Vidiots in Los Angeles, and the Roxie in San Francisco, as well as Alamo Drafthouse locations around the North America. MK2 Films represents international sales and will also handle a French release of the film in 2026, while 4AD Records plans a vinyl release of the soundtrack, featuring Slowdive and Cocteau Twins.

Araki discovered the potential of DaVinci Resolve while making his latest feature, “I Want Your Sex,” which he world premiered at this year’s Sundance. The new film is an irreverent, kinky blast — a return-to-form from the ultimate rebel of the ’80s Queer New Wave — whereas “Mysterious Skin” is an anomaly: a literary adaptation (his first) that encompasses nearly all the filmmaker’s obsessions, from sexual self-discovery (“Totally F***ed Up”) to alien abductions (“Nowhere”).

In Scott Heim’s 1995 novel, two small-town Kansas teens discover a shared history of childhood sexual abuse. The first, a hustler named Neil (Joseph Gordon Levitt), spends his days chasing feelings his little league coach awakened him all those years ago, while his shy, developmentally stunted former teammate Brian (Brady Corbet) can’t shake the belief that he was abducted by aliens as a kid.

“‘Mysterious Skin’ was made on a very tiny budget — like a million or less — because I was adamant that I didn’t want to compromise my vision of this movie. I didn’t want to water it down for, you know, a TV audience,” said Araki, who had received Heim’s book in galleys even before it was published. The director adored it, but couldn’t imagine a way to translate its “rawness” to the screen.

At the time, he felt, “I don’t want to traumatize children to make a movie about child trauma,” Araki recalled at an Academy Museum screening last summer (the restoration was done in collaboration with the Academy Film Archive, the Sundance Institute, the UCLA Film and TV Archive, Frameline, MK2 Films and Strand Releasing). And then the solution came to him: “I had just done this pilot from TV where I was playing around with a lot of POV in editing and direct-to-camera eyelines,” he explained. “We literally had a different script” for the kids, Araki said. “The set was a very safe place, and the kids were very protected from … all of the adult themes in the movie.”

These days, half the films invited to screen at Sundance deal with characters facing or otherwise trying to cope with trauma. In that sense, “Mysterious Skin” was ahead of the curve.

“I honestly can’t watch trauma right now,” Araki told me, whereas “I Want Your Sex” — a rowdy celebration of loosening up and testing one’s boundaries — is the director’s response to all that’s going on in the world. “I just wanted to make something that was pop and bright, you know, that put a little light into the world, because shit is like super dystopian or whatever. Civilians are getting shot in the fucking street.”

Working on “I Want Your Sex” showed Araki the potential of DaVinci Resolve, a finishing tool that makes it possible to manipulate footage in countless ways. “I could do all of these effects, like reframes, resizes, even relighting stuff,” said Araki, who had unprecedented freedom to adjust what he’d shot for “I Want Your Sex” during editing.

So when it came time to upgrade “Mysterious Skin,” Araki didn’t hesitate to apply those same tricks — improving even upon the process he’d used to restore his “Teen Apocalypse Trilogy” for the Criterion Collection the year before. With the support of Strand Releasing honcho Marcus Hu, Araki reached out to Beau Genot, who’d handled post-production on the original film.

“We took our original negative and put it in Resolve. That basically allowed me to go through the movie and touch every shot,” Araki said. “It was really being able to go in and just visually improve things. I would always be like, ‘Could this be better?’ I do a lot of this stuff with the sound off, so you’re looking at it like pure visual language, like how the images are playing with each other. And the program gives you the ability to literally do anything you want. I think I manipulated every single shot in the movie.”

Araki’s restoration of “Mysterious Skin” essentially fulfills the film he originally envisioned without compromising a single thing. This isn’t a case of George Lucas going back to overhaul elements fans know and love, nor an elaborate re-edit, à la Francis Ford Coppola (two names it amuses a punk-kid-turned-indie-elder like Araki to be compared to).

Araki worked miracles to get the film made in 2005, but technology just wasn’t there to finesse certain things — at least, not on the micro-budget he was working with at the time. “I love the movie, but there are things in it that have always bugged me, an example being the flying saucers, because they look like Dixie cups. So I dropped this effect, where the light now comes shooting off the flashes,” he said. He also tweaked the moment Brian and his mother react to the UFO outside their window, so the lighting matches.

In one scene (the night before Levitt’s character flies home for Christmas), Araki adjusted two shots that didn’t quite match. Neil is sitting in the passenger seat of the sadistic man’s car, and it dissolves to him asleep in the same position, except: “In the original, we were just guessing where he is in the frame. Now it lines up exactly, because you can move the frame, so his head barely even moves,” said Araki, who also admitted reversing a shot in the previous scene, as Neil leaves the sandwich shop. To match the child actor who plays young Neil, Levitt wears blue contacts over his naturally brown eyes, which aren’t nearly as distracting in this pass. ”It’s just perfecting those sorts of things,” he said.

For the director, the most important improvement came to the opening credits, which feature white text on a stark white background, as brightly colored breakfast cereal cascades in slow motion onto a boy’s upturned face. Twenty years ago, the effect he wanted could only be achieved via optical printing, which introduced all kinds of debris. “It’s supposed to be like this abstract white church,” Araki said, “but you had all the distractions of it being scratched and dirty, with hair going in the gate — you know, all that shit that used to fly through the frame.”

For the restoration, Araki went back to the negative and rebuilt the sequence entirely, using digital text to achieve what he’d always intended. In doing so, he made a surprising discovery: There’s real estate on the frame that has never been seen before, because there’s a level of like cropping that’s always happening when you’re going through all these generations. With ‘Mysterious Skin,’ there was a weird mistake cropping that I’d never seen before. I was like, ‘What’s going on? It looks wrong.’ And so I was able to basically reframe the whole movie.”

He could also color time it exactly as he’d always imagined — or in some cases, even better. “There’s a level of blue in particular that did not exist 20 years ago. I don’t understand it exactly, but it’s literally like a blue beyond what the eye can see, so there are colors that weren’t even possible before,” Araki said. In the early 2000s, studio productions could be more precise with their color palettes by having a digital intermediate made. “But we didn’t have the budget. It was like a hundred grand in those days.”

Now, by importing the 35mm original into Resolve, Araki could be as artistic as he wanted, taking his time to get the look just right, instead of rushing through a two-day color timing session (as he had on the recent restoration of “Nowhere”). ”I told the colorist, ‘I want it to look very painterly.’ Because my background is kind of in visual arts, I was really approaching the color as a painting and everything about the images like a composition,” he explained.

Most of the time, that meant making the colors richer, which helps to reinforce the candy-bright sense of childhood Araki was going for in the flashback scenes. At other times, as when Neil meets his first trick in the park, he might dial it down. “We filmed the whole movie in the summer. It was like 110 degrees, and it’s supposed to be like November/December in that scene. So we went in, killed all the green, took all the green out of the plants. We brought the whole thing into this kind of cool, frigid air, like a wintry sort of light.”

The way he sees it, Araki isn’t betraying what came before — the way William Friedkin did in approving a Blu-ray release of “The French Connection” that completely altered the film’s vintage celluloid look. If anything, he was fulfilling his original intention, correcting for the limitations of 35mm. These days, Araki actually prefers to shoot on digital, as he did with “I Want Your Sex.”

“There’s just a level of control that you have,” he said. “I am not Christopher Nolan. I love digital. I just love the colors and how clean it is. And more than anything, I love the creative possibilities of it — they are kind of limitless.”