Los Angeles, Jan 24 (IANS) Hollywood actress Olivia Wilde and Cooper Hoffman are setting the mercury soaring at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.

The actors attended the premiere of indie filmmaker Gregg Araki’s ‘I Want Your Sex’ at the Utah festival, reports ‘People’ magazine.

Olivia Wilde, 41, as a provocative artist who hires Hoffman, 22, and makes him her sexual sub. The two actors engage in a variety of kinky activities, bondage, costumes included, onscreen. As Wilde recalled during the Eccles Theater premiere’s post-screening Q&A, she and Araki, 66, knew the relationship between the characters “had to be so much more than just dom-sub. There had to be something that made you actually, weirdly, in a teeny-tiny way, root for them and to feel that they had actual chemistry and kind of loved each other”.

As per ‘People’, after signing on to the project and debating her potential scene partners, Olivia Wilde said, “the second I met Cooper, I was like, ‘huh, I love you’”.

The film is co-written by Araki and Karley Sciortino, it centers on “a sex-forward Los Angeles art gallery (that) hosts a delightfully enigmatic sadomasochistic game”, per an official Sundance synopsis. The “outrageously playful sexual crusade”, it added, challenges “misaligned conceptions of kink/predation, exhibition, and generational predispositions toward sexual freedom and autonomy”.

“I was just so excited by Greg’s enthusiasm for the medium for the process”, the actress said during the Q&A alongside Araki, Hoffman, Gooding and Wonders. “I wish more people made movies like him.” Araki praised his screen muse, saying, “I’ve been a long time fan of Olivia’s since — remember when she was the bisexual hot girl (on The O.C.)? … I think Olivia is a true, old-time, star”.

Directing a movie “is 99% casting”, said the filmmaker (who has now premiered 11 titles at the Sundance Film Festival). Meeting Wilde, he recalled, “I just said, ‘To do this part, you got to just not give a f*** and just want to just f****** take the plunge because I don’t want to compromise it. And she said, ‘Let’s go’. And the rest was history And then once Olivia was doing the movie, everybody wanted to be in it”.

–IANS

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