This month marks the 30th anniversary of director Gregg Araki’s groundbreaking and seminal movie The Living End.

It was a movie that radicalized me and shook me from complacency. The Living End gave me a blueprint for a revolution that never came to be and literally changed my life in the process. Prior to Araki’s 1992 film the headwinds of discrimination and seeming inevitability of AIDS held my psyche in a hypnotic nihilism. The Living End showed me the exhilarating transformative power of reinvention.

RELATED: How An ‘Irresponsible’ Movie About AIDS Literally Changed My Life

ID Magazine profiled Araki where he reflects on The Living End and what it means 30 years later.

Now 62, Gregg is the laidback uncle of gay filmmaking, having spent the 90s shaping the radical New Queer Cinema movement alongside directors like Gus Van Sant and Derek Jarman.

Recently, he directed the male characters of Riverdale in wrestling singlets (“That was not my idea! They literally handed me the gayest episode of Riverdale.”) and his 2019 comedy series Now Apocalypse, a weird, queer doomsday melting pot.

But this month marks the 30th anniversary of The Living End, Gregg’s third feature and the film that first put him on the map. He doesn’t see it that way, though. “It was just this little, tiny art project that me and my friends did back in the early 90s,” he explains, speaking from LA. “It’s kind of crazy that it’s lived on all this time.”

Written at the height of the AIDS epidemic, The Living End traces Jon, a film critic, and Luke, a drifter, two HIV positive lovers who kill a cop and embark on a self-destructive road trip across California. It’s quintessential Araki: messy, gay, tragic and daring. Its budget, around $20,000, was meagre. No one in the cast or production was paid. Still, Gregg has great affection for it. “It was this whole crazy adventure and we had nothing to lose,” he says. “We just kind of went for it. There was no self-censorship involved and, in that way, it was creatively reckless and free.”

Gregg defines The Living End and this infant stage of his career as “true guerrilla indie filmmaking”. His early films were shot with no permits, no budgets and “a camera that kept breaking”. Gregg says the police were often called on the production and security guards regularly kicked them out of shooting locations. “It was a crazy adventure because it was just me and my friends,” he says. “It wasn’t a traditional film production by any means.”

A pivotal scene where Jon and Luke cave into their mutual desire and have unprotected sex in the shower generated backlash at the time for its eschewal of safe sex practices, but Gregg now sees the scene as “tame”. At the time, “the reaction to it was so intense and so strong”, he explains. “It had a very punk-rock attitude, and it was very unapologetic. Gay and queer representation was so limited at the time and, really, almost non-existent. When it screened at Sundance, I remember people were just so outraged. Seeing it today, it seems almost naive and a little bit cute. But it wasn’t viewed that way in 1992.”

The film contains so much of Gregg’s life and interests that he describes it “almost like a journal”. Its ethos of “live fast, die young, leave a beautiful corpse” is like something you’d see scrawled in a club toilet by a gay man in the early 90s. It has a potent meaning. “My sensibility is in a different place — obviously, you grow up — but I appreciate that the film captures that period of my life,” he says. “It was my crazy, random, wild thoughts. That The Living End is a document of that is, for me personally, really cool and something I look back on very fondly.”

Naturally, The Living End is steeped in culture from Gregg’s youth. Posters of Andy Warhol’s Blow Job — a 30-minute silent film featuring a guy getting his dick sucked — and Jean-Luc Godard’s Made in U.S.Aadorn the cinephile Jon’s walls. The central duo’s names are, amusingly, derived from Godard’s. A song by The Jesus and Mary Chain gives the film its title. “Blow Job was a very big influence on me and the aesthetic of the film,” he says. “In a lot of ways, Mike Dytri, [who plays Luke] and the way he’s photographed is very Warholian, very Gus van San

Gregg has always foregrounded Adonis-like characters in his films, but Luke was the very first. “[Gus’ debut] Mala Nocheis a film I saw before I wrote The Living End and the way Gus frames his male Adonises is very similar,” Gregg says. “I think, to me, it’s a by-product of that time. It was about the revolutionary gay gaze at men and this objectification of men in the way that women have always been. That whole world of men being seen as sex objects and being lit and shot in a certain way was a huge visual influence on me.”

Watch the trailer below.