Interview: With ‘Drunken Noodles,’ Writer/Director Lucio Castro Takes on Sex and Queer Life in the Age of Apps with Grace and Honesty
Reminiscent of a potent collection of shorts, Lucio Castro’s third feature, Drunken Noodles, realizes three periods of time in the life of Adnan (Laith Khalifeh), a young gay man in New York. In three distinct vignettes, Castro beautifully tracks Adnan’s time housesitting in the city and a relationship that he forms with a food delivery worker, Yariel (Joél Isaac), a brief escapade to an older gay artist’s (Ezriel Kornel) residence outside of the city, and a natural escape with an ex, Iggie (Matthew Risch).
Drunken Noodles, which had its world premiere in the ACID section of the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, stands out among the year, and even the decade, as an authentic portrait of queer life in the 2020s. When so few films really reckon with the digital isolation and metropolitan ennui that’s been specifically cultivated in the years following the COVID-19 pandemic, Castro’s triptych arrives as a balm.
During Frameline50, Castro sat down with me to discuss his unique approach to storytelling in the film, how he tackled sex in the film, and how the film started as a documentary before shifting into something far different.
August Hammel: Could you speak a bit to the first inklings of when the movie came to your mind? Was it during production of another film or in between productions?
Lucio Castro: The idea to make the movie started five years ago when I saw a show that my friend Tony Cox made of this avant-garde artist (Sal Salandra) who was basically an outsider artist who, the first time he showed it, he was almost 80. I went to this small gallery in the Lower East Side of New York and there were these really amazing paintings – he calls them paintings, but they’re actually embroidery – these explicitly sexual tableaus about combining myths and like The Wizard of Oz, Snow White, Batman, The Flintstones, with S&M culture, but also had this very childlike way of working. He didn’t go to formal art school, so there’s no perspective, but all these elements were really interesting for me. After that exhibit in 2021, I went to visit him at his house in Long Island with a camera just to maybe do a short documentary on him. When I got to his house and we started talking, I realized that I was just performing questions for him and he was performing the answers. He was acting with a camera all of a sudden and he was different. So we’re in the idea of searching for truth, and I feel like I was not getting into it. I’m not a documentarian, so maybe I don’t know how to do it. You live with the subject, you are with them for a long time, you get to know them, and it’s not the way I work. I left actually feeling, “Okay, I love the artist and the work, but I’m not that interested in what he has to say,” it sounds harsh. The thing I love about his work is that it cannot be answered in the way he wants to do it. When I was finishing production for my second feature, After His Death, during the edit, I found a way to face the subjects and the way these paintings happen, but through fiction, through stories.
AH: Adnan is such an interesting character to me, mostly because I know so many people like him, he’s like most gay guys I know in the city. San Francisco and New York are very different cultures, but they’re metropolitan hubs and that specific gay guy ennui is so lived in to me. How much did you pull from your own experiences, also how much were you writing Adnan as a cipher? Because he’s a very specific type of person, but he’s kind of a canvas.
LC: Yeah, I like that, “a cipher.” I either write, like, “I’m gonna write a movie and let my imagination go wild.” Or, “Okay, I want to make this movie in two months. Where can I shoot it? I have these locations, I have these actors.” So I started this movie in that way. At first I knew the locations, I had friends, then I went on Backstage and I found him [Laith Khalifeh] and cast him. The reason why I liked him was that there’s something about him that I can’t fully grasp or understand. I like, especially for main actors – Johnny Depp actually used to be like this – you don’t really understand exactly what he’s about, what he’s feeling.
AH: A little unreadable.
LC: Exactly. So I think for the camera or for me as an audience, I like to look at a face that I want to, because audience members are detectives and they’re taking clues and symbols and building what’s happening next. I like a face that hides something. That was really important and I like characters that are in flux, who are either between relationships, like my first feature, or between countries, or between moving somewhere else. There’s an openness that I think happens when you are moving from one place to the other, and you’re sort of a beginner in a way that you don’t have when you’re in a close relationship, or in a fixed job, or in a fixed town. When you’re too set in a routine, I think you’re very closed off to the world and when you’re shifting or you’re moving around, you’re a little bit more open. This movie, it’s really about doors opening in cities and upstate and being curious and being open. Of course, cruising is connected to that as well. All my movies are really personal, but nothing happened to me exactly the same. Are they autobiographical? Sure. But it’s nothing that’s really me. I never did this or that, maybe I heard something or I made something up, but it feels very close to me in a way.
AH: You were talking about cruising and something I noticed was there’s this relationship to like convenience apps. Adnan orders off a food delivery service, he’s using a proto-Sniffies, and there is this relationship to modern life, specifically in the 2020s, that you don’t see represented a lot. Even though we’re living in the decade, people don’t want to confront that. What’s your relationship to our culture of convenience and was that an intentional threading throughout the film?
LC: It’s a good point, I think that the movie shows cruising in different ways because he also goes cruising in a cruising spot in the park, but he definitely uses the app. With the delivery guy, it was a little bit different. I wanted to cross a class boundary. With delivery guys in my neighborhood in New York, you never talk to them, they’re in their own world. I wanted [with] my character to ask, “Why not?” He is a poet and maybe all these guys are having gay sex, why not cross that class boundary? I feel like the only way to access that is through delivery apps. That’s like the only way to have that connection and that transaction, which is why the movie is called Drunken Noodles, it’s that [delivery] bag. Cinema, it’s a language of symbols, of images and words and faces. I always love that this little bag, with a thank you, [is] the only thing that happens between these two people, they almost don’t even connect besides that.
AH: In the penthouse, once [Adnan and Yariel] strike up a bit more of a connection, there is that orgy tableau that felt very reminiscent to me of My Own Private Idaho. It’s so unique and not something you revisit in the movie. There are other encounters that aren’t as locked off. Why did you approach it in that way? It was so striking.
LC: Thank you! The number one thing was that I wanted to have orgies because Sal’s work is a lot of orgies. I didn’t want it to be like a porn movie, I guess it could have been, but I wanted to add some. My Own Private Idaho was a huge influence in the way to portray those, there’s no sound at all so there’s not even room tone, and that makes it similar to when you’re looking at a painting in a museum with someone else. There’s this silence. I wanted people in the audience to be still, silent, aware of everyone, but looking at these intimate moments. It’s the closest thing that happens in the whole movie to represent, cinematically, what are [Sal Salandra’s] paintings. Some poses are literally taken from his paintings, the arrangements of the male bodies.
AH: Do you use Sal’s work as these transitory title cards, too?
LC: Yeah.
AH: You struck up a friendship with him and you’ve known him for a few years. He’s not playing himself in the movie – he is a character in the film – but is that him threading the art in between [title cards]?
LC: Yeah!
AH: How did you approach him for just those?
LC: I wrote the movie with the title [cards]… The movie’s about threading. It’s a very common feminine pastime in many cultures, I like this old man doing that. It’s also connecting stories. I liked the idea of [Sal] starting the movie, with seeing a man threading, you know? There’s also something that feels like sitting down, similar to storytelling. It’s almost like the beginning of a fable, once upon a time. I can’t explain why, to me, seeing someone threading is similar to that. Sal’s an amazing artist, an amazing person, and he also made the photos of the paintings of the faces for the poster. After I finished the movie – it started as a documentary – it’s not a documentary at all. Except for those moments.
AH: Was your approach to sex in the movie consistent throughout? How did you know that it was going to be explicit, but not, like you said, pornographic. It feels more open than what you see in a lot of films, even independent films.
LC: There’s a warmth in the sex. With all the kinks and the danger and all that sex has, I was really interested in portraying sex as people who take care of each other… I actually think it’s a very sweet movie, even though they have a lot of sex. They’re there for each other, even with the ex. Something dies, but still, they like each other. With Sal too, they end up holding hands. It’s weird to see an old man holding this younger man’s hand, sex we understand, but that tenderness is actually harder to understand in a way. So, my provocation came not through the direct sex, but through the tenderness that arises as the source of sex.
AH: Going into the third part of the film with Adnan’s ex (Matthew Risch), there’s this playfulness with the spatiality of the movie, its place in time, it feels as if you’re jumping forward and backwards. Adnan feels like a man out of place, he’s never really seen at home. He’s always in a period of transition. How did you write that relationship with his ex? Because it’s different from everything before. It’s so intimate and you feel this unspoken history with them. What was it like working with Laith and Matthew on that? Because it really is so intimate.
LC: Thank you. They’re both great. Matthew’s great. Actually, I met Matthew on Frameline seven years ago. Wow. I met him there, and I liked him. He’s a really great actor. I don’t rehearse, unless there’s a dance or a different way of speaking, but otherwise, I like to see actors read my lines and see them in their bodies, how they behave. He’s just a really good actor, and he really understood the character right away. I never knew if they were going to be able to express their intimacy, but also it’s clear that it’s ending. It has ended, but they still want to be with each other. Then in the fourth part, I wanted to show that they were no longer together. And I said, “How are you going to understand that?” But people get it. It’s crazy.
AH: It is such a gay movie, not just in its text, obviously it’s about gay men and they have gay sex, yes that’s textual, but it’s literally about being a gay guy who’s cat sitting and house sitting. Do you feel like it’s an important thing or do you feel a burden to represent the more subtle parts of day-to-day gay life? Especially, in modern films, you don’t really feel the modernity too much. This feels like a movie so deeply set in the 2020s, it understands what it’s like to live post-COVID in a way. We’re still not reckoning with what that means and what it means to be in the 2020s. This feels like a gay movie very definitively set in the 2020s. So do you feel that burden or is that something you actively want to pursue and chase? Because it feels very fresh.
LC: Thank you so much for saying that. Thank you for saying that it feels like a movie for today. I love that. No, I don’t see it as a burden. I see it with simplicity, and the idea of being a gay director, making gay movies… My second feature, After His Death, the characters were straight, but I think it’s still a very gay movie to me, at least to me. I’m gay and there’s gay characters and straight characters, but still, to me, there’s a very queer way of looking at the world, you know? The queerness that I’m interested in has to do with seeing things as what I think they are. As you said, maybe it’s the way this person interacts with the world. It’s simply how I see myself or my friends interacting in this world and not following these things that we’re supposed to do. There’s a bit of a way of looking at the world the way it is without all these assumptions of how we should behave. To me, that’s real queerness. Maybe with some sense of subversion as well, but this movie, I have to say, when I made it, I was like, “I want to make a movie. I want to make a really gay movie.” But it’s never a burden at all. At first, after my first feature, I was like, “Oh my god, I’m going to be just a gay director,” but I don’t care, honestly. It’s like, Martin Scorsese doesn’t say, “I’m just making straight movies,” so why should I feel bad if I just make gay movies or a black director only makes black movies. There are movies I’ve always watched – straight movies, black movies, Latin American, Asian – and I connect and identify with anything. The human emotion is human emotion. It doesn’t matter if the character is black or Latino or gay or straight, it’s human emotion. I’m not concerned about that anymore.
AH: What’s your relationship to the city and nature? Again, that feels very queer to me, just existing in a metropolitan space because that’s where I think a lot of us are drawn to, yet wanting that natural connection and a desire for a deeper understanding of the natural world. What did you bring to that kind of relationship?
LC: I like what you say, it’s the first time that I hear that there’s a queerness in that, in the city versus nature. And I agree, as queers, we always feel inadequate in our little hometowns, but many, many gay people have to leave their towns for bigger cities to find more community. It’s also true that, in general, queer people have this connection with nature, with animals, with pets. Not only gay people, but there’s something with being outside, with being on the beach, in mountains, there’s something there that’s true. I don’t know why, but it feels to me there’s something very close to sensuality and the world and pleasures. A lot of gay people love beauty and there’s nothing more beautiful than nature. It’s the ultimate perfection. In that tension between needing to be in a city for community, but also still aiming for beauty or for relaxation or for fun or for hedonism or pleasure, in these pleasurable worlds. They’re connected. The movie was combining Sal’s work with this poet that I love from China called Li Bai. He is one of the most important poets in China. I always love that China’s a country that really is about work, family, and money. These values are very important. I lived in China for 10 years and this poet is the opposite. He was basically always drunk, always talking to the moon, seeing friends, traveling, relaxing, looking at a flower bloom when he goes back at night. The opposite of his Chinese ideals, but he’s still regarded as the most important. So I always love that.
AH: To wrap, what are you drawn to when you’re starting a new project?
LC: I’ve been working for four years with Film4 with this adaptation of this novel by Muriel Spark, Loitering with Intent. We’re close to a final draft, and I’m really excited about it. Hopefully we’ll shoot that soon. It’s a UK novel, she was a lesbian writer, but very, very closeted. She ended up living in this castle in Italy with her girlfriend, but they were never married, but had a really amazing queer way of looking at the world. Reality also starts changing in that novel. I have another project with Gwendoline Christie. That’s a New York story. And I’m shooting, in August, a movie in Argentina – my first time shooting there – a movie called Dry Ice. All these movies have in common a main character going through some shift. Either self-awareness between identities, someone dies, one has to go back home and face something. I like when characters are in flux. With this character present in reality, I start breaking the reality for different reasons. One of them is because of grief and the other one is about literature. The Argentine movie, it’s really about a memory, a very traumatic memory that he needs to unravel. So his reality and memory start breaking in different ways. Strong characters with a shift in some way. Presenting reality and twisting it around.
Drunken Noodles is set for release in select theaters on June 26 from Strand Releasing.
- Interview: With ‘Drunken Noodles,’ Writer/Director Lucio Castro Takes on Sex and Queer Life in the Age of Apps with Grace and Honesty - June 26, 2026
- Frameline50 Reviews: ‘Drunken Noodles,’ ‘On the Road,’ ‘Sparks,’ ‘Strange River’ - June 24, 2026
- ‘Girls Like Girls’ Review: Let’s Go, Lesbians, Let’s Go [C+] - June 20, 2026
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