Few movies have achieved are both as emotionally resonant and deeply horny as Pillion. Perhaps they could learn a thing or two from writer-director Harry Lighton. While helming his feature debut, Lighton left a message pinned to his bedroom wall, intended to serve as a reminder before rushing to set every morning: “Don’t sacrifice the real for the sake of the laughs—or the sake of the gasps.”
There are laughs, and gasps, aplenty in Pillion. The A24 film, adapted from the novel Box Hill by Adam Mars-Jones, stars Harry Melling (of the Harry Potter films and The Pale Blue Eye) as Colin, a meek traffic warden who lives with his parents and sings in a barbershop quartet on the side for fun. He meets Ray (Alexander Skarsgård), the leader of a local gay motorcycle club, and falls head over heels. Ray brings Colin into his particular world, where pillions—that is, those who ride the passenger seat on the motorcycle—are designated submissives. Colin doesn’t know much about any of this, but he goes with the flow because Ray is, well, hot—but also enigmatic and direct and, in his own odd way, protective.
What unfolds is a frank, kinky, utterly idiosyncratic first feature from Lighton. He deftly depicts a sexual relationship that some might deem extreme or unusual as the engine for a moving rom-com (with, yes, some dashes of trauma skirting the edges). This is not to say he tamps down on the specifics of the sub-dom dynamic—Pillion comes complete with orgies, cock rings, and boot-licking. But as Melling and Skarsgård dig into some of the most intricately wild material of their careers, you wonder if these two crazy kids are going to make it: leather, lube, and all.
Ahead of Pillion’s Sunday premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in the Un Certain Regard section, Lighton and his stars explained to VF just how they pulled that off.
Vanity Fair: Harry L., how did you come to this novel and then decide to make your first feature out of it?
Harry Lighton: I was sent it during the pandemic. I’d been working on a different project for a good five years, and that was set in Japan, and obviously when the pandemic happened, the wheels came off of that pretty quickly. Eva Yates, who’s one of the executive producers and the head of film at the BBC, sent me the book and said, “I think you’ll like this.” Which maybe says something about what she thought about me. But I read the book, and I remember thinking that it was very funny and bracing and thought-provoking.
The previous project which I mentioned had been about sumo wrestling. I was quite interested in setting my first feature within a male subculture, and then queering that subculture somehow. And there was a really interesting quality to Colin’s narrative voice in terms of the way he processed events which, from I guess a majority perspective, might be seen as borderline traumatic.
Let’s talk about bringing these actors aboard.
Lighton: Firstly, I saw Harry sing in The Devil All the Time, and he’s got a great voice. But then across various roles there was this very interesting magnetism, which wasn’t your typical alpha male magnetism. I found he demanded attention when I was watching him.
Harry Melling: When we first started talking about Colin, we spoke about how this thing shouldn’t ever come from a traumatic place. He should always be filled with a stubborn optimism. We thought that was such a lovely thing to carry through the film; to stretch it out, to see how long that can live before the cracks start to appear. We’re with Colin experiencing, for the first time, all these things.
So actually, the most important thing I kept thinking to myself is, “Just listen. Listen to these events that are happening to him, and literally experience them for the first time.” I went on this big pillion trip to this Pride festival in Cambridge, and it was as if I was Colin. I was being taught all these new things, being told what a successful boot-licking would look like. The journey would be to watch this person open out into this world, and that was what I kept coming back to if ever I thought I was getting ahead of myself.
