Inhibition takes a back seat in A24’s new film “Pillion,” starring Alexander Skarsgård as Ray, a motorcycle-riding dom, and Harry Melling as Colin, a relationship-seeking submissive. On February 9, following a premiere at the 78th Cannes Film Festival, director Harry Lighton was honored at Boston’s Coolidge Corner Theater with the Breakthrough Artist Award, recognizing his work on the revelatory film. Speaking before a packed audience, Lighton joined Wicked Queer Film Institute CEO James A. Nadeau for an intimate post-screening conversation, reflecting on the film’s origins, creative risks, and personal influences.
From Novella to the Big Screen
The story came to Lighton on a night in late 2020 or early 2021, right at the start of the pandemic. He had just wrapped a drama titled “Stable,” produced by BBC Film, about sumo wrestling in Japan. Around that time, the novella “Box Hill: A Story of Low Self-Esteem” by British author Adam Mars-Jones arrived with a note from the head of BBC that read, “I think you’ll like this.”
Growing up in England, Lighton knew that the English could be “great but a bit square,” he recounted to the audience at the Coolidge. So when a book about the BDSM gay scene in ’70s England arrived at his door, he was surprised, but intrigued.
Modernizing the Queer Narrative
Excited by the challenge of translating Colin’s first-person narration into a film without voiceover, Lighton took on the project with one major change: shifting the story from the 1970s into the present day. For Lighton, this adjustment was imperative to Ray’s allure. “ I found that if it was set in the seventies, the answer to like Ray’s mystery became less interesting to me because you know, your head, or my head at least, goes to the kind of homophobic context of Britain at the time. You go, oh, well, he’s definitely just closeted, and he has got a wife and kids somewhere or some reason for hiding himself. Whereas, what I loved about the possibility of Ray was that actually, his mystery could just be part of like an erotic game. It could just be the like, kind of erotic frisson of anonymity,” Lighton explained.
Bringing the story into a modern setting also opened the door to additional perspectives, including evolving Colin’s parents from ones who “sweep Colin’s sexuality under the carpet” to being overly accepting, a dynamic that adds levity and humor to the film and reflects something Lighton saw in his own relationship with his mother when he came out. “She used to cut out newspaper articles. Well, it wasn’t even newspaper articles. It would be like a photo of Hugh Jackman, and then she’d leave it on my bed with a note being like, ‘you should date this guy.’ And, uh, she had high ambitions for her son,” Lighton joked.
With this plot point, Lighton also saw an opportunity to tell a story that isn’t often explored in cinema. Instead of acceptance being the resolution of the film, what if they fully accepted him from the start, “but then their son gets a boyfriend whose relationship model, his version of gayness doesn’t match their expectations,” raising questions like “what version of homosexuality is acceptable?”
Although the film is a work of fiction, Lighton wanted to portray LGBTQ+ motorcycle clubs with authenticity and care. He connected with the G-B-M-C-C, a gay bike club in the UK, and rode with them for a weekend. Many members were later cast in the film and encouraged to bring their own experiences into their characters, something they did generously. Lighton recalled one biker, Paul: “He didn’t have a pup in the script, but I went about with him in a pub in London, and he bought his pup mask and was like, you know, I’d love to represent this part of the culture in the film. And so I said, you know, go off and tell me how you do that. And he sent me like a 6,000 word email about that.”
Casting Ray and Colin: A “Roll of the Dice”
During the conversation, Lighton described how that commitment to authenticity extended into the casting process of Ray and Colin. Lighton found his Colin in Harry Melling after watching his portrayal of Harrison in the Coen Brothers’ film “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs,” and was further captivated by his other work.
The character of Ray was cast in a similar manner. After watching “Succession,” Lighton was “enamoured” by Alexander Skarsgård’s portrayal of Lukas Matsson: “ I just thought he was the perfect combination of like a kind of mad physicality, but also psychological complexity.” With a low budget, Lighton thought casting Skarsgård was wishful thinking. “I assumed it was just like a good example rather than someone would actually approach. So I remember going to my casting director and being like, I wanna find someone like Alexander Scarsgard.”
She encouraged him to “roll the dice on occasion,” and the gamble paid off when Skarsgård responded to the script the same day.
Creating Empathy for the Characters: “ little chink in the armor”
In the film, Skarsgård and Lighton carefully placed moments where the audience gets to see a “ little chink in the armor,” as Lighton put it.
One of those moments was the “day-off” sequence, when Ray gives Colin the opportunity to step away from his sub duties and spend a day in town. “ So I wanted that day to feel like a different kind of performance, but also to feel, to have a different kind of visual texture to it. You know, a lot of the film at that point has had a kind of varnish,” Lighton explained.
Part of that “unvarnishing” was intentional, while some resulted from the realities of a low budget. “We shot that sequence on the High Street of Bromley. And, you know, we didn’t have enough money to kind of close down High Street and put it with extras, so we just hid cameras in like the shop windows, and there was one in like a guitar speaker and we had a fake guitarist. And, and so we just chucked Harry and Alexander onto the street. And all the people you see in those scenes are normal people, they’re not extras. They’ll occasionally come and interact with the actors. But I think it gives this sort every everydayness to those scenes.” These interactions helped make Ray, who could easily feel like a caricature, feel human.
In contrast, the character of Colin wears his heart on his sleeve, often creating some of the film’s most comedic moments, like the sequence that follows his request for a to sleep in Ray’s bed. For Lighton, infusing comedy into the film was part of creating empathy for a character navigating a borderline abusive relationship while simply longing for love: “ I think there are moments where we do laugh at Colin, but I think hopefully over the course of the film, that laughter also creates a real empathy with him. And so by the end, no one’s in any doubt that we’re with Colin and rooting for him.”
Why We Need a Film like “Pillion”
During the conversation, Lighton acknowledged that the world has changed dramatically since he first began work on the film, but believes now is a better time than ever to release “Pillion”: “ And I think like the kind of political present makes it a very interesting time to put a film like this out there because, you know, if it finds an audience and if it can kind of encourage empathy with a marginalized group of people, then it’s a good sort of rejoinder to the people who are kind of rolling back on queer rights.”
Lighton left audiences with a simple “hope” for the film’s impact: “ I hope it makes you laugh. I hope it makes you think a bit. And if it makes some of you a bit horny, I’ll be delighted.”
“Pillion” is now playing in theaters.
Featured Photo Credit: Chris Harris | (L-R) Harry Melling, Harry Lighton, Alexander Skarsgård
Amelia Cordischi, Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Juice Box Press, is an accomplished digital marketing professional with over a decade of experience in media and communications. Her work has been featured in notable publications, including The Boston Globe. A communications graduate of Simmons University in Boston, Amelia served as manager of Simmons College Radio (“The Shark”), where she also launched and co-hosted her radio show, The Find.
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