“Pinch me!”: Harry Lighton on his dom-com debut Pillion

The coupling up of a six-foot-four Swedish sex god with Harry Potter bully boy Dudley Dursley may sound like a lurid work of fan fiction but that is the basis of assured British romantic comedy drama cum biker movie Pillion. An adaptation of Adam Mars-Jones’s 2020 novel Box Hill, starring Alexander Skarsgård and Harry Melling, it is the first feature by Harry Lighton, a self-taught writer-director with a fistful of shorts under his belt, including the award-winning Wren Boys (2017), the story of a gay marriage in an Irish prison.

When we meet to discuss the film, Lighton still seems a little dazed by the breakneck speed of Pillion’s success, including a North American distribution deal with A24 and a world premiere at Cannes where it won the Un Certain Regard Best Screenplay award, powering a whirlwind tour of festivals. “The whole thing has been like, ‘Pinch me, pinch me, pinch me!’” he says. The Cannes reviews praised the director’s light touch and the skill of his actors, with plaudits ranging from the Guardian’s delirious headline ‘50 shades of BDSM Wallace and Gromit in brilliant Bromley biker romance’ to David Rooney’s fulsome appreciation of “a cheeky delight, not to mention a unique queer love story” in the Hollywood Reporter.

Pillion is a fresh take on the romcom by a new young filmmaker. But it also feels like an ‘old soul’, evocative of cinema more familiar to previous generations, including dom/sub classic The Servant, written by Harold Pinter (Joseph Losey, 1963); Stephen Frears’s interracial gay romance My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), written by Hanif Kureishi; and the naughty but nice suburban brothel biopic Personal Services (Terry Jones, 1987).

The Britishness of Pillion is also shot through with what was once thought of as ‘continental’ – sexually bold characters and situations that were the result of historically more relaxed European censorship laws. It reminded me of Frank Ripploh’s affable and explicit German film Taxi zum Klo (1980), whose scenes of fellatio and golden showers crossed over from the gay underground to find a wider audience. In the 1970s-set Box Hill, Ray and Colin are both English, and their differences are physical and class-based. In Pillion, set in the present day, Brexit is an unspoken backdrop and there’s something charmingly old school about the imposing and otherworldly dominant biker Ray (Skarsgård), who is reimagined as Scandinavian. Colin (Melling) is a nerdy young traffic warden who still lives with his parents and when mum Peggy asks Ray where he’s from, the Swedish-American-accented reply is, “Chislehurst”.

“The novel had this narrative voice which felt totally original in terms of the rose-tinted attitude the main character [Colin] had toward events which might be received conventionally as mortifying,” Lighton says. Mars-Jones, a well-known critic who in his film-reviewing days would often arrive at press shows in his biker leathers, gave Lighton carte blanche for the adaptation, resulting in initial ideas for settings as far afield as a cruise ship and Ancient Rome before returning to suburbia. Lighton’s script dispenses with the book’s wryly humorous first-person narration but captures an equivalent overall tone that benefits from laugh-out-loud dialogue and physical comedy to offset the frank sex and exquisite pain of the romantic power games between dominant and submissive. “I wanted to show the capacity for contradictions in atypical relationships – for brutality and tenderness to co-exist,” he says. 

The film’s good humour also balances its underlying sadness and theme of loss. With hints of a broken heart, Ray reads a volume of Karl Ove Knausgård’s My Struggle in bed while Colin obediently sleeps on the floor. Whereas Box Hill had an emotionally distant father with dementia, in Pillion Colin’s mother has cancer. “I wanted to place that in dialogue with Ray and Colin’s super-abnormal relationship,” Lighton says, “to put that which might alienate an audience member alongside the identifiable so they wouldn’t be able to disregard Colin’s experience as something totally out of their life experience.” 

Over the decades of out gay filmmaking, Aids has reared up and then receded into the narrative landscape, with societal and parental roles now more often defined by loving support than disapproval that needs winning over. Colin’s parents Peggy (Lesley Sharp, evoking Mike Leigh’s domestic comic dramas) and Pete (Douglas Hodge) are as keen as Aunt Ida in John Waters’ Female Trouble (1974) to find their son a nice boyfriend. “It was a personal thing to make Peggy really supportive of Colin,” says Lighton. “My mum is very different from Peggy, but it can be hilarious, the ways in which she encourages my romantic life. Sometimes she’ll cut out a magazine article if she thinks there’s someone who looks attractive and nice, who I should be dating.”

I ask Lighton, who was born in 1992, what he remembers watching on television with his family while growing up in Portsmouth. He surprises me by saying “a lot of sport; reality TV and competitions. Robot Wars [1998-2004] was a massive part of my childhood. I’ve got a twin brother and at school we lied and claimed that our uncle had won Robot Wars! I didn’t start watching films as a passion until I was much older. When I was 18, I went to Oxford University and moved in with a friend whose family were very into film. They showed me Fargo [Joel and Ethan Coen, 1996] — it was the first time I’d watched a film and gone, ‘Wow, what is this medium?’ I was massively into reading and literature but had never really expanded to film. So that flicked a switch in me, and from there I became a rabid film consumer. I watched at least a film a day for two years. At that point I hadn’t conceived of film as a career. I was passionate about literature, and thought I maybe wanted to be a novelist. I wrote my dissertation on the Glaswegian novel: authors like Alasdair Gray, James Kelman and Jeff Torrington writing in the vernacular, doing something with the form. That is probably what translated most into my interest in film. I’ve always been drawn to films which I think are doing something interesting with genre or form.”

Having not gone to film school, shorts were Lighton’s training ground, with no rules about how to run a set. But feeling intimidated by his lack of feature experience, he applied for a job as assistant to director Oliver Hermanus for Living (2022), working on every phase of the shoot, from pre-production through to post. “Obviously, every filmmaker is different, but I got to see how a professional feature film is run, when you need to apply pressure as a director, ways you can work with actors or crew, how to solve problems… That eased the transition for me.”

Fishing around for Lighton’s cinematic influences and the contemporary filmmakers he admires also turns up unusual answers. “The Worst Person in the World [Joachim Trier, 2021], funnily enough, was a big influence for Pillion in terms of the joy I found in that narrative. It’s totally different, and its subject matter is very different. But I thought it was playful and light on its feet, despite the fact that it dealt with tragedy. I told Joachim this when I saw him in Telluride. And there’s a song [in Pillion] which is directly nabbed from The Worst Person in the World, so I owe him.

“The film which stuck with me most over the last few years and had an influence on Pillion is Roma [2018] by Alfonso Cuarón. You wouldn’t necessarily think it had an influence, but in terms of the camera language, I was really struck by the way shots developed through pans. The way we open on to the Pillion orgy scene was inspired by that film.”

Lighton mostly steered clear of other biker movies, for fear of being over-influenced, looking only at stills to identify what he needed in order to achieve a non-stereotypical costume design. The iconic black leather biker jackets, boots and denim jeans of Marlon Brando in The Wild One (1953) were lovingly copied in period pieces such as The Loveless (Monty Montgomery/Kathryn Bigelow, 1981) and The Bikeriders (Jeff Nichols, 2023). But in Pillion we first see Ray in white leathers, a wild angel on wheels tearing down the motorway on Christmas Eve to the roar of engines and Betty Curtis’s Italian-language cover version of ‘I Will Follow Him (Chariot)’. The version by Little Peggy March was memorably used by Kenneth Anger in his seminal experimental short Scorpio Rising (1963), which, of course, Lighton hasn’t seen because he actively avoided watching biker movies.

“Is it in Scorpio Rising?” he says. “No way! That’s so funny. I’ve loved that song for years. It’s from Sister Act [1992].”

It’s a joyous soundtrack in a film peppered with musical references. We see Ray playing classical piano at home (in Box Hill he remains a total enigma, but in Pillion we learn a little more about him) – and in the pub we watch Colin decked out in a striped blazer and straw boater performing in his dad’s barbershop quartet, steadfastly ignored by the biker gang. The contrast between the tribes makes you wince. Melling gamely learned barbershop for the role, and Douglas Hodge is an accomplished singer, bringing warmth and veracity to their performances. The idea, Lighton says, “came from thinking about what would be the opposite to an S&M bike gang, something which doesn’t require dialogue or scene set-ups, where it can be a musical performance. I started listening to barbershop, and it was delightfully naff, but also gives you a chance at the start of the film to see an area in which Colin excels, although it’s a niche, nerdy area. It gives you a nice contrast between his performance self and then the self which you see in the romantic world, which is so stuttering and lacking in confidence.”

Another musical connection, albeit in a non-musical role, is the presence of Scissor Sisters frontman Jake Shears as the more experienced fellow submissive Kevin, who we meet in the middle of a delightful picnic in the country for the biker gang. He was cast after being spotted playing the Emcee in the West End revival of Cabaret in 2023. “I was a terrible musician, but I was in a band when I was about eleven, and we only played Scissor Sister covers,” Lighton says, hastily rebutting my enthusiasm for the very idea of this. “We were not cool. We were the opposite of cool. I’d listened to Jake’s podcast interviewing queer musicians, but I hadn’t thought of him in the role of Kevin until casting director Kahleen Crawford suggested him.”

Pillion’s outing to the country is an inspired set piece, as is the film’s wrestling sequence, a jaw-dropping and hilarious display of sexual acrobatics played out in bottomless fetish wear. “I wanted to have little bits of queerness peek through,” Lighton says, “like having a camp classic such as Tiffany’s 1987 cover of ‘I Think We’re Alone Now’ playing rather than something super macho.”

In terms of musical taste, Lighton says, “I exclusively listen to two kinds of music. I love ambient electronic music like Peter Broderick and Nils Frahm, which I can listen to when I’m writing because it’s not intrusive. The more you listen, the more you can hear the nuances in it. The other stuff tends to be pop girl bands, like The Saturdays. That’s my comfort zone. My Spotify Wrapped [the list of an individual’s annual listening choices] is always a cause for piss-taking from my friends, because it moves between trendy electronic music and the gayest music ever.”

The film’s sound design is heightened – the roar of motorbikes, the slow grind of a zip pulled down – and I ask Lighton what he was aiming for in this under-appreciated aspect of film production. “I wanted there to be a balance. Across the film, I’d tell all the heads of department that it was important to keep one foot in realism – for the sound design, or the camera language or whatever, to never stray into what seems like a kind of erotic fantasy. But within that, there was lots of room to contrast the world of Colin’s family, which is a community of chatter and music, with the world of Ray, a quiet house designed to feel more like a kind of fish tank, where you don’t hear much from inside; from outside, even. And then there’s the zips and the motorbike engines. I wanted to try to build up a sense of desire so that the bike engine would throb inside someone’s body when they were listening to it, the noise of the zip would vibrate, and you’d have a tactile sense of the attraction Colin felt for Ray. The description of Ray unzipping in the book is something I borrowed directly, the way it describes the zip going down past his pubes.”

There was surprise among the cast and crew – shared by Harrys Melling and Lighton – that the actor famous for his role as the vampire Eric Northman in the HBO series True Blood [2008-14] had agreed to play Ray, but Skarsgård was captivated by the unique script. “It’s a relationship story unlike anything I’d read before. The fact that it was so unpredictable and exhilarating at every turn excited me,” Skarsgård explains in the press notes for Pillion, where he sums up the film in three words: “Lube, sweat and leather.”

I ask Lighton how he directed such experienced leads. “I made sure that I got to spend time with each of them as part of the prep. I had dinner with Harry, and I went to an Arcade Fire concert with Alex and to Stockholm to spend a day with him. I want to feel comfortable with the person I’m directing once they get on set. I don’t want to feel like I’m trying to work out how someone ticks the moment they arrive on day one. The other thing I did was give them both what I call a starter pack, a page of thoughts on what maybe the character could be or shouldn’t be. With Harry, we talked a lot about the idea of stubborn optimism. This is true, I think, of the narrative voice in Box Hill; Colin is someone who processes events with a stubborn optimism which other people might feel victimised by or downtrodden.” 

Lighton asked Melling to watch the 19th-century-set Icelandic drama Godland (Hlynur Pálmason, 2022), feeling there was something in the lead performance that would translate nicely to Colin, a way of juggling realism and caricature. “With Alex, our discussions were about how to make Ray feel of this world, even though he’s so out of place in Bromley. How to give the look and feel of him a real-world texture and how to not overdo his superhuman qualities. With actors on set, a lot of the time it’s about creating an environment where they can try things out and then getting out of their way. Not giving them too many notes. They’re both great actors and I’m driven by curiosity to try things out, rather than by any preconceived idea of what something should be.” 

In casting the roles of Ray’s motorcycle club cohorts, Lighton and the producers enlisted the ranks of the Gay Bikers Motorcycle Club, the UK’s largest LGBTQ+ bike club, attending an annual meet-up at which 80 riders were present. “I spent the weekend riding around on the backs of bikes, asking them questions,” Lighton says. “I discovered that the club isn’t centred on sex at all – it’s just a community for gay bikers that sometimes spans sexual subcultures. They were a real resource for me, so I cast a bunch of them in the film.” 

None of the club members had acting experience, but they loved being on set and fell effortlessly into their roles. “Traditional depictions of bike clubs in films focus on violent outlaws beating up people,” says Lighton. “I wanted to show there is the capacity for communion, friendship and personal growth among a group of guys who also participate in sexual activities that some people might find alienating.”