In a Valentine’s Day season where Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” seems the go-to date night movie for most couples, along comes A24 with some curiously fitting counterprogramming: Writer/director Harry Lighton‘s brazen, thorny, but deceptively sweet kink romance “Pillion.” Described as a “dom-com” in most of the studio’s marketing materials, “Pillion” charts the furtive romance between a leather-clad dominant, played with smoldering Tom-of-Finland assertiveness by Alexander Skarsgård, and a timid, inexperienced submissive played by Harry Melling, in modern-day London.
It’s tempting to reduce “Pillion” simply to its raunchier, more transgressive sexual elements: More than lurid scenes of Melling’s Colin kneeling in front of Skarsgård’s Ray in a dark alleyway to use his tongue in more ways than one, or a sexually-charged wrestling bout in assless singlets, so much of Lighton’s film expresses the curious normality of the D/s relationship Colin and Ray find themselves in. Colin quickly discovers, as Ray describes, an “aptitude for devotion,” which means that all of the acts of service and submission Ray demands (from sleeping on the floor to cooking all of his meals) are things that Colin deeply enjoys.
As with its source material, Adam Mars-Jones’ melancholic 2020 novella Box Hill, “Pillion” isn’t shy at poking holes at the flaws in Colin and Ray’s kink dynamic: There’s little discussion of boundaries, no safe words, and little healthy communication. And yet, in Skarsgård and Melling’s tender, unconventional chemistry, and Lighton’s deftly light touch, there’s a warmth to be found among all the padlocks and leather jackets and sleeping on the floor. It’s not the kind of love story that lasts, necessarily. But it’s one that Colin, and potentially even Ray, need to go through to find what they truly need.
Sipping tea in a hotel room before an advanced screening in Chicago, Harrys Lighton and Melling sat down with RogerEbert.com to discuss the challenges in adapting the caustic “Box Hill” to a sweeter incarnation, the psychological hurdles inherent in depicting the dynamics of a dubiously-toxic dom/sub relationship, and the one prop that gives us a clue into Skarsgård’s interior life.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
I’m really curious about the process of adaptation from the novella to the film, as there are a lot of differences, not just in time period, but in tone. What attracted you to the book, and how did you want to adapt it?
HARRY LIGHTON: Two things: The first was the subject of an innocent going into a world of transgressive sex, I think. But I made a couple of shorts which touched on similar areas, and I was looking for something else in that space. Then, the film’s tone is undoubtedly different from the book’s, which whiplashes between humor and sincerity, sometimes from sentence to sentence. I thought that was an interesting cocktail to try to translate into film.
But I knew I wanted to warm up the novel a bit. The novella is probably slightly crueler to Colin, both in terms of the way it describes him and the experiences it puts him through. There’s a categorical rape scene in the novella, which I think colors the rest of the narrative. The question I really wanted to ask was, is this relationship good or bad for Colin? In the novella, I firmly came down on the ‘no’ side, because of the fact that there was a higher element of Stockholm Syndrome, there.
Harry [Melling], when you got this script, and you built your own understanding of Colin as a character, how much did that process of adaptation hit you? Was it the case of building a more transformative experience for Colin than the explicitly abusive one in the novella?
HARRY MELLING: I read the novella after the script, obviously, and read it quite soon after, if I remember correctly. As Harry said, there are differences in terms of tone. But what was useful was that the novella is in the first person; it’s in Colin’s head. So there are certain aspects of an interior life I could steal, for lack of a better word, and transpose that into Harry’s script.
Whenever I’m working on something, I find that those things sometimes start out very useful and then become less so. In this, I found a really good starting point: using the book alongside the script soon drifted into the backdrop of what I was exploring.
The thing that made me leave the novella behind a bit was the movie’s comedic world. As Harry said, I think the film is warmer; the novella is funny, too, but in a different way. So my homework was really to get my head down and honor the narrative beats Harry had set out in the script, and try to make them as good as possible.
This isn’t your first recent role in which your character explores queerness for the first time; in “Please Baby Please,” your character is on a similar journey of sexual and queer discovery. What attracts you to those kinds of characters?
HM: I think there’s obviously some crossover. When I come to a role, I always look at it as a separate beast; I don’t have that strategic sort of brain. So what attracted me to both those roles was that they’re completely unique. I hadn’t read anything like “Please Baby Please,” and he’s an interesting character navigating the complex negotiation between the masculine and the feminine, which I found fascinating. And [Colin] is very much on the road to discovering what love means to him. They both felt like very unique, powerful stories. But I don’t think “I’ve done that, so now I should do this.”
I was also thinking, especially in the parts where you get to perform in a barbershop quartet, of the segment of “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs” where you, too, are performing for tips to unsuspecting audiences. So many of your characters are performers in a lot of respects.
HM: That’s true. Something I thought about recently is that, when my character is performing in “Buster Scruggs,” it’s bold; it’s committed. And the barbershop quartet is certainly something [Colin] feels comfortable in. This is a world he feels he can excel in. But then, off that, he’s a very different creature. That’s the same for the “Buster Scruggs” character; when he’s alone, he’s very muted. I don’t think he says anything other than the speeches. So those contrasts, those differences, have always interested me as an actor—how someone could be one thing in a particular environment, but in another environment be something else.
Of course, there’s another entity not here who’s a major element of the film’s fabric: Alexander Skarsgård as Ray. Going back to the novella, his Ray is a departure from that version. He’s a decidedly non-British Ray, which lends him a strange exoticism. How did you approach building the character around him and acting alongside him?
HM: It was amazing. We had no time whatsoever beforehand; we’d shot a week of the family stuff, and then Alex flew in. I think he was in Toronto doing “Murderbot,” but he flew in on the following Sunday. We had to rehearse the wrestling scene to be shot the following day. So we literally shook hands, started jumping on each other, and got to it.
In hindsight, albeit not by design, it was a fantastic way of entering the process: You’re not establishing a backstory, or going, “You know the scene where I’m by the piano, and you’re playing it? Maybe we should think about this!” Which means that, two weeks later, you have that conversation in your head and you’re trying to reach for something that might not be there. It was a great way of working, and with someone like Alex, who is fearless and always going to change things up, and will always be there with you in the scene, it’s just very easy. You can very much keep it alive and keep testing each other on the day, and hopefully get some good stuff for Harry to use in the edit.
Harry [Lighton], how did you work to build that chemistry with them?
HL: I didn’t, really. I thought long and hard about the casting, as that’s most of the work. To try to create the right environment. Part of creating chemistry is perhaps not letting things stultify when you’re shooting, so making sure there’s enough room to stay in the present tense during filming is important. I tried to encourage an environment where they could change things up from take to take and tweak things to keep it feeling live.
When it comes to filming the more intimate scenes of sex and kink with Colin and Ray, there are so many different ways to express what are fairly transgressive acts for cinema. You’re not letting Ray hang hog on screen, necessarily—
HL: Hanging hog, does that mean dick out? Because we see some hog.
Well, yes, but there are some strategic cutaways, as it were.
HL: My strategy was that I never wanted it to feel like we were panning away from the explicitness of the material. I wanted it to feel committed to honoring the truth of this type of sex. But I also didn’t want to remove the audience from that sex, but not beat them over the head with the shock of it. One shot, which I’ve talked about quite a lot and did shoot, was a super close-up of the hog, as you’d say.
The Prince Albert.
HL: Exactly. And once we were playing around with it in the edit, the test audiences kept laughing when we cut to it, in a moment where I wanted them to be concentrated. The same with Colin holding his breath as he gives Ray a blowjob. It was always a question of how to thread the needle between diluting the sex and being emptily provocative.
Harry [Melling], on that note, playing those scenes as a submissive, it must be an interesting exercise to play submission and even the physicality of giving blowjobs and bottoming.
HM: I think so, especially when it’s so new. That’s the thing I found so fascinating, Colin’s courage to do everything for the first time, which is what I really wanted to get across. Whether it’s a blowjob in an alleyway or licking a leather boot, all of these things are new territory for him. So I just wanted to make sure that was alive, as well as the want to do it, to get it right. Because that was very important, you know, to make sure that Colin is a willing participant. He really wants to do a good job at this. All those sprinkles of narrative moments were important—the glee, the thrill he gets from it.
You always get the sense, too, that Colin is trying to figure out Ray a bit. And as viewers, we’re also trying to figure out Ray. What was the negotiation from a writing and directing standpoint, for how much you wanted us to know about Ray?
HL: I knew that I didn’t want there to be any explanation in Ray’s background for the way that he is. I didn’t want to pinpoint, “Okay, this is something that happened to him when he was sixteen or nine or whatever that explains the way he is.” I wanted it to be perfectly possible that he’s just kinky because he’s kinky.
But I did want there to be moments where we see beneath this hard, macho embodiment of a sexual fantasy to something more vulnerable. So my conversations were with myself, but also with Alexander when we were shooting, about how we could provide those chinks in Ray’s armor. So the audience knows there’s something psychologically complex at work beneath this performance.
The one real indicator we get for Ray’s interior life, so to speak, is the [Karl Ove] Knausgård book [My Struggle], which he’s reading when he’s with Colin. How did you pick that tome?
HL: There’s definitely an insight to be read into that. I think that Colin probably reads an insight, for sure. I like the idea that, in addition to indicating his geographical roots, “My Struggle” is a famous work of autofiction. So it seems to me a fun irony that Ray was reading a book in which someone has laid bare their life, warts and all, even though he’s so resistant to that kind of autobiography in a personal context.
HM: I also love the fact that halfway through the film, Colin’s reading “My Struggle” too, in bed with him. He’s probably reading it to glean anything about this guy. “Does Ray also do that?” Because information from Ray is obviously not forthcoming, he’s looking into any clues about this person.
It also gives an indicator of Colin’s occasional desire for some of the elements of a more traditional relationship—being able to share interests, that kind of thing. Which feels like the ultimate journey Colin goes on, being the tale of a sub who figures out his boundaries and how to express them. As you said, it’s a lighter and sweeter film, but one that’s honest about the difficulty of first loves, even in this kink context.
On that note, I want to ask about the “day off” sequence, which, for me, is the most psychologically charged of them all. There’s a feeling that Ray is potentially getting back at Colin for all of his prodding for normalcy by saying, “Okay, you want a day off, you’re getting a day off.” What was it like to play the joy and tension of that sequence?
HM: I love the way you saw it, and I think it can be a big “Fuck you, Colin.” But I love that the day off, for so many people, can be so many other things. Some people think it’s very genuinely Ray trying it out to see if it will work for him, as opposed to being something he’s planned to make a point.
I love that the sequence houses all those things alongside, the finale of it, where they’re on the hill, and you have the kiss. Again, that moment can be so many different things. The whole day-off sequence, albeit leaning into some romantic tropes, also contains so many different definitions of what’s actually going on. Is he scared? Is he trying to prove a point to Colin?
What do you hope audiences get out of this kind of transgressive take on a love story, whether they be gay or straight, kinky or no?
HL: I hope they just find it a great ride. Above all else, I think the film is one you can have fun watching. It’s a film that generates a loud audience; when you watch it, people like laughing and crying and gasping and doing all the things I like watching movies together with people for.
HM: I hope people who don’t know much about this particular subculture can understand what it is. I’m just super proud that a movie like this exists, and people want to watch it.
“Pillion” comes to select theaters February 13th, and expands February 20th, courtesy of A24.
