“Kink Isn’t One Size Fits All”: An Interview with Harry Lighton for PILLION

Harry Lighton’s Pillion is a sweet, kinky romp through a shy young man’s sexual coming-of-age. Sheltered Colin (Harry Melling) is living a painfully uneventful life with his doting parents until mysterious beefcake Ray (Alexander Skarsgård) speeds by on his motorcycle. Over the course of the film, we watch Colin learn to navigate his desires and hone his sense of self as he dives deep into the push-and-pull dynamics of shared intimacy and individual needs by way of wrestling matches and dom/sub domesticity. It’s playful, surprising, and cleverly reworks the coming-out tale for a generation whose parents may not have a problem with their queerness in theory, but who may still balk in practice when the person they bring home puts a lock and chain around their neck. To celebrate the film’s US release this Friday, Film Inquiry joined first time writer-director Harry Lighton for a brief conversation about kink, camp, and biker fantasies. 

Straight off, I’d love to talk about kink. This is such a fabulous movie about kink culture, and there are more movies right now coming out that actually deal with this subject today than there have been in the past. Given that, I want to get a sense of what you wanted to bring to this topic, why you think there are more movies like this now, and what you think these kinds of films are doing for audiences right now.

Harry Lighton: I’ve always been interested in sexual transgression, and I’ve made a couple of short films before about that topic. I’d already been looking for something that had kink at its heart, and then I read this book, Box Hill (2020), which the film is based on. It felt like a very interesting version of that. I think often we associate kink with experience. You associate it with people who already know what they’re doing and have a kind of confidence about it. But Colin was this incredibly naive character and seeing someone go on that journey where they learn to define their desires better through experience was something that appealed to me. I think what I wanted to bring to it was probably a vision that showed that [kink isn’t] a one size fits all thing. Even within our biker gang, there’s a lot of variety, both in terms of the way the bikers look, but also in terms of the way they practice their versions of domination and submission. I think it’s key to show that–– that there’s all sorts of variety beyond the stereotypes within kink. 

Why are there more movies [about kink now]… It’s funny because there’s some discourse… I’ve been doing a lot of interviews today, and some people have asked me about the decline in sex on screen. I’ve heard that discourse. But then, obviously recently there’s been Heated Rivalry, which isn’t about kink, but then there was Babygirl (2024) too. I don’t know why, but I think that there’s always an appetite for films which find an original way into a relationship story and kink has historically been represented less on screen than your typical sexual relationship. So there’s definitely room for exploration on screen of kink because of that.

Absolutely. The decline in sex on screen discourse is super interesting because it’s definitely both true and not, right? When you’re making a blockbuster, say, you’re dealing with questions about appealing to a global audience and censorship and broad appeal. But then when you do get sex on screen today, there’s more variety. 

As you mentioned, this film is adapted from Adam Mars-Jones’ novel, Box Hill, but beyond that, were there any movies that you were particularly inspired by?

HL: Yeah, there were. There’s a film called The Triplets of Belleville (2003). It’s a French animation, brilliant animation, about a French cyclist and his granny and there’s a harmony singing trio called the Triplets of Belleville. It wasn’t a conscious reference, but I re-watched it recently and I was like, ‘Oh, I can see how that’s been an influence on some of the components of Pillion.’ In terms of other references, it was more a stylistic thing rather than the thematic thing. There’s a film called Godland (2022) by Hlynur Pálmason, which I just thought was magnificent. I remember being quite struck by the protagonist. He seemed like an unusual protagonist for a film and had something of Colin about him. He’s much more willful than Colin, but he felt like someone who traditionally exists on the margins of film who’s been put at the center.

When I watched your film, the first thing that obviously jumped to my mind was Secretary (2002), which is a movie I just adore, and is such a classic in terms of movies about kink and submissives finding liberation through sexuality. How do you feel about Secretary?

HL: I love Secretary, but I took it as the opposite of what I wanted to do in a way. Secretary is quite thick with irony in the way it treats the kink relationship. I find Secretary both moving and very funny. But I think that sometimes that irony can create a distance between the audience and the character. I wanted the audience to really breathe with Colin, and so tonally, it was used as a sort of example of what I didn’t want to do. It was a similar thing with The Duke of Burgundy (2014), the Peter Strickland film, which I also love. But again, it sat more in an ironic space than I was looking for.

Totally. That actually speaks to an interesting intervention you’re making with Pillion that I really appreciated. So often queer coming-of-age stories risk falling into familiar patterns and tropes, and so the way you translated the kinds of conversations about coming out into conversations with an already supportive family about kink was really elegant. Can you talk to me a little bit about how you worked those family dynamics out and how you approached the family part of this film?

HL: I have quite a shit attention span, basically. So when I feel like I’m watching something which is very familiar to me, I zone out. My entry point into writing has always been, ‘How can I do something different here?’ And in the book Pillion is based on, the parents aren’t these overly supportive parents. Colin does tell his mom he’s gay, but she sweeps it under the carpet and they never speak about it again. I was much more interested in starting from the point where you often end in a queer narrative, which is with accepting parents, and then exploring at what point that acceptance is with withdrawn based on someone’s queerness–– their queer version of desire–– not matching the parents’ vision of what a  “good gay life” looks like. It seemed like a nice way to flip that normal trajectory as you say, and then to also ask questions about heteronormativity and how sometimes parents map their relationship model onto their queer kids even when they’re really supportive.

And you get so much good, queasy comedy out of that. I’m thinking about the scene when Colin’s getting picked up for a date, and the dad’s, like, “Well, you won’t be having kids!”

HL: [Laughing] Yeah, I’m obsessed with the dad.

The parents are both just excellent. So funny. The other thing I was thinking about watching this was The Bikeriders (2023). Bikers are such a classic queer archetype, right? From Kenneth Anger to today. Box Hill is set in the ‘70s, but you’ve transposed it onto the present. What is it about bikers that’s still such an iconic queer erotic fantasy?

HL: I didn’t really have much of a history with biker movies before making this film. Obviously I watched a few while I was researching, and then I was actually going to stop watching them, because I don’t want to get patterned by them. But I watched this great film, a queer British film that’s really great, I can’t remember the name… [possibly The Leather Boys (1964)]. I watched The Bikeriders when it came out, too, the Jeff Nichols film. I definitely feel like now I know what’s iconic about them, and what’s queer and erotic about them. For me, it’s the sound of the engine. It’s the bike exhaust: Vroom, that noise gets inside your skin. So when we were thinking about how to visualize Colin’s experience of going on a bike for the first time, it was all about creating that sensory experience for the audience by using score. We ended up using a kind of transmodified cello to create a raw sound which hopefully gives the audience that texture. 

In terms of music, the soundtrack is really perfect for getting at that sense of bringing an older fantasy into the present. Can we talk about how you approached bringing in that ‘50s sound and what you wanted to pull out there? 

HL: The soundtrack’s doing a couple of different things in different places. If we take [the] Tiffany [song] for the wrestling scene [“I Think We’re Alone Now”], the soundtrack there is a cheeky nod to Ray’s gayness. Ray has the surface of someone who’s your classic kind of butch, masc, macho man. But then he wrestles to a camp classic, and he’s got his dogs’ names on his chest, and they’re named after female chat show hosts. I wanted there to be these little hints of campness in the movie. Tiffany was one of those. Then the opening track, the Betty Curtis rendition of “I Will Follow Him.” I quite like films just when they’re very literal sometimes, but at a sort of remove too. So we open with a song about devotion, and over the film, Colin learns his aptitude for devotion. But here we have this song in Italian that speaks about devotion for a Jesus figure, and Ray arrives on Christmas and is a bit of a Jesus figure. It was a cheeky wink.