Here comes your man! I spoke with Harry Lighton about his directorial debut, Pillion, now heating up movie theaters across America. We discussed Harry Melling’s incredible craft, gay intimacy, cages vs. plugs, and the towering figure that is Alexander Skarsgård.
BOSTON HASSLE: Since Ballad of Buster Scruggs, Harry Melling has been popping up as an adult actor and making really good choices. I saw him in Toronto. He’s very distinct. I assume you’ve seen Please Baby Please?
HARRY LIGHTON: I have. I watched all his stuff before I wrote to him. I remember watching Please Baby Please and a little bit of me being like, God, he’s kind of already done this. So I remember being worried, because by the time I got there, I sort of knew that I really wanted him for the film. But actually, I think the two films would be a really interesting double bill because they’re so different, but the surface has some similarity.
BH: This is your first feature length, right? How’s it been having the full grand tour? It seems like it’s crazy.
HL: Crazy is the right word. I mean, it’s been sort of nonstop. We premiered ages ago, in May at Cannes. That was an amazing experience. It went down really well, and then we had a couple of months off. And since then, it’s just been on the road every other week. It’s my first experience of it. I’ve been enjoying it massively. But I think America is the last place we’re going around doing it.
BH: I was wondering if there might be a difference in audience reaction in Europe and America. Did you listen in on the New York premiere?
HL: I didn’t. I’ve stopped watching it. I think, maybe wrongly, I kind of wondered if it had more of a European sensibility. Certainly some of the humor feels very British to me. But the American screenings have been rowdy, really lively. We went to Washington to Mid-Atlantic Leather, which is a massive leather convention, one of the world’s biggest. They were some of the finest screenings I’ve been to. People always say this about every film anyone makes, but it really is a cinema film because it generates a lot of noise and divides opinion a bit.
BH: Sometimes with gay movies like this, people laugh a little too hard in a way where I’m like, what are you laughing at? I’m always wondering how people are really taking it.
HL: I wouldn’t say I deliberately caught that kind of laughter, but I don’t mind it because I think hopefully that laughter gives way to something more sincere, emotional. The film is deliberately set up in the first 20 minutes to invite a mainstream audience. And some of those will be invited in because they’re able to laugh. But that being said, the gayest of the gays in the audience are also laughing. They recognize the clumsiness, which is often a part of those interactions, particularly within the kink space. I think it’s fine to not take it too seriously.
BH: It almost feels like for someone like Colin, who’s just ready to be submissive, he thinks he’ll jinx it if he voices his opinion. He thinks, “Oh, this is going to stop if I say anything at all. So I need to just leave the dog here, follow him. This needs to happen or the spell will be broken.” So it’s interesting seeing that play out in a film.
HL: The young Colin doesn’t know what he’s doing in this world. He’s worried about saying the wrong thing. Yeah, showing his ignorance.
BH: I feel like I say this in almost every interview I do with a filmmaker making a gay movie, but I’m glad that it’s not a coming out movie. His parents are already in the know and they want him to find a nice boy. It’s so fun to get to go beyond the coming out thing because they can meet Ray and wonder what his deal is. I was thinking a lot about what Ray gets out of having Colin. If it’s anything specific or if it’s just about power, like how far can he push him? It’s hard to see into his head, obviously, on purpose.
HL: Yeah, there’s multiple possible answers. One, I think, is that Ray’s someone who’s very well practiced embodying a certain kind of sexual fantasy. And that’s one which plays into contrasts in power and in appearance and in status. And so, as someone who is kind of parodically high status in many ways, he has someone like Colin, who is the lowest of the low in terms of the way he moves through the world. You get the sense that he’s always lived on the margins of life in almost every capacity. There’s an appeal in that extreme contrast, people existing as polar opposites. There’s that thing about how gays always like fucking themselves, or like marrying people who look like them. It’s the gay twin couples. I think that Ray is sort of attracted to the opposite. But then there’s also the fact that Colin does have this aptitude for devotion. Ray tells him that. There’s a genuine appeal to Colin’s devotional aspects, which is something Colin’s never landed on himself as a positive. Ray truly sees it as the shaping of a good submissive.
BH: I was thinking about that with Colin and his family. I mean, even his one hobby, the barbershop quartet, his dad and brother are in it. He’s never not without them. It’s interesting when he finds something outside of his house that it’s so extreme where he’s on a motorcycle day one. I don’t know a ton about the British leather scene. Are there a lot? Watching Pillion, I was just like, this feels like something that would just be happening over there.
HL: It’s a combination of facts and fiction, because obviously– well, maybe not obviously, but there’s not these neatly formed pillion biker pairings. And like all the pillions, some subs and all the bikers are kind of dominant. Part of the film’s research was me getting a meeting with the GBMCC, the gay bike club. I always forget exactly what it stands for [Gay Bikers Motorcycle Club –ed.]. They’re like Europe’s biggest gay bike club. And, you know, that club’s not even necessarily about sex or kink, but there’s a lot of overlap. There’s a camaraderie within that group, which I think is really reflected in the film. And there’s also a variety of personalities and a variety of aesthetics, you know, as opposed to Tom of Finland where everyone looks exactly the same. I would have liked Ray to feel physically, in terms of his handsomeness, like a kind of Tom of Finland archetype. But the rest of the bike gang is made up of people who look all sorts of ways. Some of them have like hundreds of tattoos, but the other ones look like accountants. That was my experience of spending time with the bikers, you know, it’s really not one size fits all. And I think sometimes kink gets flattened into “Well, all doms look this way, and all subs look this way.”
BH: The big question is about working with Alexander Skarsgård. I feel like he’ll just do anything. In one of his more recent movies, Infinity Pool, he’s just on a leash.
HL: It was a dream. He came on board very quickly after we sent him the script. I’d watched him in Succession, which is why I reached out to him. I thought he was so good in that fourth season of Succession. I knew that he had some history of doing roles which were quite out there. But what I wanted for Ray was someone who could very firmly have one foot in a psychological reality as well as being a dom, and having that headline-grabby aspect of a persona. He was great. He read the script, I spoke to him on Zoom, and 24 hours later he was on board. He’s very playful, but he also does take it very seriously. I think that a big part of the appeal for him doing this was also having Harry already on board. His brother had worked with Harry and he had heard great things. So it was just a real treat to be able to work with both of them because they are both kind of brilliant.
BH: It’s been so exciting to watch every time Harry Melling shows up in something.
HL: He doesn’t do stuff he doesn’t want to do. So all of his stuff is, I think, interesting in some way or another.
BH: This is a very specific question, but there’s a lot of talk of Ray asking Colin to use a butt plug because he’s too tight. Are there any scenes where Colin is caged? I feel like that doesn’t come up.
HL: No, there’s someone else who is caged. You see that the pup is caged. But no, I mean, certainly not on camera. Whether at some point in their year long relationship, he’s put in a cage…
BH: I was wondering.
HL: I feel like Ray wouldn’t put him in a cage. Because, for Ray, he wants the access. He’s not focused on Colin’s penis when having sex, but that’s true. I think that it wouldn’t appeal to him to have someone, you know, unable. He would want to see someone’s erection when he was having sex with them. Part of the power is knowing that he turns them on. It’s hard to wrestle in a cage as well, I bet.
BH: Or ride a motorcycle.
HL: Well, people manage that.
BH: Yeah, clearly. I love the camping. They set the table up for all of them. How much more of the grand tour do you have?
HL: UK’s done, and then America until Thursday. We’re playing in San Francisco. Of course, that is the kind of final cherry on the cake of a big American tour. And then we’ve got it opening in Berlin and Paris and some other places. But yeah, this is the last stretch.
BH: Are you just extremely focused on Pillion and putting it out, or do you have ideas percolating for another film?
HL: I’ve got ideas percolating. I haven’t committed to anything yet. I’m writing a script for another director at the moment, so that’s in the cards. But I’m going to do this writer’s residency from March to the end of July. Prime reason for doing that is to write the next script. So I’m hoping that, come August, I’ll have a script, maybe not ready to go, but in a pretty good place.
BH: A residency like that must be a dream. Have you done one before?
HL: No. And you do it with five other filmmakers and you all live together. It’s going to be interesting.
BH: Is there anything in particular you learned while directing? Or anything you had to work around or would change next time?
HL: It’s almost too boring to say, but writing scenes which require dogs to be great actors is not a fantastic idea. I think that watching Anatomy of a Fall had given me false confidence in the ability of dogs to act well. I wrote some very technical scenes, which then I quickly realized it was just about being able to get a dog from A to B. I’d be wary about that. Also, shooting a Christmas film in July and August in the UK is a bad idea. It restricts what you can do in terms of production design, because, you know, it’s summer and you’re trying to make everything look like winter. But on the whole, it was a tiny budget film. We had to find out a lot of ways to do things which were above our means. Part of the fun was working out. [laughs] So, no, I wouldn’t do anything different.
Pillion
2025
dir. Harry Lighton
107 min.
Opens Friday, 2/13 @ Coolidge Corner Theatre, Somerville Theatre, Kendall Square Cinema, and AMC Boston Common
