The Cast and Crew of Pillion Talk About Embracing the Humor in BDSM

On a big film, it’s not uncommon to have cast and crew members with the same name. However, for intimate queer BDSM romance Pillion, Alexander Skarsgård was in the unusual position of having both his leading man and the director be called Harry.

Funnily enough, writer/director Harry Lighton said, distinguishing between himself and star Harry Melling (Harvest, The Pale Blue Eye) wasn’t an issue on the set “but since we’ve been doing press it’s always been an issue.” Even more confusingly, a lot of people with production company Element Pictures call Melling “Hazza” and, Lighton explained, “with my family that’s my nickname.” Still, a big step up from the nickname Lighton’s friends have for him: “Bog Roll.”

Arriving on VOD this week from A24, Pillion is a sensitive and very British depiction of both queer and biker cultures. Lighton adapted the script from Adam Mars-Jones’ 2021 novella Box Hill, and while the outline remains the same, the details and the overall intent have changed. Both are about Colin (played in the film by Melling), a quiet and slightly sad gay man in a BDSM relationship with a stunningly handsome but enigmatic biker named Ray (Skarsgård, The Northman, Infinity Pool). Yet the book is built of the older Colin’s reminiscences and becomes about him justifying Ray’s abusive behavior. Lighton’s film is more about exploring the outlines of consent in a sub-dom relationship, one in which Ray increasingly realizes that submissiveness doesn’t mean subservience. Lighton said, “I love Box Hill but the retrospective nature of the narrative meant that regret and yearning were strong colors in it. I wanted to tell a story that had aspects that are sad or thought-provoking or challenging but was ultimately an invigorating tale.”

Luckily, Mars-Jones was happy to stay out of the scripting process completely. “I basically stole his book and ran,” Lighton said. “I had one chat with him when I approached him for the rights, and he’s so intimidatingly articulate that I was like, ‘I never want to talk to you about the book again.’ I’d ask him one question and he’d talk for 30 minutes. I recorded the chat I had with him and when I transcribed it he didn’t say ‘Um’ once in the hour I was interviewing him. I was like, ‘This guy, if I keep talking to him, he’s going to get in my head about every decision that I’m making.’”

Pillion director Harry Lighton (center) with stars Harry Melling (left) and Alexander Skarsgård (right) Credit: A24

The script retains the original book’s empathy for Colin as he comes to terms with what he wants and what Ray can and can’t provide. However, he is in some ways a radically different character that Melling called “beautifully drawn. … What is interesting about Colin is the fact that he doesn’t know how these dynamics work when we meet him. He doesn’t know the rules.” To understand those dynamics himself, Melling talked with “a lot of dom-sub dynamic relationships, and the common thing they said is ‘You know the submissive has the power?’ That’s the thing they always say, they’re the ones who are really in charge, because they give the boundaries of the relationship and what they need in order to live out the dynamic, but Colin doesn’t know that yet.”

Yet one element that stays basically intact from Box Hill is how little the audience really knows about Ray – the audience, and Skarsgård. “Harry gave me nothing,” the actor said.

“It’s true!” laughed Lighton.

The pair actually had several conversations about Ray in the year before production started, but Skarsgård avoided asking too many direct questions. Skarsgård said, “In trying to be a good boy and do my homework, the more I tried to specify it the less interesting it got for me.”

Lighton noted that he went through a similar experience when writing the script. The fewer details there were about Ray, the clearer he became as a character. 

Skarsgård said, “I found the purpose of the script and the structure very clear, and what he did to Colin and how that propelled Colin on to the arc that he goes on.”

That transferred to the filming process, where Skarsgård, Lighton, and Melling avoided talking through scenes beforehand, so they didn’t overthink things. “All that happened as the camera was rolling,” Skarsgård said. “I was like, ‘Alright, we’re doing this now. This is what I’m getting from Harry, this is his interpretation of this scene, and I thought it was going in this direction, so let’s see where it’s going.’ That made it really fun and playful, and I definitely discovered new sides of Ray that I had not anticipated.”

One big change from the book is that Lighton’s script absorbs the inherent humor of BDSM, in a way that Box Hill doesn’t. Take one particularly memorable scene in which Ray asserts his physical dominance over the smaller, meeker Colin, “It’s not just the assless wrestling singlet,” Lighton said. “There’s something inherently funny, meeting up with someone to wrestle and see who wins, and then one of them gets shagged.”

For Melling, those moments of humor are part of Colin’s growth. “It’s him second-guessing,” Melling said. “What’s the right thing to do, how to satisfy certain people. I think that a lot of the comedic elements are created in his confusion, in him getting it wrong.”

Lighton was very aware of his responsibility to not seem like he was laughing at the kink community he was portraying. However, he said, “Humor is a good creative tool to bring an audience on board with a character, particularly when you’re dealing with a subject that might be alienating at points to the audience. Comedy is such a great way to be generous and create a buzz in a cinema, so people won’t run out at the first sight of a whip.”

Pillion is available on VOD now.

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