By Kilian Melloy

There are many surprises to Harry Lighton’s gay biker romance Pillion, not the least of which is that it’s the debut feature of director Harry Lighton.

Lighton is a filmmaker of no little talent: He’s made a number of short films before now, one of which, Wren Boys, won a number of awards, including the Provincetown International Film Festiva’s Best Narrative Short award in 2018. The short was also nominated for both a British Academy Film Award and a British Independent Film Award. Pillion confirms that earlier success, winning for Best British Independent Film and Best Debut Screenwriter at the British Independent Film Awards as well as taking the prize for Beast Adapted Screenplay the Gotham Independent Film Awards. More accolades are certain to Pillion’s way as awards season continues.

The film falls somewhere in-between graphic gay drama and rom-com, but it’s so confidently made that it doesn’t feel like something strange; rather, it’s the completely relatable story of an untethered young man, Colin (Harry Melling), discovering that he likes being in a relationship with a strict code of conduct; a relationship where he is secondary, and yet he still holds enormous power because of the strength and purity of his devotion. It’s a BDSM relationship, but it’s not based on cruelty or subjugation. Rather, it’s rooted in unvarnished honesty, unapologetic kink, and deep respect, even if on the surface it can seem to be vastly out of balance.

Colin’s dom is a queer biker named Ray (Alexander Skarsgård), a stunner of a man who is almost supernaturally handsome and self-assured, and who comes wreathed in an air of mystery. Unforthcoming about his past, his job, or even his last name, Ray is the sort of tall, blond stranger who will never become mundane with familiarity because familiarity is simply against the rules. One may gather clues — the three women’s names tattooed on his chest, for instance, with one of those names being the same as that of his dog — but Ray is entirely opaque.

That leaves plenty of room for surprises, and when they come, they speak to an innate tenderness and kindness. Ray can seem gruff or uncaring, but he’s nothing if not honest. In other words, Ray might not be the cuddly type, but he does have a heart. The question eventually becomes whether he will open that heart to Colin or forever remain aloof. Colin, in the meantime, grows out of his shyness. When he subs for someone, it’s his choice; he’s no mere doormat, and when he chooses to go head-to-head with Ray his sincerity is as forceful as Ray’s stern discipline.

Lighton’s screenplay is adapted from Adam Mars-Jones’ 2020 novel Box Hill, and it features a stereotype-shattering queer biker club that adopts Colin as one of their own and shows him the friendship and warmth that he’s been missing. (In a cameo, none other than Scissor Sisters frontman Jake Shears, proving himself an able actor, plays another sub to one of the bikers.) Like his direction, Lighton’s screenplay defies expectations for a debut: It’s filled with remarkable passages and transcendent moments that Melling, Skarsgård, and the rest of the cast bring to dimensional, luminous life.

Lighton was recently accorded the Coolidge Breakthrough Artist Award by the Coolidge Corner Theater in Brookline, Massachusetts, a longtime champion of independent cinema. The 33-year-old out filmmaker chatted by Zoom recently about Pillion, revealing what drew him to the source material, what his work with Moffie filmmaker Oliver Hermanus taught him, the cinematic gift of his leading men, and what book he’s recommending to fans of Pillion.

Kilian Melloy: Congratulations on receiving the 2026, Coolidge Breakthrough Artist Award. With Coolidge so active in supporting indie filmmaking, does that feel like a special honor?

Harry Lighton: Yeah, massively. I had a look at the past winners, and what a list of independent filmmakers. It’s a massive help in in carving out the time to carry on trying to make work in this space. So, yeah, I’m crazy grateful.

Kilian Melloy: You’ve worked a lot with Oliver Hermanus — you had done second unit work on Mary & George, among other things. Do you feel work on that series prepared you in some way for this feature?

Harry Lighton: Doing second unit, I was mostly just filming, like, horses. I wasn’t in charge of the set on Mary & George, but I definitely learned a lot from Oliver about how to work on a professional set. I didn’t go to film school, and I just made shorts myself, and I didn’t really know when to when to say “Cut!” even. Working with him, I learned about all the various things you need to do as a director, not only in terms of shooting the scene, but in terms of supporting your actors in pre-production, and working out how to avoid compromising on the things which are important to you. Shooting Pillion, I was repeatedly grateful… if I hadn’t done this with Oliver, I’d feel a bit lost.

Kilian Melloy: Why did you choose to adapt Box Hill for your debut feature? Was there something in particular that pulled you toward that material?

Harry Lighton: I’ve made a bunch of shorts, and that often has been about unconventional sexual experiences, queer experiences, and so I was looking for something kind of in that space. Box Hill jumped out to me when I read it as offering me the ability to continue exploring that subject matter, but on a bigger canvas. It was also sat in a tone which I really am drawn to, where it’s balanced between comedy and sincerity, and it offers a lot of opportunity for tonal whiplash, where one moment you’re going to be laughing out loud, and the next minute you’re going to be gasping, or you’re going to be turned on, or you’re going to be crying. Those are the kind of films I like, where I feel like I’m being put through the wringer a little bit.

Kilian Melloy: We’re seeing different things now on screens both large and small in terms of intimacy and the kinds of relationships that are possible — was this a trajectory you wanted to further a little bit?

Harry Lighton: I wasn’t really thinking about that trajectory, but I definitely was interested in trying to represent BDSM in a way which I felt I hadn’t seen completely before, which was, you know, not treating the characters like two-dimensional sex objects, but really getting into the multiple dimensions which were involved in both a kink relationship, and the person within that kink relationship.

Kilian Melloy: I’m wondering if in your own mental notebook you have a backstory and an explanation for Ray, who is so deliberately anonymous. We never have a last name for him. We don’t know where he’s from. My personal theory is that he’s a screenwriter who’s gathering material and life experience — what might your explanation be for him?

Harry Lighton: I have my theories… [but] I will never say.

[Laughter]

Harry Lighton: Part of the fun for me is that very deliberate choice to not confirm any backstory for Ray. I think that there might be a very logical reason for it, but it might equally be possible that he is doing it as part of an erotic game. There’s a kind of erotic appeal in anonymity — if you have anonymous sex, it can be very exciting. Once you know all the details of someone — where they grew up, where their mom shops, and all that — then they become a bit less erotic, a bit less attractive. 

Kilian Melloy: Did you have conversations around your theories with Harry Melling and Alexander Skarsgård for the sake of their performances and their understanding of the characters?

Harry Lighton: The first time I spoke to Alexander, I was like, “Listen, I don’t want to discuss Ray’s background with you, because whenever I try and pin it down, it becomes less interesting to me. He shared my opinion. He was like, “I think it’s really important that we keep the question up in the air for the audience.” Alexander never answered it for himself, either. He’d have ideas, but those ideas changed as he was filming. We know everything about Colin’s background, but I certainly never wanted Colin to have any fixed idea of who Ray is, or what his background is.

Kilian Melloy: I would love to know how Jake Shears ended up in the movie.

Harry Lighton: He happens to be really good friends with my casting director, Kahleen Crawford, and he’s a massive cinephile. She knew that he was looking to do some screen acting, but didn’t want to start with a big part, and she thought he’d like the script, and he did. So then I got in touch with him, and he said, “Yeah, let’s go for it.” It was funny, because when I was growing up, I was in a Scissor Sisters tribute band. It was a nice moment of meet your heroes.

Kilian Melloy: Did getting Alexander Skarsgård on board feel like a gift from the cinema gods?

Harry Lighton: It definitely was a gift from the cinema gods! He was top of my list, but I thought it would be a waste of time to send the script to him, because it’s a first feature with a very low budget. And then my casting director said, “No, go on. Roll the dice, at least.” And he came back incredibly quickly, like, 24 hours later, and said, “I want to Zoom, Harry.” Then we had a Zoom. And then he said yes the next day. I couldn’t really believe it. There’s been a lot of “pinch me” moments making and releasing this film, but that was definitely the biggest because then I was like, “I think we will be able to make this film now, having spent seven years wondering.”

Kilian Melloy: If Ray is a closed book, Colin is very much an open book, and Harry Melling plays that brilliantly. I saw him in The Ballad of Buster Scruggs just the other night, by coincidence, and he was brilliant there, too.

Harry Lighton: Buster Scruggs was the first thing I saw him in, and that’s kind of why I became obsessed with him. He’s not your typical male screen presence, but he’s so captivating to watch. I knew that’s what we needed for Colin; we needed someone who you believe could be a marginal figure, who could sit on the sidelines of life, but he would also demand the viewers’ attention. I think that Harry does that better than anyone else.

Kilian Melloy: You said in a previous interview you had cut an explicit shot from the theatrical release because on the big screen the image was too much. Would that be something you’d add back into a small screen release, like streaming or Blu-ray?

Harry Lighton: I know the shot you’re talking about. It was in the first blow job alleyway scene, and we used the shot when Ray unzips and takes out his penis. We cut to this super close-up, and it just made the audience laugh. I don’t think you would be laughing at that moment. You would be holding your breath with Colin — like, “Oh, fuck, I’ve got to try and do a blow job, and I don’t know what I’m doing.” In test screenings, when the audiences were laughing, it was puncturing the tension of that moment. So, I wouldn’t put it back in now.

Kilian Melloy: I’m curious whether you hear from viewers about whether they’ve discovered unexpected fetishes of their own, or if they thanked you for shedding light on things that maybe they didn’t want to talk about before.

Harry Lighton: I’ve got a lot of a lot of Instagram messages from people who’ve said, “The film awoke something in me,” or, “It confirmed feelings I had which I hadn’t seen before on screen, or which I hadn’t voiced to myself before.” I’ve certainly got that. I always direct people who tell me that to this amazing book called Perv  by Jesse Bering. (For more on Perv, follow this link.) It’s a book about fetish and paraphilia and the like, an extraordinarily wide gamut of fetishes, and I found it a really useful, validating read when I was researching Pillion.

Pillion is in limited release. For more on the film, visit its website.

Watch the trailer for Pillion: