Everyone's Invited to Harry Lighton's Kinky British Picnic
Curzon.com (x) Joanna McClurg 20 November 2025
In his feature debut Pillion, writer-director Harry Lighton explores the dom-sub relationship between sweetly awkward traffic warden Colin (Harry Melling) and Ray (Alexander Skarsgård), the leather-clad mystery man who picks him up at his local pub.
Lighton’s adaptation, based on the 2020 novel Box Hill, has received more awards and fewer walk-outs than one might expect from a sexually explicit gay biker rom-com. Fresh from its UK premiere, the filmmaker discusses method dressing, subverting expectations and writing his way out of shame.
JOANNA McCLURG: There was a lot of wolf-whistling going on at the London Film Festival gala screening. It felt pretty raucous. Could you feel that too?
HARRY LIGHTON: I think the film encourages a lively atmosphere. It’s representing a niche within the queer community and, by dint of it being a gala, they all got to dress up in their version of black tie, which is leathers, and we got involved in the dressing up too, as you’ll have seen with my kilt.
JM: Did you have conversations with couples in dom-sub relationships before making the film?
HL: I interviewed a bunch of people in both heterosexual and homosexual set-ups with varying degrees of strictness. I liked the bite in the book. I liked the fact that the relationship felt dangerous. I think there can be pressure, when dealing with niche communities, to treat them with such reverence that you prioritise providing a training manual for the public over providing drama. I really wanted to know, for myself as a writer, how it should be done ethically, so then I could deviate from that.
JM: How did you find the adaptation process?
HL: I think Box Hill’s a brilliant book, but there was some stuff which, to make it my own, I wanted to change. I really pulled it out of joint in an aggressive way initially. I set it in Ancient Rome at one point, and then on a cruise ship. There was almost no DNA from the book left, but I ultimately came back to it. I tried to abandon the project three years into writing it. Thank God I had very good producers who said, ‘Chill out. It’s great. You just need to work through this blip.’
JM: Pillion explores tricky topics like kink and consent while remaining completely unpretentious. Was it important that the film be funny and accessible?
HL: Totally. The films I love don’t wear pretension loudly. I wanted to invite in an audience who weren’t familiar with this world. The sex scenes would be shocking, but there’d be something else they’d find familiar or enjoyable, so they wouldn’t be able to immediately disregard the characters as unworthy of their time or too repulsive. Comedy and pop music can provide sugar that allows you to put confronting images before an audience without them leaving the cinema.
JM: Ray’s background is a big unanswered question. Did you ever consider revealing more about what led him to his lifestyle and sexuality?
HL: I thought about backstory, but whenever I tried to put that into the script, it always made Ray less exciting. I wanted the reason why Ray has this specific kind of relationship to be a question, and I wanted one possible answer to be that he’s just doing it for the erotic thrill, and it doesn’t have anything to do with past trauma.
JM: It’s quite uncommon for a queer film not to feature any kind of nightlife. Drinking and drugs sometimes feel like obligatory plot points in LGBTQ+ stories. Did you intentionally avoid that?
HL: I wanted the consent issue to be ambiguous at points, I don’t think it’s clear-cut, even though Colin says ‘you can do whatever you want to me’. Had the relationship involved drug-taking, I think it would have tipped into non-consent. As for clubbing scenes, my writing process is often about trying to think of new environments for stories that feel familiar so, while it was kind of funny to imagine Colin dancing topless in a sweaty club, it was much more fun to go on a pastoral holiday where it feels like a British picnic – but they’re fucking on tables.
JM: If you were to recast Pillion as a leather dyke film, who would play Ray and Colin?
HL: I think Emma D’Arcy would make a great Ray or Colin, but a particularly good Colin. I just watched Wicked: For Good [2025] and there was a moment where I was like, ‘Michelle Yeoh is such a dom!’ She would be my Ray. I think the perfect combination would be Michelle as Ray and Olivia Colman as Colin. That’s the version I want to see.
JM: Do you think queerness precipitates a special relationship with cinema?
HL: What drove me to make films was totally wrapped up in my queerness. Initially, I found it easier to be braver in my writing than I did in real life, so I used film as a way to soft-launch exploring stuff in real life. I think a lot of queer artists share the sense that bits of their writing are based on parts of themselves that they’ve buried, which they want to try and put out in the open as a way of combating shame. And so I wonder if that’s a unifying thing that pushes queer people towards cinema and creates community.
