You made a number of short films prior to this. How did you settle on Pillion as the project you were going to make the leap to features with?
Well, it wasn't the initial plan. I was going to make this film about sumo wrestling and I spent three years doing development on that, but then the pandemic happened and it became too expensive. I was sent Box Hill by Evie Yates and she said she thought I'd like it, probably based on the sumo film I'd been writing but also on my shorts, which have some transgressive sex and tended to have a bit of comedy in there as well. I read it and I was really intrigued by the tone of it, that was the thing which got me. I was like, "Oh, this has made me laugh but it's also made me horny and it's made me think," and those three things are interesting combinations to try and play with. The novel achieved a lot of that through first-person narration, and knowing that I didn't want to make a film with first-person narration, it seemed like an exciting thing to try and translate what I liked about that tone into visuals and action.
Your screenplay departs from the book quite a bit, so how did you approach the process of adaptation?
I knew that I loved the tone and I loved the central relationship, but there was stuff that I didn't want in my version of the film, so my initial approach – which I wouldn't recommend, and it was exhausting – was really to chuck it all up in the air. I moved the first draft to Ancient Rome and then the second was in a cruise ship, and then my producer said, “Get a grip, let's move it back to the setting at least of the novel.” I did that but then moved it into the contemporary period for various reasons, the main one being that if it was in the '70s, the explanation for Ray's mystery could much more easily be pinpointed to something socio-political, like legislation against gay people and the need to be secretive back then. I wanted there to be the very distinct possibility that Ray has chosen this way of living because it worked for his lifestyle and because it contained the erotic charge which is largely what he lives for. So that was one of the main reasons for updating the time period. But yeah, my approach to adaptation at the moment is unwieldy and scattergun, like, break it apart then put it back together, and fortunately Adam Mars Jones was totally happy with me doing whatever, whether he was going to be happy with the end product or not.
In terms of what you said about moving away from the time period and that requirement for secrecy, one thing that I liked about the film is that it's not a coming-out story. Colin is already out, and his parents are incredibly supportive, in fact they are actually his matchmakers and are desperate for him to meet a nice man. That was a refreshing dynamic to see.
Totally, yeah. There was never a version where there was any discussion about that. Personally, I'm just tired of seeing that narrative, and I thought it was interesting in this instance to go from the position of incredibly permissive parents to parents rejecting their son's version of gayness, because it's sort of the inverse of what you usually go from, parents rejecting their son's sexuality and then the arc is towards acceptance. I was interested in this question of, at what point do very liberal, very permissive parents say, "Actually your version of a relationship doesn't match up to what we think a good relationship is"? Where's the line between knowing what's good for their son and just mapping their own value systems onto him? Yeah, it seemed more original as a prospect to me.
Colin is a very open, heart-on-his-sleeve kind of character, but Ray is an enigma and he remains very closed off to us. What conversations did you have with Alexander about developing that character, because we see so little of his inner life?
None. It's true, none. The first thing we spoke about was how I didn't ever want to discuss a backstory with him. The things I wanted to discuss with him were all the practical aspects of what Ray did, what he had in his house, what leathers he wore and those kind of things. But while we didn't discuss backstory we did say, “Here's a moment where I want you to give us some interiority or give us some softness or something,” so there was a dimensionality to Ray's hardness. Again, there was never a version of the script where Ray explained why he was living in this extreme relationship structure, and I can't think of a version of that which would have satisfied me.
Did you explore this subculture and get a sense from people of what they get from this kind of relationship?
Yeah, for sure. I met a bunch of people and the strictness of their relationships varied, in terms of them being 24-7 or being more into doing a scene and then coming out of that dynamic, and it was interesting to see and hear the room for variety. Something which really stuck with me was meeting one sub who said they'd grown up feeling like they didn't excel at anything, and didn't have any status in the looks department, the social department or the intelligence department. In this dom-sub relationship, they’d found a way of feeling good about themselves because they were suddenly being prized for occupying the bottom rung of the hierarchy. It became a virtue. Rather than feeling like they were one of society's losers, it enabled them to make a virtue of what they felt to be their weaknesses, and I think there was something of Colin in that. Other than the barbershop quartet, he starts the film as someone who's without skills and doesn't have any obvious credentials, and then he finds a sense of purpose, so that definitely informed the writing of it.
That's interesting because with films like this, I find it hard to connect with the idea of the sub, and what people get from that relationship. When I was watching Colin’s first evening at Ray’s place there are all these levels of demeaning behaviour, and I found it so frustrating to watch him accept that. I'd never been able to fully comprehend what the sub gets out of that relationship.
I mean, I totally get why some people would watch it and think this is just degrading. For me personally, the idea of cooking someone breakfast to not get a thank you, that doesn't turn me on, but that said, I can totally understand why it would turn people on, particularly if you have desire for the person doing it. The fact that it's Ray, played by Alexander Skarsgård, who's telling Colin to do this, and Colin is someone who has possibly never been on a good date in his life, I think that creates a dynamic where you would suspend your usual your usual conditions. I guess there's a mutual responsibility in that you're doing some acts of service, but ultimately when Colin is with Ray, Ray is calling the shots, and I can definitely identify with the sense of freedom and comfort that comes from abrogating your own autonomy momentarily or permanently. You don't have to make choices for yourself, and that can be liberating for sure.
It's also notable that they just slip so easily into these roles and just go with it. There's never a proper discussion about what are the boundaries are or what are the safe words are, and that's where the dynamic can be abused.
For sure, yeah. It would be clear to anyone from the community, but it should be clear to everyone who watches the film, that this is not meant to be a model BDSM relationship at all. Ray is not a good dom. You know, he establishes some verbal concern in the first scene but there's no protocol established, there are none of the usual ways of safeguarding these relationships, and that's why I wanted to contrast Ray and Colin's relationship with some of the other biker-pillion pairs. You see this scene after they have the orgy and there's various versions of aftercare being exhibited, a lot of which are kind of tender and they're cuddling, and then Ray and Colin are sat apart and Colin's looking at Ray wanting a bit more. So yeah, I didn't want it to seem like I was offering up a blueprint for a relationship, and I wanted that question of whether Colin is being liberated by this or being abused by this to be a live question for the audience.
We should mention your intimacy coordinator, Robbie Taylor Hunt. Tell me about how you approach these scenes, because they are so integral to the film and I imagine it’s difficult logistically and emotionally to put these scenes together.
Yeah, I mean, there was a lot of time spent on that in the writing. For me, those scenes are the most interesting to write because you know that dialogue isn't going to be the catalyst to changes in action or in their dynamic. Trying to think of ways in which sexual manoeuvres or sexual shifts in status can create a shift in a character's mood or can tell the audience something about that character, I found that fascinating. So a lot of that work was on the page and then I brought in Robbie and we did a lot of work with the non-actors, all the bikers and people from the kink community, who weren't actors. Me and Robbie did a lot of work with them, getting them comfortable with the idea of the sex first, but also drawing on their own experiences to inform what they were doing in the sex scenes.
With Harry and Alex, their scenes have been written much more exactly on the page, so then it was just me, those two and Robbie going, okay, where can we add a detail here? How can we make the way Ray pulls out from Colin feel authentic? My biggest thing with sex scenes generally is that they don’t feel like sex scenes, they feel like gestures towards sex, which you get when you see hands clasped like this. That's why I told Robbie and the actors that we needed to avoid that kind of symbolism of sex and just get the clumsy reality.
That's the thing, because obviously you have to choreograph it very carefully, but you don't want it to feel choreographed, it has to maintain this awkward quality.
And Robbie's great at that because the way he works, it's very much not the “Right, move your knee here, four thrusts” kind of work. It's more like, let's map out the sex scene and then give the actors cues where they can trigger a shift in it. You're not just going “One, two, three,” you know, and I've seen those. It's an evolving art, isn't it, in terms of coordination. When I first started working with them it was more prescriptive and felt a little bit inhibiting, whereas now I didn't find it at all inhibiting.
Did you speak to any actors about these roles or their agents who were scared off by the content?
I spoke to some HODs [Heads of Departments] who were scared off by the content, but no, because Harry and Alex were the actors I wanted. So in this instance, no, but it's interesting because I have a friend who's just directed a film that had a queer narrative in it, but it was about a teacher shagging a 17-year-old. A lot of actors were unwilling to go into that territory, and it's a very different thing to what's going on in our film, but I think the fact that the sex in this is so extreme, or relatively extreme, it might liberate an actor who's worried about doing gay sex or something like that. It gives you permission to really go full throttle because it's the essential ingredient of the film, really. It doesn't have to be something which you worry about happening on this day and get nervous about putting it out there, because it's happening every other day.
I guess with a film like this you need to stay true to what the material is and not try to second-guess what the reaction is going to be on the internet or worry about how people will respond to things that they find weird or uncomfortable.
Yeah, and I did think about that sometimes. There was a super close-up of a bellend at one point and I think I took it out because I thought it's going to (a) make the audience laugh at the wrong moment in the scene, but (b) it's probably just going to become the image which defines the film. I didn't want that, absolutely.
How did you find the experience of directing a feature, as opposed to the shorts?
I found the writing a bit painful, because I'm a very slow, painful writer. I found the shooting bit fabulous, I loved it. I always found doing shorts painful during the shoot, but here, I had so many people around me, and when you direct a short you're also the car driver and all of that. I loved doing it over a longer stretch because you've got time to get comfortable with the actors, and by the end it felt very natural and easy. I was coming to work having slept the night before, which is good. In the edit, I worked with a great editor, Gareth Giles, but it was very long and anxiety-inducing, I didn't enjoy that. I didn't enjoy the psychological state I was in, but I've been lucky, because I was always told that producers-director relationships don't survive the first feature, and I'm still very good friends with both of my producers. I had a very young, eager, hungry team around me, and I'll hopefully continue to work with a lot of them. If I get to make more films I want to try as hard as I can to engender that same feeling of, “We really want to make this and make this great, and we all have stakes in it being good,” because it was such a fun set to be on.
You brought over some your crew from your shorts. Cinematographer Nick Morris is someone you’ve worked with a lot. What kind of conversations were you having with him about the look of the film? Did you have any kind of references in mind?
Yeah, obviously because I've known Nick for ages, we spoke about loads and loads. One reference which people probably won't see was Roma (2018), because there's quite a lot of slow developing shots, and there were more which we then cut up because of the pacing, but that camera language was a reference. Then there were a lot of photography references for the quality of light, I was really keen that the aesthetic didn't feel too varnished, it has enough of what I consider to be the real in it, so we looked at photography by Doug DuBois and all your usual documentary photographers. There’s one particular guy called Nick Waplington, who released this massive retrospective book. He's made Christmas scenes in particular, and the Smith house scenes were really influenced by his photography.
Do you know what you’ll be working on next?
I do, I'm writing a film for another director, I don't know if I can say yet who, and that's probably going to take me to the end of the year. I've got a new project with Element, which will hopefully be the next film I direct, and I'm going to write that early next year, so writing basically is the answer.
The part you hate.
I'm ready for that. Directing is wonderful, but I don't think I have the stamina to constantly be in the shooting, release phase of life.
And you like the idea of writing for other directors as well?
Yeah, I love it. I wrote a film for Oliver Hermanus, about Alexander McQueen, and that was my first experience of it, and I really enjoyed it. I found it a lot easier than writing for myself, actually.
Is the sumo wrestling idea over for you now?
Yeah, I think it’s too similar to Pillion. Sumos were here this week, do you know about that?
I know, at the Albert Hall. I was going to say, I saw the poster on the tube.
I felt like this is meant to be! It’s unbelievable. I'd forgotten how much I loved it, and also how electric it is as a spectator sport. There’s this weird dynamic to sumo tournaments, where it starts off so boring and gets more and more exciting as bigger guys come out, because it’s a bottom-to-top hierarchy, and by the end there's these 200kg guys just bashing into each other. But no, sumo sadly feels like it's dead in the water. Someone else can take that idea now.
Pillion is in cinemas on November 28th.