It’s not every day you see a biker gang BDSM comedy-drama on the big screen. But Pillion, the feature debut of writer-director Harry Lighton, is exactly that – depicting the unfolding sub-dom relationship between Harry Melling’s introverted Colin, and Alexander Skarsgård’s biker Ray. As they navigate the tenets of their relationship, Colin comes to better understand exactly what he does and doesn’t want.
It was this uniqueness that drew Skarsgård to the project. “A lot of scripts that are even pretty good, they feel like a version of a film you’ve seen before,” he tells Empire. Not so much with Pillion. “It was such a funny and touching and weird love story, in this subculture that we don’t often see on screen.” Those tonal shifts also hooked in Melling, who first hit screens as Dudley Dursley in the Harry Potter films, and has since gone on to star for the Coen brothers (The Ballad Of Buster Scruggs), James Gray (The Lost City Of Z), and Antonio Campos (The Devil All The Time). “It was all there in the writing and tonal calibration of what Harry has done, which I think is actually really complicated,” he says of the script. “To go from warmer, light-hearted moments into something far more shocking.”
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Given that the film deals with dominance and submission, Pillion doesn’t hold back in its sex scenes, not just a sensory cinematic experience, but something which heavily impacts on the characters. “I often find sex scenes boring on screen,” Skarsgård admits. “There’s a lot of tension leading up to [them], and then once people get going, it’s not very interesting. But these scenes were dramatically quite interesting. There’s lust, but also jealousy and confusion and pain.” Rev up for one of the most unexpected cinema trips of the year.