With 'Pillion,' writer-director Harry Lighton made a film for himself

Just in time for Valentine’s Day, this winter’s sweetest romance is also the most transgressive. Writer-director Harry Lighton’s “Pillion” is about what happens when shy wallflower Colin (played by “Harry Potter” alum Harry Melling) falls for a hunky motorcycle man named Ray (Alexander Skarsgård), who has some very particular ideas about what he expects from their relationship. The movie is concerned with the delicate, often unspoken negotiations we all go through with a new partner when we’re first trying to figure out what we’re comfortable with and what exactly we want from each other. This warm, crowd-pleasing picture hits all the conventional romantic comedy beats, except that the story also happens to take place in Britain's leather-clad BDSM biker scene, complete with dog collars and bottom-baring wrestling singlets. This rom-com is more like a dom-com.

Writer-director Harry Lighton was in town Monday to accept the Coolidge Corner Theatre Foundation’s Breakthrough Artist Award. And “Pillion” is indeed a breakthrough. One of the most important things art can do is make what seems strange to us feel more familiar, to show us what we have in common with people we assume are so unlike ourselves.

“I thought it was interesting to make it equal parts inviting and off-putting,” Lighton said when we chatted upstairs at the Coolidge before the award ceremony. “I mean, off-putting to an audience who wouldn’t be initiated into that kind of thing, or might find aspects of Ray and Colin’s relationship repellent.”

“Pillion” is the kind of movie your mom would probably like, except maybe for the parts about buttplugs and analingus. The strategic deployment of rom-com tropes wasn’t just Lighton’s way of inviting the audience into an unfamiliar subculture, it also came from a place of self-interest.

“I grew up comfort-watching romantic comedies,” explained the 33-year-old filmmaker. “I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if I could comfort-watch a romantic comedy that spoke more to my desires?’”

The movie is loosely based on Adam Mars-Jones’ 2020 novel “Box Hill: A Story of Low Self-Esteem,” which is set in the 1970s. Most popular notions of the gay leather scene come from that era. For better and worse, the dominant iconography has always been that guy from the Village People, or Al Pacino’s biker gear in William Friedkin’s controversial "Cruising." One of the things that interested Lighton in moving his adaptation to modern times was the opportunity to redefine that imagery. “I was very keen on updating the story to the present because I felt we could rediscover what it meant to be a sexy biker in 2025. It was the first conversation I had with the costume designer. I said, ‘We want to see gays on Halloween dressed as Ray.’”

They settled on a striking, instantly iconic, cream-colored racing suit with stripes of blue augmented by knee and elbow pads. “It’s really hot… like a gay Power Ranger,” Lighton quipped. But the leather also works as a suit of armor for Ray, a costume that, combined with Skarsgård’s imposingly gargantuan frame, lends him an air of almost superhuman imperviousness. Like Colin, we spend the movie seeking out and cherishing the fleeting glimpses of vulnerability behind this facade.

“Ray’s someone who’s practiced long and hard at embodying a sexual fantasy, and that fantasy is partially about impenetrability,” said the director. “But we talked about wanting there to be moments where you saw beneath that well-honed armor. Anyone who’s chosen to live their life in a way that defies social convention, it’s a courageous thing to do. There are a lot of wins to be had in that, but there are also lots of losses in the way it alienates you from normative society. He’s lost out on certain things, you know?”

“Pillion” isn’t shy about showing the sex lives of its characters, but it’s not leering or exploitative, either. The matter-of-fact depiction was one of Lighton’s conditions for making the film, going so far as to write out every detail of the sex scenes in the script so all the actors, producers and crew would know exactly what they were getting into.

“I think, particularly when you’re dealing with kink, if you’re treating the kink in an oblique way, or you’re panning away from it or whatever, then it feels like you as a filmmaker are casting judgement on it as something that deserves to be offscreen. Like it’s too scandalous for the screen,” he said. “So I said, ‘We need to be able to see how these guys are f---ing.’”

Distributor A24 is releasing the film in the U.S. without a rating, thus sparing Lighton the frustrating battles queer filmmakers usually face trimming scenes to placate the MPA censor board, which has always been notoriously more skittish about same-sex couplings. We’re seeing “Pillion” uncut and exactly as the filmmaker intended.

“This is as explicit as I wanted it,” he noted. ”Because I didn’t want to just constantly be shocking the audience. We had a close-up of the end of Ray’s penis, a massive close-up on the piercing, and it just felt too in-your-face in a way which I thought took the audience out of the moment.”

“Pillion” seems like it’s arriving in theaters at the perfect time, hot on the heels of HBO’s Canadian hockey romance “Heated Rivalry” becoming a watercooler sensation.

“I think it's great that this show, which doesn't pull punches when it comes to gay sex, has exploded into the mainstream,” Lighton said. “It seems to be quite literally a cultural phenomenon. You know, a couple of years ago, everyone was saying that audiences weren't hungry for sex at all. So it's nice that that seems to have reversed.”

What might be the movie’s most memorable scene finds Ray and Colin wrestling on the living room floor as a form of foreplay, set to ‘80s pop starlet Tiffany’s bubblegum cover of Tommy James and the Shondells’ “I Think We’re Alone Now.” The singer reportedly loved the use of the song in the trailer, and recently tried to come see the movie at a Los Angeles screening with Lighton, but their schedules didn’t work out.

The filmmaker has been a fan since first hearing the song when he was 11 years old.“Tiffany was singing it on a reality show, and like all gays throughout history, I was like, ‘That song’s great!’”

“That song is a staple of gay clubs all over the world. And spite of his surface masculinity, I wanted there to be identifiable beats of gayness to Ray, so a gay audience specifically would be like ‘Oh, he’s a part of this culture,’” Lighton said. “This seemed like a way of doing that and a nice juxtaposition between the kind of bash, bash, bash brutalness of wrestling and this camp pop song.”

The scene made this critic think of how for the leather bar scenes in "Cruising," director Friedkin dubbed scuzzy heavy metal on the soundtrack, when in actuality at those clubs the bikers were all dancing to disco. Lighton didn’t know this and was delighted. “Is that true? Then this is me redressing Friedkin,” he laughed.

But would “Cruising” be as scary with a Donna Summer soundtrack?

“It might be even scarier,” he smiled.

“Pillion” opens Friday, Feb. 13, at the Coolidge Corner Theatre and is now playing at the AMC Boston Common and Kendall Square Cinema.