(Editor’s notice: The next interview comprises spoilers for “Pillion.”)
9 months after its Cannes Movie Pageant premiere, the oddly sleek and openly kinky queer romance “Pillion” is lastly in mainstream U.S. theaters — in all its BDSM glory.
Author/director Harry Lighton’s A24 launch stars Alexander Skarsgård and Harry Melling as lovers on a dom-sub continuum, respectively, in London. It’s now in choose theaters with no score from the Movement Image Affiliation (MPA) and, in bypassing the MPA, “Pillion” sadly surrenders extra theaters and showtimes to be able to arrive on screens intact and, properly, uncut. (It already performed a restricted qualifying run in fall 2025 for awards consideration, and now seeks to faucet into the Valentine’s field workplace alongside the equally sexually unhinged, R-rated “Wuthering Heights.”)
The uninhabited, leather-clad (or not) intercourse scenes in “Pillion” — chains, gags, assless chaps, singlets, and all — are placing for a mainstream theatrical launch. (At present, the movie is simply on 4 screens.) Earlier in awards season, IndieWire spoke with author/director Lighton, who adapts Adam Mars-Jones’ e book “Field Hill,” who assured that no cuts had been made to intercourse scenes for the sake of a safer score. And that nobody on the studio aspect demanded them, both.
Skarsgård had claimed on the competition circuit final yr that the filmmakers shot “far more graphic scenes.” Lighton clarified that the scene Skarsgård referred to was the primary blow job Colin (Melling) offers Ray (Skarsgård) within the alleyway after their Christmas Day date. That was virtually fairly a bit extra specific.
“I wouldn’t say that there have been much more graphic scenes,” Lightson mentioned. “There was particularly one shot and it was the bell finish of the cock in close-up, wanting down the barrel of the lens, erect with the deal with the Prince Albert. I beloved the shot, and it was within the edit for ages. It was within the first sexual encounter within the alley after we used it, and it created amusing within the mistaken second in that scene, amusing while you wanted the viewers to be holding their breath from releasing. It was taken out to attempt to preserve the stress. I by no means decided to take one thing out as a result of I assumed it was graphic. I used to be by no means informed to take something out. It was additionally primarily based in making an attempt to string that line between honesty and (sexual) bounce scare.”
So whereas that scene might have been a hell of loads steamier, the way in which Lighton framed mentioned blow job, it’s all about preserving the playful power of Colin and Ray’s first time.
Skarsgård is subsequent to bare within the movie — and likewise confirmed his erotic aspect as soon as extra in Sundance 2026’s “Wicker” as a sexually vigorous man woven actually from wooden. The actor, in dialog with Lighton about that scene and extra, added, “Harry by no means went for the shock values of these scenes. There was a model of this that might have been far more graphic, nevertheless it was essential for all of us to have a stability. You don’t wish to draw back from it, however you don’t need it to be too distracting the place that turns into a factor, the place it’s like, ‘Now they’re doing it simply to get a response out of the viewers.’ That takes you out of the narrative.”
That first scene, too, might have appeared a lot totally different. Skarsgård mentioned that whereas the movie wasn’t shot “in sequence, these three pivotal moments — the primary blow job, the primary intercourse, the primary orgasm — had been shot in that order. The one one which we stopped to debate on the day as we had been capturing was the blow job. The opposite two form of flowed naturally. The primary one was tough as a result of the primary time we shot it, it didn’t get aggressive, nevertheless it felt like Ray was a bit extra assertive and forceful, grabbing Colin. Colin was gagging a bit extra. All of us form of huddled after that … it’s essential that it ought to be playful and thrilling. You wish to go away it the way in which it’s within the edit now: Colin with cum on his face, smiling. … We positively didn’t need the viewers to really feel like, ‘Jesus Christ, get away from that dude. That was abusive!’ We needed to calibrate that scene. We wished it to be intense and to be clear that Ray’s in cost … (however) we wished it to be fumbling and peculiar from Colin’s viewpoint.”
“Pillion” deserves reward for its lack of restraint — there’s oral intercourse! anal intercourse! even torturously sizzling psychological intercourse of the tantric kind! — and for its earnest dive into the fetish milieu of the Homosexual Bikers Bike Membership, from whom Ray hails. The place “The Historical past of Sound” took a muted method to queer intimacy, and “Name Me by Your Identify” panned to a tree, Lighton mentioned none of that whereas pitching the film.
“I all the time felt like I wished to depart it within the viewers’s management to make their very own judgment of the intercourse, and to me, if I’m telling a narrative about kink, if I had pattered away from the intercourse scenes, that will be me casting judgment on the intercourse, and saying it’s one thing scandalous that must be saved out of the body,” Lighton mentioned. “It was my first intuition once I learn the e book and once I met with the producers, which is ‘I don’t wish to inform a model of this story that’s beneath the stress to pan away.’ I might need used that shot in ‘Name Me by Your Identify.’ I needed to really feel prefer it was wanting instantly at that world, and the intercourse inside that world.”
“Pillion” is now in choose theaters from A24.