When we catch up with the director and his two leading men, it’s at the tail-end of a press tour that’s taken them from Cannes to London, and finally now back to New York City ahead of the film’s U.S. premiere. It is, in fact, the second time we have met, the first being briefly after the picture premiered in Gotham a few months ago during a raucous New York Film Festival screening. At the time, Skarsgård quipped, “It’s gonna be a good afterparty, guys,” following a round of catcalls.
But there’s been curiosity, too, about how the film would release into American cinemas this Friday following its UK premiere late last year. Rumors continue to circulate that it would be cut significantly to earn an R-rating stateside due to the generally more puritanical notions toward sex scenes in the MPA. And to be sure, Pillion has some memorable ones involving Ray (Skarsgård) and Colin (Melling).
“There weren’t any cuts as far as I’m aware,” Lighton confirms to us. “I know that the version which has been released in cinemas in the U.S. is the same one which was released in the UK, and that’s exactly the version I want people to see.” He goes on to add that A24 was always onboard of bringing a love story as unorthodox but honest as Pillion to the screen, noting, “I think anyone who read the script knew what it was about. It was a very explicit script. There’s like five paragraphs describing an erection in the script. So people knew what they were kind of getting into bed with.”
But what seems to most strike audiences who’ve watched Pillion isn’t so much the frankness of the sex scenes, but the quiet universality of a love story about a young, impressionable person, discovering something in himself that might be unorthodox but fills a need beyond just desire.
The film walks a careful line in this way since the first scene involves Colin as a young, lonely lad on Christmas Eve, singing in an antiquated barbershop quartet for his doting parents and a blind date going nowhere. So enters the leather-clad Ray, the Mysterio biker who picks Colin up and invites him to a fairly physical first date the next night. One reading might be Colin is indoctrinated into a subculture. Another interpretation, which is also Melling’s, is that he has found his tribe.
“I like to think of it as that thing when you don’t consciously know you want something, but when something happens in your life, you suddenly realize, ‘Oh wait a minute! This actually makes a lot of sense to what I’ve been looking for or what I’ve been wanting,’” Melling muses. “It’s not like he’s thinking secretly, ‘You know what I need to be in? I need to be in a sub-dom relationship. That’s going to make sense to me.’ But the fact that this opportunity gets presented to him, and the fact that clearly he’s so attracted to this man, and then this dynamic is presented to him, I think things start to click. Things start to make sense about how he wants to express himself and how he wants to experience love.”
