Iset out on my motorbike for Cannes on the morning of 16 May, a distance of about 450 miles, having booked a room in Montpellier so as to break the journey and take my own sweet time. It’s not often that anyone’s books are the basis of a “queer biker movie” premiering at the only film festival everyone has heard of, let alone one of mine – I felt I owed it to myself to make an entrance in style.
Harry Lighton’s film Pillion is based on my novel Box Hill, published in 2020. When the option was acquired I didn’t see how a consciously disorienting first-person narrative could work on the screen, but I was happy for him to try. At one point I was told, through my agent, that everyone was happy with the first two acts of Harry’s draft, but the third needed work. After three years it was up to me to decide whether the project should go ahead. Conscientiously Yasmin McDonald, then at United Agents, itemised some drastic divergences. My 18-year-old narrator Colin was now 35 when he met the glamorous biker Ray, though still living with his parents, and Ray didn’t die as he does in the book but simply disappeared from Colin’s life. I flinched when I heard about these changes. Would the next phone call let me know that Olivia Colman had agreed to take on the demanding role of Ray? Nevertheless I said yes. I couldn’t imagine pulling the plug on a project that someone had spent far more time adapting than I had spent writing it.
I wouldn’t have written Box Hill in my parents’ lifetimes, since like many well-behaved gay men I wanted to emphasise the positive – no, Mum and Dad, I won’t get sick, won’t be persecuted in the press, won’t be queer bashed or blackmailed. In their absence I could explore a darker landscape. In fact the book comes close to being a black joke. The tone skids all over the place, with hairpin bends between Alan Bennett’s territory and Jean Genet’s that require the reader to cling on for dear life or be flung out of the book. Is this meant to be comedy or tragedy, is it subtle or gross, somehow sincere or a put-on?
I was also reacting against the lyrical tendency in gay fiction, as if these lives (and these sex acts) needed to be justified by aesthetic flourishes. You know the sort of thing: “… his armpits smelled like truffles, the white summer truffles that the old women lay out early in the morning, before the dew has gone, on the stone benches of the market in Piacenza”. So I excluded sensuality even in the upside down form of eroticised pain. My biker subculture is a consciously ridiculous confection, and weirdly innocent compared with the S&M practices that led to arrests and prosecutions in the Met Police’sOperation Spannerin the late 80s (despite the fact that no one involved had needed medical treatment). The sex in the book is purely transactional, establishing the pack ranking. That’s the great thing about subcultures – you can travesty them with very little fear of contradiction, though usually out of hysteria or malice rather than the mischief that was my motive.
My real target was shallow mainstream tolerance. Fifty years ago a straight readership would take it for granted that gay people were weak, corrupt and perverse. Nowadays the same readership, for fear of seeming homophobic, will condone behaviour that would instantly be condemned if the participants weren’t gay. How about a level playing field? Gay people can be perfectly horrid. I set out to write scenes that would test a phoney tolerance to breaking point. When I read in this paper that Box Hill was considered by one or two of the 2020 Booker judges “unsuitable for recommending to friends and family”, I thought the verdict was fair enough, despite the slightly chintzy phrasing. You can’t write a confrontational book and then expect everyone to like it, even if I didn’t mean the book to be an entirely heartless exercise. I wanted Colin to be likable, not right away but over the long haul, and I’ve been pleased when readers found more emotion in the book than I thought I had put there.
Instability of tone can’t really be transferred to film, where there’s no easy equivalent to the first person. I wouldn’t have wanted to write the screenplay myself, since I don’t think in images. This sounds as if it should be an immediate disqualification in a film critic, but I don’t think it’s so. It just means that I see better with other people’s eyes than my own. Harry Melling doesn’t correspond to the rather bleak way Colin describes himself in the book, but that didn’t bother me – I was only troubled by the change in the family dynamic. An 18-year-old living at home is plausibly virginal, a 35-year-old with no sexual experience is a misfit. It made sense that the film should be set in the present day rather than the late 70s, since period films are so expensive, so the book takes place before Aids and the film “after” – the inverted commas indicating that this chronological marker is dependent on your country of residence and access to healthcare.
Harry and I had very little contact while the film was becoming more real. I had no input and wanted none. If you’ve given up a child for adoption it’s bad manners to hang around the school gates – even worse manners if you sold the child in question. The success or failure of the film doesn’t affect me directly, though obviously it’s nicer to be associated with something good than something bad. He treated me to a meal in a gastropub at the end of last year, the only time we met before Cannes. Later he emailed me a question about a sentence in the book he didn’t quite get, where Colin says “If I’d seen any pornography at all in my life I might have realised that what was happening could only happen to the people in pornography”. I did my best to be helpful when I replied: “Ray is very practised at embodying a sexual fantasy, but he enters Colin’s life entirely without context, as the realisation of something that hasn’t been formulated. Any good?” Harry seemed satisfied. He even offered me and my partner Keith a day’s work as biker extras, but I turned him down. Keith and I look like what we are, a retired art teacher and a redundant creative writing professor, and I didn’t want to turn a transgressive spectacle into Last of the Summer Harleys.
So when I arrived in Cannes last week I had neither seen Pillion nor read the script. The last time I had been there was in 1987, when I covered the festival for the newborn Independent. Newspapers had money then, and I was put up in a hotel in Juan-les-Pins with a marble swimming pool, though there was never enough time between screenings for me to dunk myself in it. The dress code for gala screenings (black tie, long dress) has stood more or less firm against informality, though a dark trouser suit or little black dress is also permitted. To counter excessive display there is a ban on voluminous trains that block gangways or obstruct seating. A common sight on the streets in the early evenings is a man in a tuxedo and shades riding a scooter.
There was no dress code for the 11am screening of Pillion, though I tried to look halfway spiffy, a decision justified by the fact that a seat with my name on it was waiting for me. The festival’s pre-screening ident is an animation of red steps without risers – floating stairs – that start underwater and rise into the sky accompanied by “Aquarium” from Saint-Saëns’ The Carnival of the Animals. It’s greeted by audiences as an event in its own right.
I knew Pillion would be have to be more conventionally structured than Box Hill, so as to make Colin rapidly likable rather than merely inescapable as a literary narrator can be. I hadn’t anticipated a touch of the Mike Leighs (no bad thing), with some comedy of embarrassment but also some outright laughs. There is likely to be the occasional gasp, too. A Lighton line such as “buy yourself a butt plug – you’re very tight”, delivered not as an insult but as part of a shopping list, is a pillion miles away from the compromised territory of Gimme Gimme Gimme or Vicious. And it’s not just that Alexander Skarsgård’s performance is committed. His subsequent lack of interest in distancing himself from the part he plays seems to me unprecedented.
The material of the book has been re-ordered without being denatured, one significant shift being in the relationship between Colin’s parents. In the book their hermetic devotion, obsessively mirroring each other, was meant as a sly contrast to the men’s arrangement, obviously asymmetrical but not necessarily out of balance. In Pillion it’s clear that Colin’s mother Peggy (Lesley Sharp) has always worn the trousers, while Douglas Hodge gives his father a warmth and softness that suggests he likes being told what to do almost as much as his son does.
Elements retained from the book are richer – the shaving of Colin’s head has elements of ritual humiliation, but it’s also a rite of passage. Not only does it introduce a mildly feral element into Harry Melling’s normally beseeching features (best puppy-dog eyes and puppy-dog ears in the business), but it makes him part of the group, with bikers affectionately scratching his scalp-stubble. He isn’t owned, he just belongs. I do wonder, though, if Harry realised how preposterous my biker subculture was when he elaborated it in his screenplay. If anything in the film was giggle-adjacent it would be the scene of adejeuner sur l’herbethat features role-playing sex, with a flesh buffet laid out on picnic tables next to the potato salad.
I’ve heard that the festival organisers try to homogenise the reception of films by herding audience members to the front of the circle, even if people have been steadily leaving before the end of the showing, so that the VIPs in the stalls, looking up, see only steadfast applause. The accolade at the end of Pillion seemed entirely genuine, and lasted several minutes, with the inevitable awkwardness of seeming dutiful in the manner of party conferences, while the people being acclaimed clap their own hands and look around them so as not to look smug.
Melling wore an embroidered suit, as if to show by this very un-Colin outfit what a distance he had to travel to play the character. Skarsgård did exactly the opposite, wearing leather that was not part of his costume in the film. At the Pillion party at a private beach that evening he wore another get-up with fetishistic under- or overtones, including thigh boots that to a stern fashion eye might seem to throw his silhouette off-balance without the compensating upper-body swagger of a cloak. (It’s worth mentioning that there is no sand under your feet at a party at a “private beach”, and no access to the sea.) He was extremely good-natured about being pestered, by me among others, and was unswerving in his allegiance to the film. At future festivals there’s no doubt that he will test the limits of dress decorum, though which of the forbidden categories he’ll be leaning towards, nudity or a voluminous train, is an open question at this point.
Walking home from the party I made the beginner’s mistake of choosing the side of the road nearer the sea, though the various pavilions block any actual view of it. It was a mistake because you can only cross the Boulevard de la Croisette back into the town at widely separated points, and when in due course you’re stopped by police or security personnel you have to go all the way back and around.
Altogether my movements have been less than smoothly managed. My motorbike’s clutch cable snapped before I’d covered more than 40 miles of the journey to Cannes. It was a blessing, really. The bike would have earned me a fine for breaking emission standards in Montpellier, and my biker persona is close to 100% pose in any case. If you’re relieved to be stuck behind a truck going at 50mph why are you riding a motorcycle in the first place? I travelled by train the next day. It took close to 12 hours, with a rail replacement bus service between Béziers and Marseille thrown in just to make a Brit feel more at home.
Pillion premiered at theCannes film festivaland will be released later this year.