British novelist and literary critic Adam Mars-Jones could never have guessed that his 2020 novel Box Hill, about a BDSM relationship between two men in the 1970s, that it would one day be adapted for the big screen. Pillion, the debut feature from director and writer Harry Lighton, stars Harry Melling and Alexander Skarsgård as Colin, the submissive, and Ray, the dominant, respectively.

For Mars-Jones, who has spent the majority of his career writing about the lives of gay men, has so far been amazed by the enthusiastic reception to the film and its source material. In fact, he said, an alleyway seen in Pillion where Colin and Ray’s first sexual encounter is becoming “a point of pilgrimage,” for many fans; he predicts it will soon be “a tremendous rallying point for perverts.”

The pair talked to PW about how Box Hill came to become Pillion, the big changes from the book to script, and Skarsgård stepping into Ray's leather pants.

Adam, what was the initial idea for Box Hill?

Adam Mars-Jones: I admired Lolita so much as a book that didn't let you read it either of the two obvious ways, either as a love story or a story of abuse. And with this material, I thought I could actually spread it out and have it be a horror story if you read it a certain way. And also, I like being provocative. One of my little obsessions is 50 years ago, if you wrote something about gay people, everybody hated it because they hated gay people. Now, you write about gay people, they love it because they love gay people. To have a really morally dubious basis you're getting people to apply the same standards to gay people as to straight people.

Harry, how did you come across Adam's book and what was the process to adapt it?

Harry Lighton: I was sent it by Eva Yates, the head of film at the BBC. She sent it to me via email and there was just one note being like, “I think you'll like this.” I remember finding it funny that she'd just said that note, because 10 pages in, I was like, this is pretty filthy stuff. It amused me that an exec had been like, well, this is Harry Lighton.

I'd been sort of burnt a bit at the time because I'd been trying to make a film in Japan, and then the pandemic happened, and so I was nervous about taking on material which felt like it would be difficult to get made. Fortunately, good producers told me that shouldn't be a concern, we'd be able to find a way to make it. With that assurance, I then said, can I speak to Adam?

Adam, how did you feel about having Harry come to you wanting to adapt your novel?

AMJ: Well, I know enough to know that movies never happen. The closest I'd come to being on the big screen was somebody who was a sound recordist on the Tom Cruise project Days of Thunder paid his pocket money to buy the rights to option a short story of mine. So I didn't seriously assume it was going to happen. When people said there was competition for the role of Ray, I thought, who wants to play the posh blonde sadist? Apparently, lots of people, and for Alexander, it's the role of his lifetime.

I trusted Harry, or rather, I didn't think there was anything to lose because it wouldn't happen. So when I heard stuff about how Ray doesn't die in the script and the narrator character has become a 35-year-old—that's quite a change—I was not thinking there would be any of the essence of the DNA of the book there. And I'm not sure there is a lot of the DNA of it, but it's the source that Harry has transformed. I think it's more of a transformation than an adaptation.

Like you said, there are a lot of big changes from Box Hill to Pillion—in terms of moving the era to modern day, changing Colin’s age which really changes the family dynamic. Why did you want to make these big changes for the film?

HL: The decision to make it present day was born of a budget choice. But it also gave me the opportunity to put some of myself into it, and to ask new questions around queer parenthood. I was interested in having these parents who reversed the normal trajectory of queer parents. So it wasn't a story of someone coming out to their parents, it was a story of someone who was out and embraced in a sickly way by their parents. Then the nature of the boyfriend they find is what creates the rejection.

For both of you, what was it like exploring this dominant and submissive relationship on the page and the screen?

AMJ: To me, the important thing in the book was that Colin has no framework for any sort of relationship, so the ways in which this is abnormal don't particularly register with him. When he's called by objectifying derogatory names at the end, he's quite shocked and says, “That's not me,” and that that was what made you look at the relationship afresh.

And because I'm a literary guy, most things turn out to be about reading. The relationship between the reader and the writer is not in the least symmetrical, but it is equal, and it depends on the surrender of the apparently powerless party. The reader is what makes the book work. In the book there's a surprising amount of reading. Quite often they're curled up, and one of them is reading military history, the other reading about flowers. And then a knee tightens around a neck and it becomes sexual.

The casting for both Colin and Ray is just so good. What was it like getting Melling and Skarsgård and seeing them bring these characters to life?

HL: It felt very ridiculous when both of them came on board. I remember sending Adam a message saying that Skarsgård had come on board. We had talked when we first spoke about how there was a version where you cast someone who wasn't that good looking as Ray, and played into the idea that this is Colin's first person experience of a man. But then when I thought about Skarsgård I was like, here is someone who's so ridiculously good looking that he can embody the greatest sexual fantasy on earth for a late, arrested development 35-year-old.

I think both the novel and the film are so funny, and getting to see the relationship come together really smacks of romantic comedy to me. Harry, was that something that came to you while adapting Box Hill?

HL: I think Alexander called it a dom-com in an interview. I wanted to actively use some romantic comedy tropes to elicit that genre, but also to test the limits of it. If you take scenes like the meet-the-parents dinner—it's a terrible idea to bring a guy who won't tell you his last name and makes you bring beers for him from the fridge. Or the day off [the characters take a day off from their BDSM dynamic] feels like the first day of a romantic comedy, but having it happen at the end of the relationship shows where it doesn't fit into that romantic comedy box.

AMJ: I wanted it to be sort of skidding wildly from one genre to another without ever settling. So that there are some bits where you think, Ray does care for him, and then something relatively atrocious happens. I think a film does need to be in a genre to some extent—people don't enjoy it if they have no signposts at all.

Adam, you had mentioned how showing them reading together is so important to their relationship. Harry, you have the most brilliant sight gag of Ray reading Karl Ove Knausgård’s book. How did you come up with that?

HL: It's funny because what put me on to Knausgård was an article by someone who had compared Adam's Pilcrow trilogy to Knausgård in terms of the detailing of a life. Then I read the Knausgård and I thought it would be just funny that Ray, who gives no information about anything, would be reading an autofictional, granular explanation of someone's life. I wanted a book where there was a volume so that Colin could pick up where Ray left off. It seemed like an obvious act of devotion to be reading a book you're not particularly interested in because you think it might give you some insight into the man you love.