The BDSM ‘Love Actually’? How ‘Pillion’ found a home in a surprising corner of south London
Christmas came very early for the people of Bromley when the cast and crew of Pillion rolled into town last summer.
The south east London suburb is the setting for Harry Lighton’s BDSM romantic drama, which shifted the setting of Adam Mars-Jones’s 2020 novel Box Hill from leafy Surrey to Bromley, and updated the story from the 1970s to Christmas in the present day.
Already hailed as one of the films of the year, Pillion, Lighton’s directorial debut, stars The Queen’s Gambit’s Harry Melling as hapless car park attendant Colin and The Northman’s Alexander Skarsgård as Ray, the brooding biker with whom he forms an unexpected sub/dom relationship.
The shift in setting came down to budgetary concerns – ‘You have to film [close] to London to avoid having to put up all your cast and crew overnight, so Box Hill was too far,’ Lighton tells Time Out – but the change in season was pure wish-fulfilment for the filmmaker. ‘I’m obsessed with Christmas films,’ he says. ‘Every film I’ve made has had a Christmas element. I liked the idea of combining that sort of syrupy Christmas feeling with hardcore sex and seeing how an audience would combine those two things.’
Photograph: Picturehouse Entertainment
Cue a towering Christmas tree being erected in the middle of Bromley’s town centre during filming in August 2024. ‘I’d sit by the Christmas tree and hear all these locals walking past and saying how Christmas comes earlier each year,’ laughs Lighton.
It’s at this spot on a chilly Christmas Day evening that Colin meets Ray for what he assumes is a romantic date, but that ends up in a kinky hook-up down a backstreet behind Primark. ‘We had modesty screens up and people doing crowd control to make sure nobody would walk past – both for the sake of the actors and the public,’ recalls Lighton. ‘Fortunately, we found this alleyway by a Gail’s Bakery that was pretty well protected.’
Photograph: Picturehouse EntertainmentHarry Melling in ‘Pillion’
The scene had required some hasty replanning. ‘At one point I had this idea that the hook-up would take place in the open against the Christmas tree, but I was quickly told that it wouldn’t be possible,’ says Lighton.
Filming took place between 11pm and 5am on a Friday night, so the cast and crew were confronted with the odd drunk reveller emerging from nearby bars. ‘Everyone was coming out of nightclubs off their tits and trying to join in,’ says Lighton, ‘and it’s supposed to be a quiet scene’.
Photograph: ShutterstockMarket Square in Bromley
Another, later scene, in which Ray and Colin take a ‘day off’ from their dom/sub dynamic, was filmed guerilla-style with hidden cameras here.
Lighton reveals there was almost an unplanned cameo at one point during the shoot. ‘There was a great guy called the Bromley Spider-Man who is a local fixture in Bromley,’ he says. ‘Occasionally, we would be shooting a long lens scene on the high street and a guy dressed as Spider-Man would drop into the back of the shot. I let the scene play out, but it didn’t make the cut. That was good fun.’
Read Time Out’s five-star review of Pillion here.
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