Harry Lighton’s film Pillion is based on the novel Box Hill so, misgivings riding alongside, it felt right for the author to motorbike to the film festival for its premiere

I set 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.