Molly Manning Walker’s first feature, How To Have Sex, has rightfully been receiving a lot of praise. We chat to her about the real-life origins of the story and the importance of speaking about consent.
This article first appeared in Film Stories issue #47.
Molly Manning Walker’s debut feature is far from what you would expect from the title. Following a group of enthusiastic 16-year-old girls on a boozy, messy, but exhilarating holiday in Malia, Crete, what’s meant to be the ‘best summer ever’ doesn’t turn out quite as expected as the partying soon gets out of hand. Spurred on by friends Skye (Lara Peake) and Em (Enva Lewis), as well as a fair amount of societal pressure, Tara (played with moving vulnerability by Kindling’s Mia McKenna-Bruce), the only member of the group who’s still a virgin, resolves to have her first sexual experience during the trip.
How To Have Sex is a film that tackles many things, but displays with a raw honesty the aimlessness of being a teenager who hasn’t figured themself or their future out yet. Despite its title, it also paints a picture of a society that’s obsessed with sex, and the effect that can have on young people.
Personal experience
“The title’s been with us since the beginning,” Walker divulges as we sit in a rather swanky London hotel room. Her film’s about to have its UK premiere at the London Film Festival as we speak, and although it’s not a warm day there’s an inflatable flamingo rubber ring sat behind the director, making the atmosphere seem just a bit more summery.
Much like the film, though, under the bright holiday ambience lie some darker themes, which reveal themselves as Walker continues to explain the reasoning behind How To Have Sex’s title. “For me, it was about how we all kind of learned how to have sex wrong,” she elaborates. “I think there’s an irony to the title that hopefully people will understand, and reflect on how they learned how to have sex. I think in life with anything, it’s easy to follow what you’ve done for the rest of time. Even if it’s wrong.”
Molly’s brought a lot of her own experiences and memories to How To Have Sex. She’s no stranger to wild, teenage party holidays, and names a particular trip to Magaluf as sticking around in her memory – one key moment of public indecency even made it into the film.
“I had one particularly strong memory of this blow-job on stage that I started writing from.” Walker’s film may not be set in Magaluf (“they got really bad press from that blow-job and so they kind of didn’t want us to depict that in Magaluf,” she says by way of explanation), but the act remains in the final film.
Badger (Shaun Thomas), whom the leading trio meet during the course of their holiday, is the recipient, and mourns the fact that the next morning he can’t remember “the best moment of his life.”
It’s a scene that shamelessly shows the debauchery that openly goes on during these trips, and reinforces how everything is centred around sex and the perception that everyone should be having it.
Consent
It was also important to Walker to explore the concept of consent in her film – especially the aspects of it that some would unfortunately still consider ‘grey areas.’ That comes from personal experience, too, as the director was herself assaulted at the age of 16.
“It’s something that’s really close to me, and I felt the need to talk about it, and whenever I talked about it, it sort of sucked the air out of the room,” she says, adding that she wanted to “open up that conversation” with the film. She’s always been very open about her own experiences, but also noticed that others sometimes aren’t. That’s something she wants to remedy.
“I think I found it weird that no one else wanted to talk about it.”
Writing
The industry has very much supported Walker in that goal, as after just months of developing the script, an early version of it was accepted into the Cannes Next Step programme.
“It gave everyone confidence that the project was good,” Walker says of that acceptance, adding that it also pushed the film through development at a faster pace.
Pacing seems to have been key to this entire project, in fact, as Molly explains that the majority of the writing was done at speed.
“I wrote the first 60 pages all in one go and then sort of figured out the last 30. I sort of set myself challenges to write the next five pages over this amount of time and then see what comes out.”
After getting it all onto the page, she’d then go back and make the necessary tweaks.
Avoiding spoilers, those last 30 pages come after one of How To Have Sex’s most important scenes. It’s understandable that Walker had to think about how to follow it up, and what she ended up with is a very naturalistic, understated ending that nonetheless carries a lot of weight for the central characters and emphasises the importance of their friendship.
Walker describes those teenage years as being full of “these friends that you think are gonna be your friends for life. The reality of it is that they’re probably of a time and moment, and you’re trying to really make it work because you think you’re going to be friends for life, but you find more of your tribe in other people.”
She captures well the feeling of friendships that feel strong in the moment, but are also on shaky ground as none of the characters really know themselves.
“I think it’s that time of life where you’re trying to figure stuff out, so it was important to me to kind of show that sort of process in finding yourself.”
Backing
Not only was the film supported by the Cannes Next Step programme, it’s also backed by the BFI and Film4. Funnily enough, How To Have Sex wouldn’t even exist if it weren’t for Film4. Walker has done extensive work in cinematography and happened to be shooting a short for the network – which was being directed by a close friend of hers – when she was asked if she’d ever like to direct her own movie.
“I was like, ‘No, I don’t think so!’ ”
But life works in funny ways, and with the coming of 2020 (and a certain C-word that came with it) she began writing her script, knowing that she’d want to be the one to direct it.
Having been a cinematographer for so long, Walker admits that it was hard to give that job to someone else when she came to make the film, but says that she and DP Nicolas Canniccioni worked very closely during the shoot.
“It’s really tough to give over the creativity of that. But with six main cast and 200 people a day [to manage], you’re never going to be able to do all of it. So I had a really collaborative relationship, and I think he did a really great job.”
She also mentions her composer, James Jacob. Better known by his stage name Jakwob, he’s primarily a songwriter, music producer and DJ who had never scored a feature film before How To Have Sex. But with the pounding music of the club scenes that’s as anxiety-inducing as it is exhilarating, he seems to have inherently understood the project.
“He’s actually a club DJ, but also a counsellor,” Walker says of Jacob. “So I think he’s really connected to how people feel emotionally.”
Tight schedule
How To Have Sex made its debut at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, and just as Walker won a place on its Next Step programme early in the film’s development, the film won the Un Certain Regard award after its premiere. It’s a category of the competition that highlights movies with unusual styles or non-traditional stories, and Molly describes the experience of taking the film to the festival as “pretty magical,” as she got to take many of her cast and crew with her. However, she also had to complete the movie very, very quickly in order to get it there on time.
“We finished the film on a Friday and took it to Cannes on Tuesday. It was a pretty tight turnaround!”
Since then Walker has taken the film from festival to festival, an experience that she acknowledges is “tiring,” but ultimately the director is chuffed that people get to see the film. Even more will have had the opportunity to watch it since our chat, with MUBI spearheading a wide cinema release that began at the start of November. With all that going on, it’s understandable that the director doesn’t currently have any new film ideas in her mind when I ask about possible future projects. She does, however, want to direct again.
“I want to kind of tell big-scale stories but with Trojan horse ideas in it, like political ideas in it,” she explains.
After the resounding critical success of How To Have Sex and the way its message has connected with so many in the audience, we’d very much like to see what Molly Manning Walker could do with a similarly meaningful tale and a much bigger budget.
