In a cinema cafe in London’s King’s Cross, Molly Manning Walker is showing me some pictures on her phone. They’re of a young woman, on holiday in Magaluf; a teenager with long brown hair and fake tan, laughing in her fake eyelashes and “out-out” clothes (belt skirt, stretchy top). Here she is on a bar crawl, falling off her mates; here, rotten hungover with a towel wrapped around her head. She looks as if she’s having the time of her life.
“I was,” says Walker. “I went on four of those holidays, when I was 16 to 18. You run away from your parents, you’re free. You can do whatever you want. The first time I went, there were 16 of us in four rooms on the same corridor. Sitting by the pool, talking absolute nonsense all day long, going out drinking all night, nonstop partying for a week. Nonstop. You pay €25 to get into the club, you get unlimited drinks all night.”
Walker’s Magaluf trips gave her “some of the greatest memories of my life”. But she also remembers the difficult parts, mostly ignored back then. “Stuff happened, you know?” she says. “Bad stuff happened. And we didn’t even recognise it as bad. Because we were too busy bigging each other up. ‘You slept with someone! So good!’”
Now 30, with cropped hair and a more relaxed wardrobe, Walker has transformed all those teenage experiences – the good, the bad, the ugly – into her new must-see film, How to Have Sex, which follows three 16-year-old girls from London on a post-GCSE summer blowout in Malia, Crete. Tara (Mia McKenna-Bruce), Em (Enva Lewis) and Skye (Lara Peake) – screeching all the way, good vibes set to 11 – spend their time getting plastered, making one another laugh, bouncing from hotel room to pool to bar to club to beach to club to, sometimes, bed. They join forces with a group of three slightly older party-harders from Bradford and they all have “the best holiday ever!” At least, that’s what they keep telling one another. “You have to, don’t you?” says Walker. “That’s the deal.”
How to Have Sex won the Un Certain Regard award at Cannes this year, an overwhelming experience for the not easily overwhelmed Walker. It was the first time she’d seen anything she’d directed in front of an audience. Her first two short films came out during Covid and an unfinished script of How to Have Sex won her a place on the prestigious Cannes Next Step programme, where a tutor (director Marie Amachoukeli) helped her develop it into a full-length movie. Filming took place in Malia last November – “It was freezing!” – and it was a scramble to get everything finished in time for Cannes itself. So when Walker saw her film on the big screen in the packed Debussy theatre with an in-the-know audience, it was… a lot.
At the end, there was polite applause. Walker thought: “Oh, they like it, but they don’t love it, fair enough.” But when the lights came up, she was given an eight-minute standing ovation. “Bizarre,” she says. “Like going to 12 weddings in a row, when you’ve been living in a dark room, editing for six months.”
The awards ceremony was even weirder. She’d had to go to Italy for work and her flight back was delayed. As her name was read out as the winner, she was still in a taxi. Jury head John C Reilly filled in for time – he sang a song – and eventually Walker belted to the stage and picked up her award, panting, in a T-shirt and Adidas shorts. “I don’t think it sunk in that we’d won until much later,” she says. “I was just so stoked that I’d made it!”
Perhaps this all sounds like an easy ride – Walker herself has a tendency to downplay events: she’s open, but quite cool and unfazed – but directing How to Have Sex was a big step. Up until now, she’s been an in-demand cinematographer, working her way up through pop videos (A$AP Rocky’s Sundress), fashion shorts, documentaries (City of Children, about kids on a Bradford housing estate) and features. She was the director of photography on Scrapper, made by her friend Charlotte Regan. And Walker loved wielding a camera. She hadn’t been sure about moving into directing, though several producers had asked. It was lockdown that gave her the time – and the financial motivation – to come up with the script for How to Have Sex.
When filming began, she had a few panicked moments, but decided to just enjoy herself and, in the end, loved the whole experience. And it was an experience: she uses the word “embedded” to describe it. She did workshops with the young actors to establish their relationships; spent two weeks in Malia in high season, going to clubs and listening in to mad-smashed conversations; and worked out a hugely detailed storyboard that she often shelved when a better idea came along.
Her cinematographer, Nicolas Canniccioni, came from documentaries, and the film feels so realistic I’d presumed it had been made among genuine club crowds. The club scenes are so convincing, you feel drunk watching them. In fact, they cast every single person, from the wonderful McKenna-Bruce to all the extras. “And everyone on the crew was young and party animals as well,” says Walker. “The thing that resonated with me in Malia was that there wasn’t any silence. You had to take yourself away from it, into a hole, in order to find any silence. There’s this constant beat.”
That beat is present throughout the film, but it isn’t a pop video. It’s dreamy, cinematic, poetic (it’s been likened to Aftersun). There’s joy, experimentation, subtle shifts of mood, sweet gestures of friendship, delight and uncertainty and silliness: the full, wild gamut of teenage life.
Sound is used to deft effect to show when main character Tara is enjoying herself, when she’s fading or fully present. As the story gets a little darker, Walker explains, the sound of crickets gets quicker, the music bassier and heavier. When Tara feels alone, you hear her breath. And at a couple of points, it cuts out altogether.
Because the thing is, although How to Have Sex is packed full of “best holiday ever” good times, there are also difficult situations. As the film progresses, events start to spin slightly out of whack and Tara, the bubbliest but least sexually experienced of the three, has a couple of hard-to-manage sexual encounters: uncomfortable, clumsy, not good for her, not right... And the boys they meet end up in weird sexual circumstances, too. One, the daft but sensitive Badger (played by The Selfish Giant’s Shaun Thomas), labels his (very public oral sex) as “the best moment of his life”, though he can’t remember it, and we know it isn’t.
“Yeah, how we’re taught and pressured into thinking that this is how you should have sex,” says Walker. “That’s the whole concept of the film. The blowjobs on stage, I saw that, in a club in Magaluf. I was standing on a pool table watching it…”
Really, this is a film about consent. “For me, consent has become too black and white in terms of: ‘She said yes’, so it’s fine,” says Walker. “That doesn’t always work – it’s not enough. And afterwards, you don’t have the words. You’re young. So you’re like: ‘I said yes, but I know it was wrong.’ But also: ‘I don’t want to be called a victim.’”
Complicated emotions are pushed down, because to voice them is too much. How can you talk about such situations when you’re 16 and the only language available would send you to the police? Walker knows about this. She was sexually assaulted in London when she was 16, her drink spiked while she was on a night out: “And I find that when I say that, all the oxygen is sucked out of the room.”
She adds: “No one knows how to deal with sexual assault. Especially if you’re young, because everyone just goes: ‘Fuck!’ and stops talking.” But Walker thinks we should talk. Not about the details, necessarily, but about how such situations come about.
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Walker grew up in London. Her parents were creative – her dad’s an animator and her mum is a director, whose credits include the seminal fake spooks TV programme Ghostwatch. Walker describes their work lives as artistic but precarious, especially her mother’s. “Her career was stunted because she had me and my brother,” she says. “I’ve inherited their passion and their drive. They’re both still hustling now.”
Before she was into making films, when Walker was a young girl, her passion was football: she was captain of her school team, played in summer camps run by Chelsea FC. “That was me,” she said. “I was just football kit, shaved head, until I was 12. When Frank Lampard left Chelsea, I cried for two days. I wanted to be a footballer.”
And perhaps she would have been, but for some bad luck. When she was 15, messing about with her friends at school, she fell down some stairs and broke both her legs. She was in a wheelchair for a year. It was a turning point, she remembers – “a moment. From then, it was partying or football, and partying won.” Despite their young age, her friends hid vodka in her wheelchair and “rammed me into clubs”, wheeling around the dancefloor, drunk as a skunk. Her dad is an alcoholic in recovery and she thinks she has some of his addictive tendencies. “I was all in on football and then I was all in on drinking,” she says.
After she was walking again, she carried on partying. Even after she was sexually assaulted, she continued to go out. In fact, she was even more determined to enjoy herself. “I was like: ‘Don’t tell me what to do, it’s not going to restrict me – fuck you, guys.’” But then she decided to stop – bang – like that. She was sober for six years straight, from when she was 19, went to Arts University Bournemouth to study cinematography, then the National Film and Television School to do a master’s “and got addicted to film-making”.
Walker has a full-tilt approach to life. When she left uni, she cropped her hair to her skull: “A bit of a Britney moment.” She adds: “I was in a bad relationship. I was like: ‘Fuck this. If I shave my head, he won’t be attracted to me any more. And then I’ll have to dump him and start dating women.’ And it worked.”
Long hair gone now for almost a decade, she found almost immediately that her more masculine look led to an easier life. “Much easier,” she says. “I don’t get aggression on the street. I don’t get whistled at. If you go to a bar, you’re not going to get touched up. I looked like this when I was a kid, then went hypersexualised for 10 years and then went back… It’s a response to the world, for sure. It opens up the world for me in a way that I feel safe.”
On set, too, it has helped. She was young when she started as a cinematographer, but because she liked football, looked boyish “and could chat the lad chat”, she found she could arrive on set, “go to a gaffer and be like: ‘All right, mate. Can you just move that light over here, please?’ And he’d be like: ‘Yeah, all right, geeze.’ Which is useful, but obviously problematic, because you should be able to be whoever you want to be and still get things done.”
She doesn’t really care about gender presentation: she’s often mistaken for a young man and it doesn’t bother her. But other aspects do, often within relationships. She dates women now and “as a masc-presenting female, I know that I’m affected culturally by the world. I’m told how to hit on women by films. You absorb it.”
It’s made her sympathise with men and she was careful that her film doesn’t pass judgment on the boys’ characters. “Not taking away all blame or guilt, but I know that it’s not all their fault,” she says. “It’s the way that society has brought them up. ‘Be a strong man. You’ve got to take the lead, and you’ve got to know what you’re doing.’ I feel it so much, trying to go on dates, even as a woman dating a woman.”
We carry so much nonsense in our heads around sexuality and sexual attractiveness, especially when we’re young. Walker laughs when she remembers how judgmental she and her friends could be when they were teenagers, how they invented reasons why a perfectly nice person might not be good to go with (socks and sandals), telling one another: “You could do better.”
She’s hopeful that How to Have Sex will be seen by young people – it’s rated 15 – and is in the process of arranging discussions after some screenings for teenagers and young twentysomethings. In workshops carried out before shooting, some reactions to the script from teenagers were revealing.
“They said things like: ‘He asked her, she says yes – she’s up for it,’” says Walker. “And: ‘It’s not an assault, because she’s already slept with him – he can do what he wants.’ So now we’re talking about taking it into schools with sex ed. Just making it less of a legal conversation and more of a human conversation.”
Such conversations are not easy, even among adults. In audience Q&As after the film, there have been difficult moments. Women have talked about their own sexual assaults. One man said: “This film has taught me not to let my daughters go out dressed in short skirts.”
So what would Walker want teenagers to take from How to Have Sex? “That sex should be two people having a moment and enjoying it together,” she says. “Discussions about consent can turn into ‘He said, she said’… Let’s make it about human interaction. And let’s make it a rule that sex should be: ‘Oh, we’re both having a great time.’ Great.”
How to Have Sex screens at the BFI London film festival on 10 and 12 October and is in cinemas in the UK and Ireland from 3 November
