The rites-of-passage holiday has different names in different places. In the US it is, of course, Spring Break. In Australia, “Schoolies”. Further down under, New Zealanders know it as “losing your virginity in the sand dunes at New Year”. In all cases, it’s a post-school blow-out with your besties, a parent-free, unsupervised bridge to adulthood via much clubbing, chugging and carousing. UK party-seekers make a beeline to one of several European seaside resorts that are uniquely set up for the annual onslaught of horny youth. Molly Manning Walker was once one of those teens, and her experiences—good and bad—inform the story of Tara (Mia McKenna-Bruce) in Manning Walker’s feature writing-directing debut, How to Have Sex.

It is a provocative title for a film that’s provoking complex conversations: about sexual consent, alcohol consumption, male silence, and how a film’s narrative can flow. Manning Walker drops us straight in it as sixteen-year-old school friends Tara, Skye (Lara Peake) and Em (Enva Lewis) head to the island of Crete for a post-exam rave-up in Malia. They buddy up with resort neighbors Paddy (Samuel Bottomley), Badger (Shaun Thomas) and Paige (Laura Ambler). A throbbing, immersive sound design pulses as a fly-on-the-wall camera observes the party prep, the drinking (so. much. drinking.) and the blurriness of seaside sexual encounters.

“Everyone has a story of that one guy who was a little too handsy, a little too pushy, misread your discomfort for pleasure etc,” writes Ash on Letterboxd. “What’s almost as bad as the experience itself is the second-guessing that inevitably comes after it. All of this happens in this film, but it never announces itself in the way one might expect it to, which makes it all the more unexpected and powerful.” Maia agrees: “This is one of the most brutally accurate depictions of a girl’s sexual-coming-of-age I’ve ever watched. How to Have Sex is atmospheric, horrifically relatable, and riveting from beginning to end.” And Erin echoes (far too many) similar responses: “An incredible film but a catalyst for memory.”

What position do you play on the field?
Molly Manning Walker: Striker. Yeah.

Always?
No, recently my team got better than me, which is really sad for me and great for them. I’m now in defense a bit more because I’m getting old, tired. There’s a bit of a thing sometimes of, like, trying to give people the confidence to be a striker, which then echoes onto set. People come to me and they’re like, “Oh, I want to be goalie.” And I’m like, “I think you’d be a good striker.” Not that the goalie is not an amazing role, but they stand back a bit, you know? I’m like, “Go and do that.” Then they get a bit more confidence. It’s quite cool.

This is really interesting because I do want to talk a little bit about the vibe of any kind of high-stakes team, which applies to films as well.
Yeah, it’s the same as being on set. We played football every weekend in Malia and I did it from prep all the way through and it changed the dynamic of the set radically because you are high-fiving the UPM [unit production manager] being like, “Nice goal last night!” And I wouldn’t even know his name necessarily, normally, on set because they’d be setting up the easy-ups or something. They’d be in a different space to me. It blew up the hierarchy in a way that was so refreshing.

Before we go any further, I need to ask: Bend It Like Beckham, what role does that film play, if any, in your life?
Do you know it’s shot in my hometown? I’m from the same place that it was shot, so, a huge role in my life. Did you know, fun fact for you, that it was more gay, well, it was gay, and then the execs dampened the gayness down?

We all know this. There are many, many Letterboxd lists where Bend It Like Beckham is on there. We just know.
Yeah, so I always think about it when notes come in.

Did you get any notes for How to Have Sex? Apart from [the note you shared before the screening]: “Hasn’t the conversation about consent moved on?” Which, I think that the vibe in the audience when you said that was like, “Oh no, fuck no.”
Yeah. Do you know what? In general, I quite like notes because they make you either agree, which is fine… or you really strongly disagree and then you know what your opinion is. Those knee-jerk ones where I’m like, “What the fuck, man?!” Then you know that you’re like, ‘okay, this is my opinion’. The complex ones are the ones in the middle where you’re like, “I think they’ve got something there, but I don’t really agree with it.” Those are the ones where you bang your head against the wall and wake up at four o’clock in the morning being like, “I think they’re right.”

Thinking about soccer and going out dancing with the crew makes me think a lot about how to make sets good, or the whole experience good, all the way through. Making the edit suite safe for all of those notes and opinions. It still seems quite hard for people to do. You’ve obviously been on a lot more sets than your own, in terms of the gamut of experiences.
It’s still so bad and I think it’s this thing of, ‘Must pretend to be director. Must pretend to be director because don’t know how to direct. So must shout at everyone and be the boss, because that’s how I’ve seen it portrayed in films.’

Good people with experience, right?
I talk about the gap a lot at the moment where what’s happening, especially in the UK film industry, which is amazing, is that diverse stories are getting pushed forward, which is so great and I wouldn’t be here if that hadn’t happened. But what comes with that often is… no experience in this set. Suddenly you are in this position where it’s their first experience and then they get all these gnarly, old-man crew who are like, “Fuck these guys. They don’t know what they’re doing.” They kick up a storm about it. They love to tell people that, “You don’t know what you’re doing and I do.” It is a boys’ club.

I think that’s why, sadly, people had a bit of respect on our set, because I’d had experience. I could put the 50mm on and they’re like, “Oh, shit, she knows what a lens is.” So simple but so basic. But I’ve seen directors crumble in similar situations. It shouldn’t be like that, obviously. And I just couldn’t have made that film if I wasn’t a cinematographer. There’s no fucking way. There’s so many situations where I was like, “Okay, let’s pivot.” How do you do that if you don’t know the parameters of pivoting?

We’ve all had “those” moments, especially traveling through Europe in your twenties. I wanted to immediately share with you my dodgy stories of traveling in France and Italy in my twenties, but I’m not going to because you’re a filmmaker, not a therapist. I know your distributor Ahi have been mindful of this. 
Yeah. It’s pretty hardcore. That’s why we started to talk about how to protect myself. The whole point of making a film was to talk about it and to share these stories. So in one part I’m like, “Yeah, man, let’s share these stories.” And then in the other part, every time I come to a room full of 200 people, I can’t take ten stories home with me because if I’m going to do this for six months, I need to be able to do this.

There were a couple screenings where people had really visceral emotional responses to it—and rightly so—and I feel a responsibility to be like, “Thank you for sharing. Sorry that you’ve been through that”, but I also need to protect myself somehow. Part of the process of making the film, I became quite numb because people were processing live on set, people were realizing stuff, reflecting on their past. So I put up this wall and was just like, “I need to make this film. I also need to get it done good because all these people, they’ve shared their story with me. So it’s not me, it's everyone. I need to do it sanely. And then I need to figure out how we get through the release,” kind of thing.

You’re working with a distribution team that isn’t just out to get every ticket at the box office, but also to make sure that it’s a good experience for you.
It’s been a real discovery because I hadn’t thought too much about it. You’re just like, “Oh, cool, the film people relate to it.” In a way that’s the best thing we could ask for. But then, it’s definitely a navigation. It’s been really amazing to figure out with Ahi, like, what’s the process for that? With my team, with Mubi, and with the publicity team that are like, “Okay, we should have resources in each country. There should be a QR code and people should be able to find who to speak to. We should maybe open up discussions in audiences so that people can talk within the audience.”

I often think about that with actors who then also have to walk in the world and be recognized.
He was like, “I’m going to be recognized as the rapist.” And I was like, “No. You are going to be recognized as someone who’s telling a really important story.” Part of our job is to say, “Without you telling this story, the story doesn’t exist. You’re not this person.” He’s really worried about it. It was part of the development process, but men recognize themselves in these characters, and I think both of them do such a good job at that. And he’s not a one-dimensional bad guy. And Badger is sweet, but… they both failed her, and hopefully people recognize themselves in them.

I could see the ghost of Morvern Callar in this film.
It’s so funny because I hadn’t actually seen it again until recently. But yeah, it is, the ghost of it is in this film.

It’s so fascinating that the European getaway is such a central British experience, but it’s appeared in so very few films. Lynne Ramsay absolutely nailed the party scenes of the nineties and the sound mix in that film. And then yours is just as incredible, if not more so because it’s really visceral. I just wondered if she or who else, in terms of filmmakers, were inspirations.
She’s definitely a huge reference, but I actually hadn’t seen the film before, which is mad! But We Need To Talk About Kevin is one of my favorite films of all time, she’s been a huge influence in my filmmaking in general. Also Andrea Arnold’s American Honey was a big reference for us because of that chaotic kid energy that feels livewire and you don’t know where it’s going at any moment. And then lots of club music, obviously. There was one song, ‘Losing It’ by Fisher, that’s not in the film, that was really part of the aggressive drone. You’re in this club and it hits you and you’re just like, “What?” You feel aggressed by it. It became such an important thing. TikTok was a huge thing too. Am I allowed to say that?

You can say that.
It was a huge part of it because I’ve got hundreds of videos downloaded from TikTok from people uploading them, like [drunk, party rambling].

From people on the party scene?
Yeah, so real, live references, which then became meta because then our guys were uploading their own TikTok videos and I was like, “Oh my God, this is just so much crossover.”

Then you’re going into the edit and you’re working with all those layers of sound. It’s so all-encompassing.
Yeah, so much sound. I made this crazy document, a chart, where it’s the noise level and it’s like techno, techno, techno, party tune and then it’s silent. Red is silence. There’s two moments in the film that are pure silence. Green was techno, the nightclub. And then there was distant music, fun, chatter, background track, that kind of stuff.

But when you’re in the moment filming, are you listening in your head to the drops?
No, not at all.

What’s going on? What are they dancing to?
Whatever I’m trying to get the beat up with. We had all these plans where me and the composer were like, “We’ll make a playlist for each club and it’ll be a certain BPM, they’ll all be dancing to that beat and then we can recreate that beat.” Like fuck, that was ever going to happen! In the moment you’re like, “Just put some fucking Drake on, just like, anything, Rihanna! What’s going to make you guys dance?” Obviously you have to put it on and then turn it off. So you set the beat and then it turns off and you’re like, “No, no, no, keep dancing. Keep dancing.”

It’s visceral, the whole film. You avoid classic set-up/reaction shots; everything feels live and lived-in.
It’s one of the main things we did, like, every drawer was full. The production designer built a 360 set. I don’t want them to open a drawer and be like ‘ha ha, pretend to get something out of this drawer’. There’s stuff in the suitcase. Everything was full.

How much do we hate an empty suitcase?
I know. The costumes as well: I’ve got videos of the lineup, like, [costume designer Sarah Blenkinsop] would dress 150 people in five minutes and I’m like “how the fuck did you do that? It’s crazy.” It was just a 360 experience to the point where sometimes I was like “please get someone to take that music off because we’re trying to shoot!” I do think there’s a crossover of good set equals good performance.