‘Stuff happened, you know?’ How to Have Sex director Molly Manning Walker on wild youth, Magaluf and storming Cannes
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, Howto Have Sex, which follows three 16-yearold girls from London on a postGCSE 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.”
Howto 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 Howto 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 Howto 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 McKennaBruce 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