How to Write a Meet-Cute: New Case Study — Pillion (2025)
Hot on the heels of the “how to write a meet-cute” discussion from a couple of weeks ago, I found an excellent further example of the meet-cute from the 2025 film Pillion. This is a perfect example of the meet-cute, but also provides an excellent foreshadow of the rest of the film–this is arguably as effective, character-wise, as the diner scene in Reservoir Dogs.
Not to pigeonhole the film, but I suppose there’s an argument to be made that it’s some species of romantic comedy. That is, in the sense that Harold and Maude is a romantic comedy. In any case, it’s a good watch and I suspect a film that will age well.
That said, I wanted to take the opportunity to focus on the specifics of the meet-cute while that’s still sort of fresh in the mind.
Implication Before Meeting
This is a good example of a situation where the scenes prior imply, as a sort of dramatic irony, that these two characters will meet:
First, we saw a leather-clad biker speed past Colin and his father puttering along in their Volvo. Second, we saw Colin, literal (not figurative) hat in hand, seeking coins from the punters at the pub–he puts the hat under Ray’s nose. Ray, writing Christmas cards at the pub table, simply ignores him.
There’s something here, but we don’t know what it is. Walking into the movie unaware of its topic, I might be slightly surprised at the turn things are about to take. Until this very scene–and that’s the beauty of it.
Inciting Incident
Unsurprisingly, this meet-cute is the Inciting Incident of the film. It comes fairly early in the runtime (06:22 of a 106-minute film), but we get enough from the earlier scenes to get an idea of Colin’s character. The fact that Colin is gay is even set up with a fairly decent framing rather than loud exposition: he’s on a blind date with a man his mother set him up with.
The writer in me wonders whether it might have been more interesting if Colin’s sexuality were not precisely mapped. That is, if things were left more intentionally ambiguous, that is, “Man who doesn’t really know what he wants ultimately finds what he wants in motorbike-fetishizing gay leather D/s.”* Understandably that might have detracted from the efficiency of the storytelling, so I’m willing to leave this speculation hanging.
*Dominance/submission; the “s” is lower-case to indicate the relative position of “submission” with respect to “Dominance.” This is a more technically apt term than, for example, BDSM given that we’re leaving out the B and the M.
The Scene Map
Let’s look at the scene in more detail:
- Intro: Colin goes to order a drink at the bar. The bartender asks who’s next and Colin says “Hi.”
- Inciting Incident: a voice comes from the side “What crisps do you have?” The bartender ignores Colin and responds to this person. We do not see his face. Colin looks over, shocked at being shoved aside so bluntly. The voice orders the crisps. The bartender gives him the price: £4.80. We hear loose change hitting the bar top.
- Second-Act Break: We see the face–Ray, the tall biker Colin had been staring at in the previous scene.
- Rising Action: Ray stares Colin down–intimidating, but not physically threatening. Ray nods down at the change.
- Midpoint: Colin looks back at Ray for a moment, then he gets it. Colin reaches down and counts out £4.80 in change.
- Falling Action: As Colin is counting, Ray takes out a Christmas card and writes something in it. Colin gives the money to the bartender. She hands over the crisps.
- Low Point: Colin offers the crisps to Ray. Ray vanishes.
- Climax: Colin notices that Ray has left the card on the bar. Colin picks it up, very confused as to what just happened.
Notice how this scene fractally mirrors the entire film–spoiler alert if such things matter: Ray swoops into Colin’s life, unlocks something Colin didn’t know he had (submissive tendencies in this case), gives Colin a thrill in acting out those submissive tendencies, and then simply vanishes.
Spoilers aside, it’s a good movie and there are a million other reasons to watch it, so do yourself a favor and go see it.
Mechanics of the Meet-Cute
A meet-cute is, as you will remember, a situation that is strange, interesting, or memorable where the two romantic leads are put into a situation of artificial intimacy from the jump. That doesn’t mean that both of them have to like it or even really be on board–but the situation forces it.
In this case, there’s an obvious question: sexual orientation aside, how does one test easily whether another person is a willing submissive (in the D/s sense)?
The coin-counting test is therefore the crux of the scene.
Notice how Colin doesn’t really stand up for himself by this point in the film: he’s let his mother choose his date and he just goes with the flow on whatever people are willing to put into the hat he’s carrying around.
In a polite English suburb, he can probably get away with being relatively passive. What happens next throws everything for a loop.
Ray barges in and takes control of the situation, asserting his dominance immediately by disrupting Colin’s order. He is interested in Colin, but Colin must first pass a test–to see whether Colin actually has an “aptitude for devotion”–hence the coins.
Ray is fully aware that he’s jumped the drinks queue here, which is extremely poor form (if you’ve never been to an English pub). The question is whether Colin will do anything about it. Ray is six inches taller than Colin and probably has 60 pounds of muscle on him, so chances are that the answer is “no.”
Still, Ray is probing rather than bullying. There is a certain kindness in his eyes as he stares at Colin. Colin is clever enough to understand that there’s something here if he can just figure out what that something is. Ray looks down at the coins and back up at Colin.
At first, Colin is confused, then it clicks: Colin counts out the change. Ray scribbles in the card he brought–note the point at which this happens: Colin has passed the test. Colin takes the crisps and gives them to Ray.
Ray vanishes. Except he left the card he was writing on. We don’t see the text of the card until later.
The point of this scene, therefore, is not just to have the characters meet, but to set up the overarching mechanics of their relationship through the rest of the film. Even if D/s is rather alien to most viewers, this scene gives us enough of a taste of it that we can get the basic sense of what’s going on. In that sense, it acts as a taster to draw the audience into the new world Colin will enter.
In a world where bad exposition makes everything just that much more shit–“Can you say it out loud? People are too busy looking at their phones to pay attention to screens.”–it’s refreshing to see a scene that provides necessary exposition and gives us a rundown of what we can expect from the entire film–extra gravy for mirroring the overarching plot within this scene–all without rubbing our faces in it.
Conclusion
There aren’t any hard and fast rules for how to write a meet-cute. A good meet-cute can occur for a random reason. Plenty of films do this, and the concept works reasonably well–think randomly spilling your juice on a movie star–even if the reason for meeting never really makes any substantive difference in the rest of the film.
A truly great meet-cute, such as the examples we’ve discussed before (I’m thinking of Before Sunrise and Say Anything), tie the awkward situation of the meet-cute into the topic and theme of the film as well.
Note how the Pillion meet-cute does precisely that: it shows us the topic (D/s) and theme (Colin’s coming of age catalyzed by Ray) all in one tiny little scene. Without making it obvious, this scene roadmaps the emotional, practical (D/s), and thematic journey that the rest of the film will take us on.
Exercises:
Pre-Meet Foreshadowing
In this case, write two separate short scenes where the two characters who will eventually meet, but haven’t yet have some sort of near-miss.
In the first scene, have Character A invade Character B’s world in a way that makes Character B take notice–even for just a small moment. Think about Ray rushing past Colin’s Volvo on his motorbike.
In the second scene, have Character A invade Character A’s world in a similar way. There might be more (or less) engagement than in the previous scene, but there’s another near-miss here. Think about Colin holding his hat out to Ray in the bar and Ray simply ignoring him.
The goal here is to make the eventual meeting feel inevitable, not random or rushed into.
Bonus: this is not absolutely essential as there are clear violations of the rule (e.g. Say Anything), see if you can do this without either character mentioning the other character to any other character.
Compatibility Testing
Think about how the meet-cute sets up that these people will work well together. Consider a situation where Character A puts Character B through a test.
What sort of test? It needs to be something where the stakes are relatively obvious. Probably something that Character B wasn’t expecting and didn’t really want to do. Character B likely only realizes that this test is, well, a test partway through what’s happening.
What does this mean about their compatibility? How does it make Character A relate to Character B?
This is obviously what Ray does with the change in Pillion, but consider other circumstances, such as Character A asking Character B to “buy [him] a drink” to see how Character B handles the demand, or Character A acting out in public to see how Character B handles this (think Stoffer meeting Karen in Lars von Trier’s The Idiots).
Bonus if Character A can propose the test without explaining it verbally.
Scene as Fractal Map
Focus here on the major thematic arc of the film. In the case of Pillion, it’s something like “Passive character is awakened, challenged, passes the test, then is abandoned” if we consider the full arc of the film.
Make sure that all of these incidents are in your meet-cute scene in microcosm. Naturally the emotional stakes within this scene won’t be as heavy as throughout the entire film, but think about how the structure, in general, plays out as we move along.
Bonus if you can consider how this meeting gives a tangible item (e.g. the Christmas card) that is addressed later in the story. In this case, the card is read in the following scenes, but it could easily also be a memento of the two meeting, etc.
(I’m going to write how to write a meet-cute again for our SEO overlords.)