My Policeman director reveals the movies Harry Styles watched to prepare for his sex scenes

The first time Tom (Harry Styles), a closeted cop living in 1950s Brighton in the film My Policeman, has any meaningful physical contact with his new lover Patrick (David Dawson), a small mirror is visible in the background of the entryway of the apartment. This was a subtle focal point for director Michael Grandage, who played an active role in dressing this particular set. "I wanted to pay my own little affectionate homage to a few things that have been important to me in the way we shot the movie," Grandage, 60, tells EW.

The mirror, specifically, is a nod to The Servant, the 1963 black-and-white drama by filmmaker Joseph Losey. The Servant features Dirk Bogarde as an aristocrat's new household help who causes unrest within the home, prompting a psychological face-off between master and servant, one with palpable sexual overtones. The movie became a "huge influence" for how Grandage approached the sex scenes in My Policeman, which also stars Emma Corrin as schoolteacher Marion Taylor.

"I find it a massively affecting film, with its menace and its underbelly," Grandage says. "[Losey] understood so much about how to tell a story by just a picture and not needing any dialogue at all."

Sex propels the story forward in My Policeman, which layers in the perspectives of its three main characters several decades later. In 1999, an older Marion (played by Gina McKee) welcomes a now-wheelchair-bound Patrick (Rupert Everett), who had just suffered a stroke, to her home with husband Tom (Linus Roache). Patrick's presence forces all three of them to confront tough memories: In their youth, Tom married Marion while engaging in a passionate, intoxicating relationship with Patrick behind closed doors at a time when it was illegal to be gay in the U.K.

PARISA TAGHIZADEH/Amazon Prime Tom (Harry Styles) and Patrick (David Dawson) enjoy a Venice getaway in 'My Policeman.'

Showing that passion was vital to the film, and Grandage found willing participants in Styles, Dawson, and Corrin. "As a gay man, I thought, I if I'm going to direct this film, I do at least want to somehow make sure that — if I'm lucky enough to carry on living in another 10, 15, 20 years or so — I want to be able to look at the film constantly and go, 'I did what I set out to do in terms of intimacy,'" Grandage says. "I just knew that there was a way of telling a very specific story about same-sex intimacy that, each time we saw it in the film, helps move the narrative on. You can't do that if you just fade to black."

The filmmaker had very clear ideas and references for how to approach sex on screen. From their first conversations, Grandage wanted each physical moment to have "its own narrative flow." For Marion and Tom, it's "a story about the difficulty of the intimacy," Grandage clarifies. Sex becomes Marion's way to convince herself that her husband wants her. For Patrick and Tom, sex is more about the "ease and abandonment." And the filmmaker wanted to tell it all through "sculptural storytelling," something more "choreographic," he says.

Apart from The Servant, Grandage suggested the trio watch the 1959 classic Hiroshima mon amour from French director Alain Resnais, as well as Nicolas Roeg's 1973 romantic mystery Don't Look Now. Grandage calls Hiroshima "very beautiful, almost painterly," while Don't Look Now became a specific recommendation for Styles and Dawson. (One sequence in My Policeman has Patrick whisking Tom away on a work trip to Venice, also the central location of Roeg's film.)

Don't Look Now features a famous extended sex scene between actors Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie, an interlude that was provocative and controversial at the time for its frankness. Grandage explains the power of Roeg's strategy by counting: "Often we just go, 'And now, the intimacy scene — one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, and gone.' But I said, 'What happens if you extend those moments into scenes that are as big as some of the other scenes?'"

Much of My Policeman takes a similar artistic approach, even beyond the sex scenes. The first moment of connection between Tom and Patrick occurs at a museum, the men considering a painting from English artist J. M. W. Turner. Scenes of Tom teaching a smitten Marion how to swim at a public pool emulate sun-soaked vintage photographs. It's the idea of art commenting on art, which Grandage confirms is a "big theme" throughout his work.

"As a director and as somebody who is in the creative industries, you want art to comment on art, and you want art to comment on life, politics, and history to help us understand ourselves a bit better," he says. "That seems to be a glorious theme for me to be able to explore."

My Policeman opens in theaters Oct. 21 and globally on Amazon's Prime Video Nov. 4.

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