Benedict Cumberbatch stars in The Thing With Feathers, writer-director Dylan Southern’s big-screen adaptation of Max Porter’s award-winning Grief Is the Thing With Feathers, which just screened at the 69th edition of the BFI London Film Festival (LFF) after its world premiere at Sundance.
‘A mother dies, leaving two primary school-aged children and ‘Sad Dad’. Before long, ‘Crow’ emerges from the pages of the book Sad Dad is writing, to peck at the open wounds and shepherd them through their grief, in the only way it knows how,” reads a synopsis. The movie follows the father (Cumberbatch) and his two sons (Richard and Henry Boxall) as they struggle to cope with the sudden loss of their wife and mother.
Southern is best known for making music documentaries (Meet Me in the Bathroom, Shut Up and Play the Hits) and music videos for the likes of the Arctic Monkeys and Björk. At LFF 2025, THR caught up with him to talk about how The Thing With Feathers came to be made and what’s next for him.
“I optioned the book on my own,” he recalled. “I did everything you’re not meant to as a filmmaker. I spent my own money. And I was sort of in the hole. But I believed in this book and the idea of this film so much that I just kept pushing it and pushing it.”
He wasn’t the only one touched by the book. “When I was told that Benedict was a huge fan of the book as well, I thought I’ll take a punt. So, I sent him the script. expecting to wait six months for a polite ‘no’,” Southern told THR. “And within two weeks, his company, SunnyMarch, got back to me and said, ‘Benedict really likes this. He wants to meet you’. I was never expecting to get an actor of his stature in the film, and I was nervous, because I’m a documentary maker, and this is my first narrative feature, but I went to meet him, and all of those nerves were dispelled. We got on so well.”
The creative exchange felt right, too. “He was such a great collaborator,” Southern said about Cumberbatch. “He asked as many questions of me as I asked him, and he eased me into it. We had so many long conversations about the character, weeks and months before we went on set, that by the time we got there, our working relationship was established.”
Of course, the shooting took much less time than the planning. “I’d been thinking about this film for years and years and years, and then suddenly you have six weeks, and you have to make it,” the writer-director said with a laugh. “So just establishing that relationship is so important. The first time I called ‘action,’ I forgot to call ‘cut’ because I was so mesmerized by his performance.”
Will Southern continue with fiction work or return to documentaries? “I was not going to do another music documentary. And then, I don’t know if you’ve heard of a band called Oasis!?” he quipped. “The ask came from Oasis, if I and my directing partner would cover their reunion. So I’m back in that world now, but I’m also writing the next feature.”
He hopes it will make its way to the screen now that he has one narrative feature under his belt. “I wrote another film, an original film, and worked on that for five years and got to the point where we were casting and location scouting. But then the whole thing fell apart,” Southern told THR. “That’s where I learned you have to have really thick skin.”
About the new narrative feature that he is writing, Southern can share this much: “It’s flexing a different muscle from The Thing With Feathers, in which the arc is emotional. There’s not so much plot in Feathers as it’s more about an emotional journey for a character. The next thing I’m doing is completely plot-driven with character. It’s a London-based thriller.”
