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 on 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 on the open wounds and shepherd them through their grief, within the only way it knows how,” reads a synopsis. The movie follows the daddy (Cumberbatch) and his two sons (Richard and Henry Boxall) as they struggle to deal with the sudden lack of their wife and mother.
Southern is best known for making music documentaries (Meet Me within 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 speak about how The Thing With Feathers got here to be made and what’s next for him.
“I optioned the book by myself,” he recalled. “I did every little thing you’re not meant to as a filmmaker. I spent my very own money. And I used to be kind of in the opening. But I believed on this book and the concept of this film a lot that I just kept pushing it and pushing it.”
He wasn’t the just one touched by the book. “After I was told that Benedict was an enormous fan of the book as well, I assumed I’ll take a punt. So, I sent him the script. expecting to attend six months for a polite ‘no’,” Southern told THR. “And inside two weeks, his company, SunnyMarch, got back to me and said, ‘Benedict really likes this. He wants to fulfill you’. I used to be never expecting to get an actor of his stature within the film, and I used to be nervous, because I’m a documentary maker, and that is my first narrative feature, but I went to fulfill him, and all of those nerves were dispelled. We got on so well.”
The creative exchange felt right, too. “He was such a terrific 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 in regards to the character, weeks and months before we went on set, that by the point we got there, our working relationship was established.”
After all, the shooting took much less time than the planning. “I’d been fascinated with this film for years and years and years, after which suddenly you will have six weeks, and you will have to make it,” the writer-director said with fun. “So just establishing that relationship is so essential. The primary time I called ‘motion,’ I forgot to call ‘cut’ because I used to be so mesmerized by his performance.”
Will Southern proceed with fiction work or return to documentaries? “I used to be not going to do one other music documentary. After which, I don’t know when you’ve heard of a band called Oasis!?” he quipped. “The ask got here 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 subsequent feature.”
He hopes it’ll make its strategy to the screen now that he has one narrative feature under his belt. “I wrote one other film, an original film, and worked on that for five years and got to the purpose where we were casting and placement scouting. But then the entire thing fell apart,” Southern told THR. “That’s where I learned you will have to have really thick skin.”
In regards to the recent narrative feature that he’s writing, Southern can share this much: “It’s flexing a distinct muscle from The Thing With Feathers, during which the arc is emotional. There’s not a lot plot in Feathers because it’s more about an emotional journey for a personality. The subsequent thing I’m doing is totally plot-driven with character. It’s a London-based thriller.”