Benedict Cumberbatch stars in The thing with featherswriter-director Dylan Southern’s big-screen adaptation of Max Porter’s award-winning film Grief is the thing with featherswhich has just been screened at the 69th edition of the BFI London Film Festival (LFF) following its world premiere at Sundance.
“A mother dies, leaving two children of primary school age and a “sad dad”. Soon, ‘Crow’ emerges from the pages of the book Sad Dad is writing, to peck open wounds and guide them through their grief, in the only way he knows how,” reads a synopsis. The film 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 bands like Arctic Monkeys and Björk. At LFF 2025, THR I met him to talk about how The thing with feathers has come to be done and what’s next for him.
“I chose the book on my own,” he recalls. “I did everything you’re not supposed to do as a filmmaker. I spent my own money. And I was kind of in the hole. But I believed in this book and the idea of this film so much that I kept pushing and pushing it.”
He wasn’t the only one touched by the book. “When I was told that Benedict was also a big fan of the book, I thought I’d take a chance. So, I sent him the script. Expecting to wait six months for a polite ‘no,'” Southern said. THR. “And after two weeks, his company, SunnyMarch, wrote me back and said, ‘Benedict really likes this. He wants to meet you.’ I didn’t expect to have an actor of his stature in the film, and I was nervous, because I’m a documentarian, and this is my first narrative feature, but I went to meet him, and all that nervousness went away. We got along so well.”
The creative exchange also seemed good. “He was a very good collaborator,” Southern said of Cumberbatch. “He asked me as many questions as I asked him, and he made it easy for me. 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 filming took much less time than the planning. “I’ve been thinking about this movie for years and years and then suddenly you have six weeks and you have to do it,” the writer-director said with a laugh. “So it’s very important to establish that relationship. The first time I called ‘action,’ I forgot to call ‘cut’ because I was so fascinated by his performance.”
Will Southern continue to venture into fiction or return to documentaries? “I wasn’t going to do another music documentary. Also, I don’t know if you’ve heard of a band called Oasis!?” he joked. “Oasis asked me if my directing partner and I would cover their reunion. So I’m back in that world now, but I’m also writing the next feature.”
He hopes the film will make it to the screen now that he has a narrative feature under his belt. “I wrote another movie, an original movie, and I worked on it for five years and got to the point where we were doing casting and location scouting. But then it all fell apart,” Southern said. THR. “That’s where I learned that you have to have very thick skin.”
Of the new narrative feature he’s writing, Southern can share this: “It’s about flexing a different muscle than The thing with feathersin which the arc is emotional. There’s not that much plot in it. Feathers as it is more of an emotional journey for a character. The next thing I do is completely plot and character driven. It is a thriller based in London.
