E48 • Adapting Literature, and Grief, to Film • DYLAN SOUTHERN, dir. of ‘The Thing With Feathers’ starring Benedict Cumberbatch at Berlinale + Sundance

Dylan Southern talks about his film “The Thing with Feathers,” based on Max Porter's book and starring Benedict Cumberbatch, which delves into themes of loss and family relationships after a mother’s passing. The film made its debut at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, followed by Berlinale. He also references previous films that inspired him, including Steven Spielberg’s “E.T.”

Dylan shares his experience of transforming the book into a film, highlighting the need to grasp the emotional heart of the narrative. He discusses the complexities of portraying grief, noting that it is often non-linear and can be both cyclical and unpredictable.

He elaborates on the fusion of horror and dark humor to illustrate grief and reflects on how personal experiences shape storytelling, stressing the importance of emotional authenticity in film.

Like, subscribe and follow us on our socials @pastpresentfeature

Chapters

• 0:01 Past Present Feature, Hosted by Marcus Mizelle
• 0:20 Presented by Valerion Projectors
• 1:01 Dylan Southern, dir. of "The Thing With Feathers", starring Benedict Cumberbatch at the Berlinale

Transcript

Marcus Mizelle (01:02)
Today, Dylan Southern talks about his film “The Thing with Feathers,”, starring Benedict Cumberbatch, which delves into themes of loss and family relationships after a mother's passing. The film made its debut at this year's Berlin Film Festival. Dylan also references previous films that inspired him, including Steven Spielberg's E.T.

his experience of transforming the book into a film, the need to grasp the emotional heart of the narrative. He discusses the complexities of portraying grief, noting that it is often non-linear and can be and unpredictable. He elaborates on the fusion of horror and dark humor to illustrate grief and reflects on how personal experiences shape storytelling.

stressing the importance of emotional authenticity in film.

Marcus Mizelle (01:44)
you guys premiered at Sundance, right? World premiered? That's right, And then you're following that up with Berlin now. Yes, yeah. I leave for Berlin on Saturday, actually. That's a wonderful one-two punch right there. That's a nice, that's like top, top premier, you know, back-to-back places to screen your film, I feel like.

And this film is a it's about a young father of two sons who is left devastated by the sudden and unexpected death of his wife. His hold on reality crumbles as a seemingly maligned presence begins to stalk him from the shadowy recesses of the apartment he shares with his boys. What begins as a terrifying haunting evolves into a battle of wills between the grieving family and their unpredictable uninvited houseguest and tormentor. An anthropomorphic crow, which appears to have emerged from the pages of the father's work as a comic book artist.

The week and months during which the father and his sons are under siege from the crow ultimately forced him to confront their grief and reconcile themselves for the new shape their family must take. Okay, so we're talking about grief here. We're talking about, I guess, being a new single widowed father to two kids. You just told me you have two kids. So was going to ask you, what drew you to this material? I know it was a book before, right? Yeah. So it was a book that was published in 2015. And I actually have

No one will be able to see it, but you can in my hands. This is the 10 year old copy of the book that was first sent to me by a friend. This has been with me for 10 years now. and I mean, my friend sent it to me. He worked at the publishers, but he works in the, the, the music arm of the publishers doing like biographies of musicians and, books about genres of music and stuff. And he just sent it to me because he knew my taste. had no idea I would then, you know, set up.

set about this kind of a 10 year journey to will it into existence as a film. He just sent it to me because he's like, you'll really like this book. And I did really like the book. It's a really unusual book like Max Porter, who wrote it is an incredible literary talent, like really well regarded in the UK and across Europe. And he's I think he's, he's on his like fifth book now. But this one really grabbed the public's attention. I don't think he expected it to

grabbed the public's attention as much as it did. And, you know, it's subsequently been turned into a play which starred Killian Murphy in the West End here in London, in the Barbican here in London, and it also played in Dublin and New York. He gets offers all the time to turn it into anything from as wild as like a Japanese puppet show to another theatrical version of Australia. There's something about it that's universal and just taps, because it's a difficult subject, grief.

It's a really difficult subject. Yeah. My mother passed away when I was 21, so I have some experience with that and I don't mind talking about it. I don't mind talking about it either because that's what I was going to go on to is that the thing that first attracted me to the book was it was a book that I obviously needed and didn't know I needed because I'd sort of in my teenage years had experience of losing friends and kind of being British and

being kind of emotionally repressed or just not back in those days, not being given the tools to deal with something like grief. So I kind of carried it around with me and pushed it down and, know, assimilated it in some way, but never really dealt with it. And when I read Max's book, it unlocks a lot of stuff and it kind of gave a language to a lot of the things I felt. And it gave permission for some of the behaviors that, that I was sort of aware of in myself.

But it also did it in a way that was like really strange. It's a really peculiar story, but it just makes, you know, the fact that it's been translated into 36 languages and been won so many awards, literary awards, and been kind of adapted into different stage plays that it obviously has something universal in this strange story of a family and this visiting crow character. There's something kind of like folkloric or fairy tale like about it.

But then there's also a huge dose of British realism. Like it feels so real, even though the concept is kind of out there and it's got gallows humor, it's got dark humor in it. And these are all the sort of things, you know, that sort of dark sense of humor, that avoidance of sentimentality. These are all the things I've recognized as a way that I deal with grief or I deal with things. So there was something that just spoke to me in the book and

have been really heavy. could have been just a depressing read, but Max's writing makes everything just feel accessible, but then also sort of profoundly moving. that kind of emotional punch sneaks up on you without it ever becoming sentimental. So I was like, I read this book, I was like, that is amazing. I have no idea how you would ever turn that into a film. And then a week later, I was sat in a coffee shop with Max and I obviously

kind of was enthusiastic enough that he optioned it to me and I'd be... I was going to ask you, yeah, yeah, yeah. What was that process like? You had the advantage of having your guy at the publishing house, right? Kind of get it to you a little bit sooner than maybe the other people. I mean, I don't know how it works in that world where I know that all the best stuff seems to get optioned before anybody even knows about it. I mean, interestingly, the book was already on the shelves when my friend sent it to me. It had already been out for a couple of months.

Prior to this, I'd tried to option some stuff and just called up the literary agent or called up the publisher. And you're right, like, you know, so many of the big production companies and studios have readers and buyers and they've had bidding wars before the books even on the shelves. Because Max told me like several months after I'd got it, everyone started coming for it and it was already in my hands. Kind of daunting, like, you know, exciting.

Adapting a book, I've never done that. What is that like? What does that kind of process look like? How do you know what to keep? How do you know what to cut? What are some things that I wouldn't even know of until I were to go and adapt a book? What is that like? I've only done it once, so I can give you my experience. I imagine it's very, very different for every single book. This is a book that's so unusually written. It's a mixture of poetry and prose. It's written from the perspective of three different characters, the dad.

the boys, and you never know which one of them's talking, and then the third character, Crow, who may or may not exist. So he's got these three different perspectives. It's also written in different tenses. So the boys sections read as if they're much older, looking back on the past. The dad sections read as if they're immediate and now, then Crow is an unreliable narrator who might be a figment of dad's imagination. And then the book spans

decades, know, the third act of the book goes all over the place because it's just showing you how the sort of tentacles of grief reach out into this family's future as well as their past. So my biggest challenge was how do you take this thing, which does all of these amazing things that you can do in literature but don't necessarily translate to a typical movie story. So how do I do that?

kind of keep the DNA of Max's book, which is what's so special for me. And it got easier as I moved through it, because I saw that hidden beneath like Max's, the sort of massive variation and kind of fragmentary nature of Max's book. I saw hidden beneath it, there was quite a simple structure that I could use as my structure. I still wanted the film to be as unconventional as Max's book. It was never going to be, you know, a typical sort of screenwriting book arc.

for any of the characters in this. It's not plot driven, it's purely driven by emotion. The whole thing is meant to feel kind of throwing the audience into the subjective experience of grief. Do you use the five stages of grief as a structure or anything like that? did Max, or is it kind of just all over the place? Yeah, what is it? I wish I'd seen the movie or read the book for sure, because this is super fascinating.

Well, that's a really, really interesting question and a really pressing question because one of the things that felt so honest about the book's approach to grief to me was that it very quickly gets rid of that idea of grief being this thing that you move through in five stages and then you come out the other side and you're whole and you're fixed again. The thing that I responded to is that there are so many elements of grief.

and it can be cyclical. can go from like, in my film I use, not the whole way through, but just towards beginning, I use a lot of the language of horror cinema. It's simply because I wanted to evoke the kind of raw shock and what the fuckness of like new grief. And the arrival of this character felt like it had elements of horror, but it's not a horror film.

There are other parts of grief. You have magical thinking, that idea that maybe the person can come back, maybe I'll wake up and it was all a dream. That's a huge element of grief. There's also survivor's guilt, why her and not me and how that comes out in behavior as anger and him perhaps not being able to parent the boys as well. And then there's also hope and hope is where I wanted people to end up in this film and that hope.

is part of grief. You get it from the love of your family or the reciprocal love of the children or the support of people. But those things aren't stages that you move through. It's like you're in a washing machine with them. 10 years later, you can be as shocked or as angry as you were when you first heard. Like that's what grief is. It'll come out of nowhere. You know when it hits me for some, for whatever reason, and I think my guess is because it's about the time element of it is New Year's Eve.

some reason New Year's Eve really fucks me up emotionally. I think it's probably because of the you're in between the past and the in future, you know? Yeah and it's a point at which everyone kind of like reassesses themselves. You everyone starts the new year with such good intentions but that final part of the year is where you really are kind of like contemplating yourself and where you are. So it doesn't it makes total sense that that's when those things would come to you.

It's happened a handful of times that I can remember immediately about just even my, my mom's dying. You she died of cancer when I was 21 and, like, you know, it was, I definitely feel like there was acceptance of it when it was happening. Like, I don't feel like there was any sort of flight. It was more, it was more of just like accepting that it was happening. That said, you know, you never stop missing them. And it does feel like it does kind of get better or you can find ways to make yourself feel better. Then all of a sudden it's like, boom, out of nowhere.

where it's like, man, I wish she was here to see this. I wish she was here to meet my kid. I wish she was here, you know, like you were saying, it like the washing machine kind of situation. More sad than anything because she wasn't able to meet Luke, my child, but also I look at it as like, like I do with many things these days. It's that's, what it's supposed to be. Like it, like I don't really question why it happened because I feel like it happened because it was supposed to happen.

Not because it was good or bad or anything, but because things happen the way they're supposed to happen. And I'm lucky enough to even have 21 years with her. Some people don't. Some people don't even. Some people don't get to say goodbye. know, some people like there's like an accident that happens and there's snap of a finger. They're gone. Anyway, I'll try to be grateful with like what I did have and being able to say goodbye and being able to watch movies while she was sick. You know, things like this, like hang out. It was terrible. It was sad, but it was also really

important to say goodbye. felt like that helps me a lot with my grieving experience. So anyways, I look at it as like my first 20 years of my life, you know, I got like coming of age and then I became an adult and then it was up to me to figure out the rest, you know, kind of thing. And that's, that's kind of, you know, I'm sorry, you kind of have had to have that experience, but I think one of the aims of this film is, you know, for people who have been through something like that, it's cathartic.

It kind of helps them feel seen. for people who haven't, I hope that it's kind of illuminating and puts them into a position that they perhaps haven't imagined before. And then beyond that, I hope that it's entertaining because Max's book certainly is entertaining. And it was just such an interesting experience to read something that dealt with something so monumental in people's lives, but did it.

in a way that was very, very easy to engage with and very, easy to dive into and go with. I think that's the important thing with both the book and the film. Like Max, when he's writing his book and me, when I'm making the film, I'm asking the audience to go with it and just lean into the strangeness of it. Yeah. Tell me about your grief. If you don't mind. Yeah. I mean, it happened when I was a teenager and a really close friend.

without warning died. And it was at a point where my entire friendship group were about to separate and go off to university. had one kind of like half of the, cause a lot of my friends were a year older than me. So half of them were already off. We all kind of came back together when Andy died and know, grieved together, but it was very short-lived. We then all went off and started, you know, at the point we were starting our adult lives, we had this very real kind of,

lesson that life is kind of fragile and it can just end. And then a year later, another friend died. And I remember at the time thinking, I went to college in Liverpool in England. And I remember when I got there, kind of thinking, well, everyone must know like two or three friends that have died. That's normal. And then when I sort of discovered that it wasn't, that kind of experience felt very targeted and personal.

But it is that thing of you're just like seeing possibility in life and to see it end. can't help but change something about you psychologically. as I say, think for a bit, you know, back in the nineties, maybe it's better now, but, you know, young men weren't really taught or shown how to process that or how to deal with it. No, no, no. I think also here, yeah. Even beyond just...

processing grief just in mental health in general, just like, you know, it's a John Wayne mentality still kind of fucking thing. Yeah, this is an important movie then it's not just obviously it's not entertainment. It's like, you know, you have something that you can really give people that go through, that have gone through this like something to, yeah, that's a big deal. And I think because of that, it's not a conventional movie. You know, I think a few people have seen it and, you know, the synopsis that you read out at the beginning there, you could listen to that and think, this is a...

horror movie, it sounds like an 824 horror movie or something. it is, I don't think this subject fits that neatly into a genre box. There are definitely genre elements in the film that I've made and they're there in service of the story. So they don't continue all the way through it. When I was trying to describe it to people as I was kind of developing it and working it out, at the time I was watching a lot of Studio Ghibli films with my kids and I was like,

I mean, it's not, but in a way I'm kind of making an adult Studio Ghibli film here, because it's about some very heavy subject matter, but it has this kind of fantastical element to it. it has this, you know, and I'm asking the audience not to question that aspect of it, even though it's set very much in the world of realism for half of it when we're in the family life and we're in.

That's kind of the bureaucracy of dealing with grief and, you know, there's all this stuff that feels very, very real. And then these moments with Crow are kind of like these expressionistic glimpses of what's happening inside dad's head. know, Crow manifests for the audience as a way of kind of exploring what's the sort of psychological strain on this man. You know, the things that Crow says are

you know, dad's worst instincts about himself, you know, and crows quite vicious. wanted him to be, but he's kind of part Mary Poppins in that he's there to sort this family out, but he's also part Don Logan from sexy beasts in that he become violent at any moment. he's character. No, okay. The other one. Yeah. I need to rewatch that movie. Well, that, that, ties in with the, kind of, would you say sexy beast is a

officially a little bit of an inspiration for this film then and Mary Poppins. I'd say there's a bit of everything in there. There's a bit of, you know, I just think I'm such a cineast and have been from a young age that there's a bit of ET in there. There's a bit of, you know, with Nail and I, there's a bit of all of these things that I've just soaked in over the years. It always leads back to like, I feel like some sort of inspiration or we make films because we watched films. What about your past? What's some past inspiration for you?

What's some of your movies that kind of changed your life? There's so many. Well, I would start with, I'd start with ET because that was the first film I ever saw in a movie theater. As a five-year-old kid, I was obsessed with it. Like it just blew my mind, like everything about it. And this sounds like such a director thing to say, but my mom always tells a story where I came out of ET and said, that's what, that's what I want to do. And she was like, what, you want to act in a film? And I was like, no, I want to make

make them. man. And you know what? It deals with such grief in that film too, you know? Yeah. I think it's always things like that where you can kind of have a huge genre element, but essentially that's a film about a boy who misses his dad and needs a friend. I showed it to my kid who's five about three months ago and his face lit up like I'd never seen when that bike went over that moon. It was just like so amazing to see that. Then I noticed something at the end.

of the film, which I never noticed before, which is, mama gets with the scientist guy. She seems to, doesn't she? She seems to. I didn't notice it before. I'm like, they're at least like real cozy at the end there in the woods, you know? I'm like, shit, I never noticed that before. Okay. You know, they almost made a sequel to ET with, where bad ETs came looking for good ET. I didn't know that. I mean, I think it got to kind of, treatment stage. thank God I didn't do that.

I think other films like huge influences. Like one of my favorite films of all time is Night of the Hunter. There's some of that in this film because at the heart of that film is two children in peril who are being kind of pursued by Robert Mitchum, the preacher with love and hate on his knuckles. And there's a scene in it, which actually, when I wrote to Max, so Lillian Gish plays this woman who takes in the kids who are on the run.

and she's got all of these kind of orphaned and homeless kids and she feeds them and looks after them. And she does a piece of narration to the camera at the end of Night of the Hunter where she says, I'm going to paraphrase here, but she says, God bless the little children. They abide. I think it's where the Coen brothers might have got the dude abides from, but she says, God bless the children. They endure and they abide. And when I wrote to Max in the first place, I said, my

view of the boys in this film is the same as Lily and Gish at the end of Night of the Hunter. They endure and they're pride because their function in my film is to show dad that you can still have a world of possibilities inside of you when something like this has happened. So weirdly, there's a connection between the first two films I've mentioned and my film that I've just made. Well also, Love and Hate, didn't Spike Lee use that for Do the Right Thing? Yeah, he took that from Night of the Hunter.

So again, it's like tying in with this kind of, we only have to force this. It's it's everywhere, you know, I need to watch that movie, Night of the Hunter. it's so amazing. it's the only movie Charles Laughton ever directed because he was so kind of broken by the, it's now considered an all time classic, but Charles Laughton put everything into it and he was so broken by how it was received that he just went back to acting and never made another film. I mean,

2001 of Space Odyssey, there's so many films like that, right? Where they came out at the time and over time, they just gained appreciation. That's the great thing about making movies is that once it's in the can, it's there and it's there to be discovered. But then my other huge area of interest in cinema is I'm just a huge early seventies fan. So like one of my favorite films.

of all time is The Last Detail, a Hal Ashby film with Jack Nicholson and Randy Quaid. Nicholson made so many movies in that time period, didn't he? He was just busting them out. What other 70s films do you Do like the Don Siegel and all this? I do. I tend to go for films that are kind of political with a small P. So like Blue Collar, the Paul Schrader film with Richard Pryor and Harvey Keitel and Jaffa Koto. That would be...

high up on my list of 70s movies. Just because, in fact, both of those films are saying something like about America at that time, but they're doing it through characters from the working class. And they're doing it in a way where they're not banging you over the head with it. They're just both really good films. I feel like we need more of that. We need more of what the 70s was doing right now. Definitely. It's hard out there though, isn't it, to kind of get anything made?

to get anything made, but also to get something made that's perhaps saying something counter the received wisdom of the time, you know. Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, let me talk about this. Let me ask you about this. What good came from you not having kind of an immediate path and you having to fend for yourself and like figure your own way out? I mean, I'm sure your knife sharper because of it. I'm so grateful for the direction that I took. Like if I'd have, you know, had a

parent in the business or had gone to the right, you know, if there had been a way that got me there quicker, I don't think I would have the tools to do what I have done. You know, I think if I'd have made a film 20 years ago, it would have been rubbish, you know, and I'm really proud of this film that I've made. So, and I think, you know, lived experience as well, you know, to tell a story, you need to have to have been through things and then be able to be sort of

self-aware or self-analytical enough to kind of convert that into what you do creatively. But then also just boring stuff like technical stuff. I can shoot, I can edit, I can record sound. The skills to do so many different things so I understand the roles of everyone on set. So developing this film, well not really even developing, okay so how did it come together? How did it go from like once you got the script figured out and done

Then what? What happened after that? Well, I did a lot of stuff cart before horse, because I'm not a producer. I have some of the skills of a producer, but not the ones that counted at this point. Like I wouldn't know how to go about raising the kind of finance that the film needed. But what I could do is curate the people that I wanted to work with. And that's another great thing. When you get to watch this film, it's so handcrafted because the character of

Crowe, I knew had to be designed by this sculptor called Nicola Hicks, who's like a fine artist, really respected in the art world. And it was a big swing. Like I needed to get in a room with her and tell her about the project. And I spent two years trying to get in that room. And when I did, like half an hour later, she was like, yep, I will design Crowe for you. And then similarly, a comic book artist who I wanted to do dad's work.

Lucy Sullivan, really loved her work and got in touch with her and it turned out she lived two streets away from me. And so she came in there. So in the stage of development where most sensible people are trying to find the money, was just bringing, was assembling the A-Team basically. You're packaging it though, in a way, right? Your vision wasn't just here's an idea. You've also went out and already done that. I would think that would be good, a good thing to see if I was a financier. It meant when I did the next stage, which was to find a producer who

had more experience than me, which was Andrea Cornwell, who'd just done that film, Saint Maud. My cinematographer shot Saint Maud, and he's someone that I've worked with on smaller projects before. And he said, maybe take it to show Andrea. But it meant, because I'd done all of this, you know, I was making the film as far as I was concerned. I was like getting this sculpture made of the crow character. I was like,

developing dad's drawing style with the graphic novelist. was kind of talking to musicians. was, you know, I was doing the storyboards long before there was any money. Yeah. You were a man obsessed. You were, you you were on it. But it meant I had all of that stuff to take to Andrea and she pretty much came straight on board. And then it was just a case of, you know, finding the money. But I think because she'd done St. Maud,

They were, you know, and she's well known in the British film industry. There's already film four in the sidelines to look. And in England, if you get film four or you get BFI, still then have to go and find the money from people who are like, well, do I invest in this kind of very unconventional emotional story about a man and a crow?

or do I invest in this? So you still have to find the people within the finance part of it that really get what you're trying to do. It's these stepping stones, it sounds like. Yeah, you're building out the pedigree of the potential investment, right? The product. So then what happened after you got Film 4? So Film 4 came on board. Then it was just a process of taking the script out to potential investors and finding the right

In an ideal world, just want a fairy godmother to come along and give you all the money in one go, but realistically, it's going to come in little pockets from lots of people. That's why when you watch my film, you'll see about 400 executive producers on the crowd. Not quite that many, but there's a reason for that. I'm just like, we're going to get the money. We're going to get the money. And you're just living.

in such a precarious place, because these things can fall apart at any moment. Someone could have a change of circumstance or decide actually that's maybe not that one. And it could all just go at any minute. I had a film seven, eight years ago that almost got there and fell apart at the last minute because the people that supported it went from...

one funding body to another and couldn't take their projects with them. That one was like five years, four years, four and a half years working on Did you have to grieve after that? What was that grieving process like for you as a filmmaker? It definitely is. mean, I'm sort of glad I had the practice. It's more a case of like you just build this incredibly thick rhino skin, which putting anything.

artful or creative art into the world. have to have that anyway, because it's going to be judged once it comes out. But you also have to have it to get in the position of making it. You just have to almost like be blinkered and so. It's such an oxymoron. It's so ironic because, you know, we have to, we're sensitive souls that need to tell stories about human people, human emotions, right? So, okay, talk about getting Benedict Cumberbatch on board. How did that, how did that look like? Basically, I was in the world where I'm making this little indie film.

And, you know, probably not going to get somebody from the Marvel universe or somebody who's such a brilliant stage actor who's so kind of advanced in his career. But then I, then I heard that he was a huge fan of the book. And then I heard from someone else that he was doing, he'd been offered, I don't know this was true or not, but he'd been offered the part of dad in the Australian play of the book. And I was, I was like, well,

you know, why the hell not? Let's send it to him and send it to his company, Sunnymarch. And my Intel was correct. He was a huge fan of the book. He was dubious about someone turning it into a film. And then he read my script and then it happened really quick. was, it was, it was so weird. Um, cause I, by this point I was years into it and you know, you go through these waves of like, this is going to happen. This is never going to happen. And this is, this is going to happen. This is never going to happen. So you,

You kind of like ride those waves. Benedict's just like answered so fast and was like, yeah, let's do this. And then, you know, that's, that's the point at which everything starts moving fast. Yeah. You had already had the financing. There was more came when Benedict came. But you had enough to say, let's talk like he could take you seriously. Yeah. Cause yeah, you got to an actor. They want to know you have some financing. They don't want to help. Right. Definitely. But you know, I've got friends who've made films and

It's that speed of answering is such a key thing because you could send a script out to someone, they could hold it for six months and then give you a pass and then you're back at it. And then if you go for someone of similar stature, could, another six months could go by waiting for a pass. like, you know, this is films, you already know this, but I sort of learned it like during this process of just like how much time you can leave when your script is out there. Well, this reminds me, I,

I have this really cool movie that I wrote based on the documentary that I did in my hometown about basketball. Anyway, the whole thing takes place in a double wide trailer in the middle of nowhere in North Carolina, my hometown. And it's about this basketball prodigy who's having this party and he's gonna announce where he's gonna go play school. You know, it's a big deal in America, right? You college basketball, especially where I come from. And it's all about just like all these characters that have this like ownership mentality over someone else's future.

long story short, I had sent it to this actor that I thought would be absolutely perfect for the lead. Come to find out he's like an hour from my hometown. That's where he's from. But he was in One Night in Miami, this actor named Aldous Hodge, really great actor. I sent it to, I got his email from my agent and I sent it to him. Didn't hear anything back for for, I don't know, two months. Sent another email, didn't hear anything back. And that was like six months ago. Finally, this past Monday, like three days ago, I don't know what made me think of it. I was like, I'm gonna just.

What email, what loose threads do I have out there? I need to just like try to like tie up a little bit. So I sent one more email, the same email, and 15 minutes later I get an email back. He's like, hey, this is Aldis' manager, what's your phone number? I give my number, he calls me up, we talk on the phone, he's like, tell me about the project, not tell him about the project. And he's like, cool, that was his mother's email that you were sending to, so that's why you didn't hear back, but I'm glad that she forwarded it to me. he's like, yeah, this seems like something he could be interested in, I mean like.

If you got a little finance in which we got a little bit, we're going to read it and get back to you. It's like six months just to get the right damn email It's like, Oh my God. I'm to have too much expectation because then you're just going to get bummed out. What's the point of like getting upset? I think films happen by force of will. They happen because, know, I mean, it's easy for me to say, cause I've just made one, but you know, it was nine years from.

optioning the book to standing on stage at Sundance. you know, so much of that was, you know, as you said earlier on, there's a huge part of it that's just luck. But then there's also a huge part of it that's force of will. And there's a huge part of sort of serendipity, like things falling into place at the right time, or just hitting those hurdles in your stride. You know, and it's so often not people's fault when, when it doesn't go their way. It's such a kind of, but you,

To your point, you can't get bummed out by it. can't take each setback personally because otherwise you're going to stop moving forward. Yeah, exactly. You start developing trauma all of this. And it's just important to just, whenever it does come, whenever the timing is your time, and then when it's your time, it's just important to also not get too high or low, right? It's like, just be chill and take care of your business. You know, it's like anything in life. Expectations just...

usually aren't any good, I guess, sometimes. So what about production though with this film? What was that like? mean, it's pretty contained film, I take it? Yeah. mean, so production was mad because it's sort of, you're thinking about this thing for years, know, drawing storyboards every time I can, imagining it in my head for years and years and years, and then you've got six weeks to shoot it and it's like, go.

And it is quite complicated. Like for a debut film, it had these elements. It had two seven year old kids who'd never acted before twin brothers who were, who were very, very kind of spirited, amazing kids. The performances that we ended up with are so incredible, but you know, it was overwhelming to them. So there's two kids, real animals. There's real crows in it that we had to train up to do things. Then grow himself because I'm an eighties kids.

he had to be a physical creation. So a guy in a rubber suit with an animatronic crow head that could malfunction at any point. Combine all of that first time director with an A-list actor who's been on some pretty pro sets. So it was kind of a baptism of fire to like contain all of these things. And I think the greatest benefit was that I'll never have this much time to think about a film again. hopefully I won't have this much.

I'd solved all the problems and was able to move through it. Again, it's never the film you imagine in your head at the beginning, because suddenly trying to achieve all of that in six weeks, you have to make compromises. But the whole trick of production is keeping your head and knowing which are the compromises you can afford to make and which are the ones that you really kind of die on the hill for. there any compromises that come to mind that you had to die on the hill for or that you had to make?

I mean, were compromises like right up until shooting. I had to change the location of a huge kind of set piece. I guess you would call it. There's a sort of fight sequence that was going to happen in the street and was going to be quite, quite big in scale. And it became very apparent that I needed to become more and more realistic about that. And I think it was only about a month before shooting that we landed on where we did with the compromise.

But there were other things that I wouldn't compromise. Like I knew we had to build a set and my work in documentaries and my work in commercials and things, I never build sets. I always shoot in real places, my aesthetic. But with this, a huge part of the film is about members of a family occupying, living in the same space, but living completely different lives. So I knew that I wanted shots where you could see from one room into the other and you could move through the space.

And I designed all of that before I even knew what the flat would look like. I just would not, even though it meant we had to cut the budget in other areas, I wouldn't compromise on building the set because it was so important to me. The psychological space of the apartment, you know, we shot the film in four, three as well. because of the contained kind of element. Yeah.

People sort of ask why did you do that as if it was a sort of arbitrary or just like- makes sense if you're going for that. Yeah, but the whole idea is how do I get the audience to realize that we're in a space that has changed for these characters in recently. We didn't see it when mom was alive. We just see it after she's died. And the first thing was like, well, let's use the aspect ratio to close them in. Let's make this place as claustrophobic as possible. And then the other thing was Crow is eight foot tall.

Benedict is six, the boys are like three foot like and all three made the more interesting compositions. You put them in a 16 nine and the frame becomes baggy. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You got to fill the frame now more with the sides. Yeah, exactly. So, that was, so that was another thing that I kind of put my foot down on. I didn't, the biggest compromise was I wanted to shoot on film. I want to shoot on 16 mil actually. But you went digital. We went digital and it was.

Part of it was sort of working with kids who hadn't acted before and the fear of kind of burning up film. A part of it was having more control over how we lit the most artificial thing in the frame, which was the crow character. I don't think anybody wanted to take a risk of getting the film back and just seeing that it wasn't quite what we wanted. But that was a compromise, like losing film was something that was sort of hard for me.

Yeah, I you can't see the difference. You can see it if you're looking for it. But yeah, you know, I mean, there's benefits to digital. That makes complete sense why you would switch over with the kids and everything. I was working with Benedict. I'm sure it was a complete joy. was, it was amazing. I had nerves because obviously he's worked with the great and good in the directing world and like being on huge sets and he was kind of like stepping down to do it.

a low budget indie movie with a first time director. So I was like, yeah, and you don't know what people are gonna be like, but we actually, I would go to his house once a week or twice a week for a couple of months before, and I'd make him playlists of the type of music that dad would listen to and we'd sit in his living room and discuss the character. like very quickly it became a friendship rather than this sort of...

scary thing of me having to direct a much more experienced actor. And by the time we got to set, it was literally just the discussions were very organic. I mean, the biggest thing was he threw himself so hard into it that I would be so mesmerized just eyeballing him on set, not even on the monitor. And I forget to call cut, know, so the scenes would go too long. He's amazing. And he had to go to and stay in some pretty

kind of dark places in this film and it's just, it's a process I don't think I could, have you ever acted? Not officially, technically yes, but not in that way, no. I've had cameos, I've been in scenes like I was in my first feature and I've been in scenes with friends and I know what it's like, the difference between being behind and being in front of the camera, but as far as technique and all this and like being able to go to that deep place, no.

It's magic to me. It's, it's, it's dark magic. That's what I was going to say. It's like alchemy. All my, I got a lot of actor friends and one of my best friends in North Carolina, he's in South Carolina now, has a guy named Cullen Moss, who is so good. Anyways, he, he, does that to me where it's like, and I've been on big sets with big, big, actors and all this, but I still think Cullen is the best actor I've ever met. But it's just like, he does that thing where it's like, man, you like, you just, he just, he just understands the assignment and knows how to go to that place. I mean, it's a beautiful thing. This is why we love.

good actors, right? It's like they just do their thing. It's a beautiful thing. Also, Benedict is funny because the last feature that we had, we premiered at Santa Barbara and we walked the carpet right before Benedict did for his film. And I like his taste. I like his choices that he's made aside from, know, and even Dr. Strange is so fun. He kills it. You're happy with production when it wrapped for the most part. You feel like you felt good about it, like you had what you needed. Yeah. I mean, by that point, you're so out of body.

And you're so like in the world of the film for six weeks. was staying at, even though was in London, I was staying at a hotel just to be close to set. So I wasn't really leaving the film. So when we finished, I tell you what, that's a really, my biggest concern when we finished was the two young boys, Richard and Henry, who just, seven year old twins who'd just done such an amazing job. And two days after we'd finished, I found myself in London and I'd been.

I'd been at the center of this tornado with everyone asking me questions all the time and suddenly I'm snapped back out walking around London thinking maybe I'll go to the cinema but just feeling like the absence of this thing that I'd been in and I started to wonder if it's like that for me, what's it like for the boys? So I've sort of had them on play dates with my kids and stuff and but they kind of like, kids are so like resilient that they just came straight out of here and we're like, we've done our film now.

Aren't they though? Yeah. Wow. It was me that needed the help. Well, I mean, that's how I feel as a parent too. It's like, I'm like, he's teaching me more than I'm teaching him. They already know everything they need to know. Now they're just, hopefully we're not teaching them too much to have to unlearn later. That's how I see it. Did you feel like you captured, you know, when you're moving from production to post-production and being in post-production, seeing your footage and putting it all together, did you feel good about kind of capturing the grief of it all? Like capturing that kind of,

that big key kind of ingredient or element what this film's kind of about. I felt really good about that. Obviously, the first thing you see is your assembly edit and I think ours was like three and a half hours long. You have that stage where you're like, I can't see how we can make this any shorter. And then we've got it to 97 minutes and you're like, I can't believe this could ever be any longer than this. It's something that happens like in the edit where you just have to.

So it'd be ruthless? You gotta be. And it's you need somebody to help, but I need somebody to help me out with that these days too, because it's just like, I know there's redundancies here, but I don't know which redundancy to cut because they're all great. How can we lose any of these? Or whatever the case. Or just even something that you really do love, but it doesn't drive It's like a window dressing moment where it's like, shit, this is so good.

Despite the fact you know you're going to end up there, always a hesitancy to start being ruthless because you know you can put that back in once you've taken it out, but there's something that just stops you from taking it out in the first place. once you get into it, I'm actually quite enjoying that moment where the strength of the thing reveals itself to you the more you take away. It's so exciting then. It's like, we know we've got a movie.

It's so true though. It's like this hesitancy, especially as the director, I think, right? You have like a fresh editor. If you had the right editor, you know, come in, they seem to have less, you know, hesitancy. It's like, come in and kill my darlings, please, real quick. I should give a shout out to George Craig and Martina Zamola, who were the editing team on this film, who were just amazing. Amazing. Nice.

What did you learn as far as the grief of it all, as far as grief is concerned? Did you learn anything through this process of making this film? I mean, weirdly I did because as it does in life, it happened again whilst I was writing, another friend died. But it was weirdly cathartic because at the time that was going on, I was writing these scenes with Crow eviscerating that that character for being so kind of,

you know, wallowing in self-pity and things and like just the writing of it. was like, so this is no longer a conversation between Crowe and Dad on the page. This is a conversation between me and Crowe in real life. It was really weird. I think I was really, that Francis Ford Coppola book came out at the same time. There's bits where his wife's talking about how he kind of becomes every project he did. So.

During the apocalypse now, he just went wild and had affairs and was a madman. And then, one from the heart, he became more romantic and more tender towards her. And she could really see that in the marriage. I mean, I feel like I became the character of Dad a little bit in the writing and making of this film. And I think maybe I learned the same thing as him.

best thing is not to fight this stuff is to assimilate it and make it useful for you to not push it away to pull it in, but know that it's there and hold it and use it. That's amazing. Nice. love this podcast. we always talk about movies, but it's like this life thing that we can take with you. Like that's such a great thing to talk about movies. I think. Yeah, totally. One question for you.

What would you tell your younger filmmaking self if you could go back in time? I would say just don't listen to me. Nobody knows anything.