Watch： Benedict Cumberbatch and Max Porter on The Thing with Feathers Film

Hi, this is me, Max Porter, talking to Benedict Cumberbatch, Authoress and Firefighter. Hello. Let's do each other now, that would be brilliant. Shall we do each other? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh God, alright. I'm ready. Wait for the lisp and all sorts. OK, here we go. I am a multi-award winning author. No, sorry, you do it yourself. I'm not feeding you any lines. Hi, I'm Max Porter and I write quite good at it, Marmite, but you know. I think basically, yeah, Crow. I'm Benedict Cumberbatch, star of stage and screen. But underneath it all, just a normal guy. Karate expert, surfer, fluent in 19 languages. This is the 10 year anniversary of my book, Grief is the Thing with Feathers. And I'm talking to Max because I'm in the film adaptation, The Thing with Feathers. Coming out soon. I mean, we first met on set. Yeah. We were already halfway through and I was very nervous. I knew Max was supportive. I knew Dylan and him had a very fraternal, close, supportive, collaborative relationship. But I didn't know him myself. And also because, basically because of the work, because of what I was carrying and trying to deliver and honour with love. And it's just slightly terrifying when you meet the man, the creator, the lived experience of that book. And I think you were a bit nervous. I was a bit nervous. I was a bit weirded out by it. Yeah. I didn't come immediately. I left you a few weeks to get stuck into it. Because I think the idea that I'd be there on day one. Would have been a bit haunting. Oh, is that what you're wearing? It was very odd. I didn't like that. The flat was, by pure accident, uncannily like my dad's flat. And that was the biggest spook really. Yeah, I didn't like it. I felt really uneasy about that. The bunk bed, you know, because these are distant childhood memories. Yeah. And what you realise is how much is still stored back there. Yeah. And then it's sort of triggered or awakened by the physical. And film sets are weird places anyway. They are. They're those liminal existences that come and go. And that flat was destroyed literally, you know, a week after you were on it. But it will live on film. And you walked around it and breathed it. Well, so writers have, it's me and the book. And then this book has gathered other people along the way. But then you're like, what's that guy doing over there? And it's a guy whose job it is to walk around. I'm probably misdescribing this. But he's got like a hundred different masking tapes of various different colours. And he's just expertly taping things everywhere. And I was like, that dude is taping things in my imagined world. It was fun and weird. That's true. Did have a little cry on the train home after that day. In a kind of, what have I done? Is this right? You know. Letting it have another existence. Something about film. This is now being translated into a medium which, as you say, has a permanence and has a bigger number of people on it. But what was immediately apparent, and I'd heard this from all of you, was that the set was carrying this emotional energy. That everyone was very close. And a lot of feelings were being brought up. Unexpected people were saying, I'm struggling a bit with this, or I need a minute here. So there was a kind of intense emotional self-awareness or shared feeling on set which was extraordinary. Yeah. And I think from the book and the experience of making it into a film, I think everyone was incredibly invested in that. That's the power of this. It's a story that's incredibly personal to use. You have many fellow travellers. However peculiarly and unequivocally personal it is to you, this touches everyone. Everyone who was part of it and everyone who will see it. And that is the nature of grief. It is a universal. And it's something that isn't dealt with. And that's a whole other conversation we can get into. But the actual act of making it was incredibly involving for everybody. Which is what we want. It is what we want. We want to make work that makes us feel things. But I think actually in the moment you have to start thinking, and obviously the movie business is really sophisticated in terms of emotional support, isn't it? Psychological support. I'm guessing, yeah. Yeah, on a way to being better with that. But I did think, because I've chatted for years about, that's why there's all this blank space in the book. It's for you. This is your sibling relationship or your mourning or physically the architecture of your childhood that you can think with me about. But then that made it really real. Several hundred people all thinking and feeling their way into this imagined world. Doing something about it. Yeah, that's quite overwhelming for you. I can imagine. The flat was so beautifully dressed. You'll know the name of the designer. Susie Davis. Just incredible. Things I put in the book as tiny little notes to self, like his Coltrane poster, became big, as it were, cameo parts. And then I feel this kind of vertiginous, again, what have I done? Maybe I shouldn't have chosen Coltrane. I stepped away from the book at a certain point, but I reread it again literally yesterday and this morning, twice, but back to back. And I was amazed at the amount of detail that had been literally transferred and also, you know, grieving the things that, you know, films can't do everything, that couldn't be, you know, that we tried or attempted or thought didn't work, I mean, in the way we attempted them. But I was shocked. I was really shocked by how much of the book is in the film. Yeah, the iconography is really well represented in terms of his character. And also Dylan's decision to make him a graphic novelist. That was thrilling to me. Yes. Partly because of the quality of the work he used to illustrate Dad's work. But even that, Dad says about, you know, a change of career at the end. That's being suggested by his, you know, his northern publisher. And it fits, and your doodling in the book, which is a supreme reissue, your drawings in it. It is visually, I mean, I could talk a little bit about what the impact of the book was incredibly cinematic. I mean, the utter guttural, wailing punch of delightful pain and truth and beauty. And within that, it's visually so arresting. And it is, it's a shutter film. In the broken language of Crowe, the poetry of it, you just get these smashing images all the time coming through. A white middle-class male who grew up in something like North London. Clapham fever. You know, it's a very familiar milieu in that childhood era as well. So it just was very alive for me as a piece of, in interior cinema as a reader. But Dylan is the person who's not here. Maybe he's the gap in the sofa. Crowe and Dylan are here in the middle, but not here. But you should speak to, you should speak to the fact that he was the one that you felt, okay, yeah. Because people must have been knocking your door down their front and centre. I mean, he was first, and I kept on being glad Reid said yes. Partly because of his love of the book, partly because he's just a complete weirdo, isn't he? I mean, he's really into the kind of cultural bedrock of the thing, you know, right down to tiny little nuances of, you know, people coming in whose music mean a lot to him, or people coming in whose cultural positioning in the UK is, you know, slightly outside the mainstream or that kind of nerd culture. Or, you know, for him, the kind of viewpoint, the kind of directorial sensibility of working-class British filmmakers that see, you know, see the world from a place of, you know, from a domestic place or from, as I say, from a sort of counter-cultural place of nerdery as well. I love that. And so when he became a graphic novelist, the fact that the whole thing gets to be inky and work in progress and rubbed out, and it gives it this sort of tactile... And Lucy Sullivan's, you know, work is so good because it feels already bird-like, already hesitant, already, like, flooded with grief and uncertainty, and what have I done when I make a mark? Absolutely. If I remove the marker or I spill something, is it still there? And so to combine that with The Uncertainty of Crow in that small space and give you that... Frankly, for me, as someone that has needed something to do relatively on a kind of compulsive level, I need to be busy. The fact that that has to draw and finds himself drawing and then is almost possessed by the drawings, beautiful. Beautiful decision. There was a technique that Lucy taught me very early on of putting the carbon paper over the white and drawing blind. So you don't know it. You don't know what you're etching underneath. So there's a real freedom to that. And like you say, the correction isn't a correction. It's something that has to exist. It's the mistake that makes it sort of perfect in its imperfection. And then also just like you say, the inky mess of it, the fact that that can then spill out and then you can move into animation, you can move into Crow's feathers. And, you know, it was very important for us with the choice of artists and Nicola Hicks, who did the sculpture that Crow's costume was based on by The Creature Workshop. And it had to be tactile. It had to be analogue. It had to be real. It wasn't a digital replication. And it had to be something that could play within that space. It keeps the whole slippage alive, doesn't it? It's a book that's a bit like a play or an essay or a joke. And then it's a play that's a bit like a book. And then this is a film that's a bit like a graphic novel that's a bit like a child's bad dream. It's a bit like a guy in a suit. So all the time there's this slippage between what you think you're watching and what it is, which is to me where you locate, particularly where Dylan locates tenderness. Yeah, I agree. I agree. And it's a very true and nuanced point that for somebody who's got quite a lot of bombast about it, but he does centre things in the domestic, in that verite, but with humour and all of this skewed artistry and insight into just the rich textures that can be involved in filmmaking. And he is a nerd on everything. I mean, he's seen every film. He's read every book. He's been at every concert. I mean, he's extraordinarily... When he said he was going, we got back... I don't know how he lives. I just don't... Because he talks very slowly. I don't know if he does it in the day. And it's all very deliberate, but he still manages to read five novels and see... We got back from America, and most of us would have gone and slept. Dylan said, no, it's Master and Commander at the Prince Charles Cinema. He's always at the Prince Charles. It'll be my sixth time seeing it. And that's the great thing about the Prince Charles, I can just maybe have a little nap halfway through. We're talking about a hardcore, committed film consumer and maker. He really knows because he lives, eats, sleeps, and breathes it. I worried about his family, especially when he brought home yet another huge reissued Godzilla statue. It's like, do you have storage outside of your house? Because I'm not sure that's going to make it to the... But the way Dylan... His attention to detail on technical matters was also being matched by attention to detail on keeping me informed, or checking that Lucy was happy, or making sure that we all got those little Lego models. So there's a kind of play in the collaboration. Absolutely, he draws everyone in. It's just delightful. It is delightful, you're right. It's absolutely that, it's play. When I first read Max's novel in what felt like a breath-held moment, immediate electric shock of grief being held as a subject in such a unique and profoundly beautiful and devastating way, and the device of Qrow and what he is, this amanuensis friend, Mary Poppins, bully, protector. Just the shades of that, and the opposition to despair, the demon figure. Just the nuance of detail of the relationship of the father to his two boys, to the two boys to each other, to their father changing, to the event. It knocked me sideways. It was one of those word-of-mouth moments as well, where everyone was talking about it, and it was extraordinary. It's just a complete work. It just holds itself, and I think will for all time. It's a remarkable achievement, and I can't really speak highly enough about it. And like I said, everything that I'm saying has been said before, but it played very, very vividly in my head, relating to what we then did with it eventually, as a piece of theatre, cinema, puppetry, cartoon, drawing, writing, feeling, light show. I mean, it's all there in this sort of amazingly... In a mere 11,000 words. I mean, it's not very long. It's not very long. But it really was like a hell breath. I couldn't get enough of it. I had to read it all in one go, and I sat down I think a day later and read it again, and then a lot of times, obviously, before we started filming, and then I left it alone. I had to, because I just had to. I had to sort of rest in what we had on the page and what we're trying to do in the day, which is a real discipline for me, because I find it very hard, especially with material that's that absolute. And it's brilliant. And how does he do it? How does he get something so humane, intelligent, razor sharp, funny, insightful, extraordinary, but also humble and silly and boyish and childish and true? How does that all work? How does that all work together? How did you do that? It's funny, because it's now not mine, which is fine and good and interesting. And so all that empty space in it that was, as it were, the white gap I wanted to invite people into is now full of translations. 36 languages of Crow, all squawking and buzzing, and the thousands of people around the world that have spoken to me about it, they're all in it. And friends of mine who, in the 10 years since it came out, have lost people in circumstances horribly similar to this sometimes. They're all in it with me now. You're in it with me now. The play is in it with me now. That relationship between trying to be deeply, deeply serious about something and then also trying to poke fun at it in order to flood light on it is just how I see the world in a weird way. Being permanently heartbroken at the world and at the missing of people and the yearning for what's gone, at being part of my joy, part of being a function of joy and gratitude, it still feels like the gesture I want to make. And because I had no reader, the private gesture of becoming public doesn't change it. I meant it. I mean it. I mean these boys. And ultimately, for me, the heart of it is the sibling relationship and me and my brother and trying to get back into that moment and wonder how I am still that child. And I sort of still stand by it in a weird way. I mean some people hate this book. Some people love this book. It's an item for cultural debate, as all books should be, and that's fantastic, but they can't take that away from me. That initial decision to make the boys one, the sibling relationship as a character, I still think was the solution to it and the epiphany that I'm really glad I didn't just not write down in my notebook. Could they be one? I'm glad I didn't just wake up in the morning and be like... I'm glad I saw that through because I still think it's generating something in me, for me, in my love of literature and also in my love of the way other forms speak to one another. That decision that you can do that as a writer. You have to do the thing that only you can do and that might mean knowing the rules so well that you can bend them or being slightly iconoclastic with a certain tradition that you're in love with. You can wake your dead poet up and ask him difficult questions. You can do it. So I guess the kind of sleep-deprived mania but also rigour of me writing that book in my little flat. I just remember going in and there being this little lamp and me being in my crow space and my wife saying, working on this crow thing. Yeah, I still mean it, I would say. It felt very natural. It felt a very truthful reckoning with my various different loves and my various different heartaches. And the fact that it reverberated into other people is great. It's nice. But if it hadn't, it is what it is. It's still the same thing. Well, that authenticity of experience and everything that's present about what you wanted it to be is what people connect with. I think that you can only do that with something that's true to you as a creative or someone who's had a lived experience. Yeah, and one man's masterpiece is another man's load of old shite and that's completely fine. And I think that the... But it doesn't take away the... Well, that doesn't matter if the gesture is felt in the first place. If your intent is true and deep and real. So, like, my formal decisions in this book might have been relatively naive or unexamined. I've now had 10 years to think about why I make those decisions. I've now got quite a pretty sentence about why I do the A to B thing and the triptych and everything. I can talk about it in terms of other people's work or literary theorists a little bit. I can now explain those decisions in terms of the... But at the time, they were just instinct. And that would be my... When other people would talk to me about, how can I get my book published? Forget about all that. Forget about the huge capitalist complexity that you're going to move into when you want to get this thing published or represented or whatever. For the time being, think only about the quality and intent of that gesture. Listen to the work. Listen to the musicality. See what's being interrupted. Examine what you're borrowing. Examine every cliche, every familiar word choice or formulation. See if you're doing what you need to do with it. If anything, my job now as a writer, now that I have a bit of a readership and I have people that are interested in making work with me, is to recapture that. Well, yeah, now you have a weight of expectation. Yeah, that's good. Of play. Yeah. And what's nice is I kind of can. Yeah. However busy I am, once I open my laptop, pop the headphones on, I'm there again. You're there again. I'm back in the play space. I think that's the secret to any creative act, isn't it? I think if you're weighed by dread or expectation, it has to come from a place where it is essentially for you to begin with and you wrestle with it. It's a solo act. Even in the most collaborative forms of what I do, it's to inhabit a moment. Everything else has to go to the wayside. You can't. It's dead if you play for an audience. It's dead if you worry outside of the need of that moment, that sentence, that passage. That was a revelation for me when I was on set. So the scene, the book launch. I can't remember what you actually said. Oh, the book launch. Sorry, don't you remember my cameo? How weird that you forget the landmark contribution to cinema that I made in a mere eight seconds. Baffling. You were. You were very good. On IMDB it says, you know, I'm in there as cast. Are you? Handsome Man at Bookshop is actually listed in the cast, yeah. Extraordinary work. People are calling it the greatest. Debut cameo. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Changing what we mean by acting. But what was amazing about that scene, and I remember coming out and my agent said the same thing, she was kind of white as a sheet when we came out, was that there's all these people in there, people you've never met, people you've been working with for months and are getting, you know, like, in the kind of extremely tense and tired environment of a film nearing the end of the shoot. There's people with masking tape, there's people with makeup, there's people with microphones. You're obsessed with masking tape. I'm going to get you some. I'm into tape. Then there's the children, who we should talk about, because it's something quite extraordinary, but they're also demanding of a different type of attention from you simultaneously as human being, as pretend dad, as colleague, as producer on the thing. It's a lot. That was a lot. And I was just aware of, like, there's a tiny room, and I was like, there's a lot in this room. And then you just disappear momentarily, do whatever you do, breathe, gather yourself. And it's like, oh, ----, this is why acting in films is weird, because he's done this four times already. He's about to do it for the fifth time. Everybody has to disappear. Like, there's almost this kind of, like, everything's gone. And then dad's here, and you do dad. And we're all like, and then Benedict's back. And now that's really amazing for a writer to watch, because it's like, how could I try that? You do have to. Yeah, but even with a turn of phrase, how can I cut everything else out and land that line in the atmosphere of the book? Well, you've done it. With all the noise and all the directorial. You've done it countless times. You've drowned noise out. You just described how you did it in your garret with the lamp when you first went to the crow space, I think. And also, it's elusive. There are days when Benedict is much louder than the character I play. And it's, yeah, God knows what that does to all of us when you're messing around with who you are and losing yourself in order to find somebody else. That's weird stuff. And I think with this one, more than anything else, I just had to do a lot of self-care between the beginning and end of the day rather than getting into it. And there, it was all there. It was actually about letting it go. There's no ******* around with this. No. That's what I realized when I came to see you, is that this was going to hurt. Yeah. And I'd say the same for any of my collaborators on this over the years. I did an event with my Dutch translator the other night, and she was saying, you know, this wasn't just a sit at the desk, translate this English book, get paid, go home. She lived in it and pulled it apart and made it her own in a way that, because language is self-heard, so your decisions you're making with language are how you are in the world, what you are in relation to other people. That's a far more delicate task than acting it, in a way, because although there is a huge weight of responsibility with that as well, but to literally put it into another language, and yet it is a craft of language. That's a very tight, horrible, I love that, rope to walk. Because also you're making Dutch Crow, but Dutch humour is different from English. Well, yeah. Dutch understanding of bird noise and, you know, everything. You're rewriting a kind of nonsense poem. Kind of makes me want to learn the language in order to just enjoy it. I remember my Catalan translator saying, do you mind if Crow becomes Catalan? I was like, he has to. Go for it. So he becomes the songs he sings and the nursery rhymes he riffs off, and the noises he makes are Catalonian Crow sounds. That's very cool. And I love that. That's very, very cool. I think, you know, when you've been doing it for a bit of time, I mean as in the particular job, the particular role, there are certain hooks, there are certain things that you know put you in the right frame of mind to deliver that moment. And the slightly wiser I've got, I know not to hold onto those too drastically because then it becomes precious and then you're chasing a ghost. You're trying to just replicate something that's just happened. And it's almost always about just leaving yourself open. You have to be very confident in the material. You have to know what you're doing. You have to understand where you are in the story and all the kind of mechanics of narrative in that time for previous circumstances, where it's going next. And also, I think, even on a slightly bigger Zoom app, just understanding the context, sometimes on the audience or the camera move, but not the audience because, again, that's dead. It's more about the overall shape of a piece of storytelling. And you just toy with that a little bit in your mind and it might be looking over someone's shoulders to see the shot and playback or rehearsal of it and then you leave it alone. Then you leave it alone because you can't exist with that as a frame. You're not playing to a mirror. Again, that's dead. Emotionally, whatever loss you've experienced, naturally, reading it, being in it, you start to connect to that emotional charge. And you just listen. You listen very deeply to what that is and you let it take you over. And that can be quite scary. That can be exhausting as well because sometimes it doesn't mean cut. You just have to go to the corner and keep going. And that's something. At least you're in a car, though, not on the old 133 back to Bristol. I love a public cry. I've done it on the professional public cry. Tell me about the boys, though. I'm not good at it. Well, no, it's not really an audience. I've been openly moved. But for a private reason on my own, I've only had one experience of that and it was kind of mortifying. I don't know where to put myself. Tell me about the boys because you're, as you say, you're accessing a thing and then you're pretending to be this person but drawing on real feeling. But then the boys are in the room and you're their colleague on camera. But you have a duty of care towards them as young actors. This is it. And also I'm playing a character who at times is angry and ill-tempered and impatient with them and incapable of love or support and nurture because it's just overwhelming and at other times very sentimental in a confusing way. Well, not sentimental, that's too crass a word. But just overwrought with emotion that they don't fully understand, although children do, but it's how they process somebody who's dysregulated. And that was one of many spinning plates, I guess. But it made the focus of being in that moment really acute because with the children, you never knew. It could be one of them could come on set and go, no, I'm bored, I don't want to do this. And you can't coerce a child into doing acting, especially in that environment. Also to protect them against what it is and explain the scene and talk about it, whether it's grief and loss and pain, whether it's the fact that Eric Lampart, this brilliant physical actor, is wandering around on stilts in a prosthetic, which for them is like, I mean on Eric as well, it's magic. They are just lost in the make-believe of it, having conversations with him and it's a game. But sometimes he's got to be mean to them or make them do things they don't want to do. So managing them as a sort of parental figure, managing them as a colleague was actually my real way in, like treating them as what they were, as your fellow actors, although they were non-actors. And it's like fire. It's just like having fire in your hand. It is so extraordinary. And to work off that, you just go with it rather than against it. And it becomes a necessity. Do you think that's easier for you because you're a parent? Massively so, yeah. I mean, I can't speak from any other point of view, but it made it, yeah, my empathy for their situation. I'm thinking of what if these were my boys. There's a lot of that around this film obviously, but how would I want them taken care of on the set and to give them that love and respect and time and patience? The work. I mean, Dylan tells good anecdotes about, you know, they drew on his face with a Sharpie. They demanded Harry Bow in order to work. They called him Weak Man and drew bum on his face with lipstick. They're only doing what we all want to do. But then, you know, so say two hours of complex intercollegiate manpower goes into person power goes into getting these kids on set. The 20 seconds you get is astonishing. Yeah, it is. It really is. It really is. And I mean, I remember coming out of the audition with them feeling scared on two levels for my own physical safety. It was so unpredictable. And for your stature in the film, it was the best. Well, no. Oh, great. No, not that. No, I wasn't going there. I was more worried about how will we get this lightning in the jar? You know, is it going to just kill the film? Because it will be such a time suck. We just won't get the day done. That was my fear. Not that they would outshine me. I'm happy with... So have I spoken. No, well, I mean, you know. And so they should, though. Extraordinary, untouched, brilliant. But isn't that actually a beautiful act? I mean, I do this. So some of my... I do this teaching in prison. And in order to be, you know... I'll set them a little exercise. Yeah. And because I go in again to see the same guys, they're getting better and better and better. And they know me really well now. So I'll say, right, let's all write from the point of view of you've got to pretend you're a Benedict Cumberbatch and you've got to write how it feels to be sitting on this sofa. And they do it, but I have to do it too. Yeah. Because if I'm going to make them read their work, I'm going to read it. And that's the same with the boys, in a way, isn't it? You can say to them, behave. You've got to now become... Actually... Their innocence in the process, their lack of professional mannerisms or performance, actually is a raw challenge to how you do it. Because they're like, well, go on then. Exactly. No, exactly. There was one moment where Richard didn't want to hug me and then he did it. And during the shot when he was hugging me, which is a massive sort of, you know, that thing that you write about in the book, how these children keep recharging me and I'm giving them nothing, yet they manage to replenish me, which is so true of children's ability to emotionally stabilise adults. I think, you know, he put his arm around me though and he whispered, you owe me big time. It's probably, I think, sound heard that as I'm sort of weeping with guilt about ill-treating them because I'm just, I miss their mum. And I've got cross with them in the moment of thinking I've lost them as well. And he literally whispered, you owe me big time. That's beautiful. I think he meant it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because the moment... That's the thing that this adaptation has that none other will have is the caught moments of genuine parental problem. Yeah. There's a bit where you're cross with them about tidying up and they look up at you and they are simultaneously genuinely scared. I'm worried for them. Worried. And also pitying. They're just like, oh, this guy's... He's not in control. ...in completeness. Yeah, it's all of those things. You're so right. And I think that was a case in point where I went, okay, I now have to be Benedict very ******* quickly. I have to go to them and say, look, I don't like shouting. I try not to in real life. I'm really sorry if that gave you a jump. But you must raise your voice. But it looked great. I said, you know, your reaction was brilliant. I won't do that again. We'll do something different. But I'm sorry if it jumped you because it was the first thing I did. It was a genuine shock to them. And they were like, ooh. And their Rice Krispies flew out of their spoon. It's just something you could never get again. And yeah, I just felt something very desperately parental towards them. I feel desperately parental full stop. Yeah. What is parenting to me? Feeling desperate. Yeah. Desperate with all the words. Desperately joyful. Desperately humble. Desperately out of control. Desperately inept. Desperately learning. Desperately catching up. Desperately loving. It's true. The truth of Crow being real is that it's both a blessing and a curse in the sense that, you know, Eric Lampart is this really gifted, the cock trained physical actor who is so committed in the most uncomfortable way on stilts, holding a crow head, this beautiful thing made by the Creature Workshop, and yet really heavy with animatronic eyes. It's doing that. And he's sort of underneath doing his best David Thewliss voice. And it's such a car crash of stuff to act with. You know, it really was. No disrespect to him or the idea of it, but it was utterly, utterly necessary to see them both in frame as real things. But that was another thing where I had to go, whoop, okay, someone's driving a funfair at my head at a million miles an hour, and I've just got to find dad and stay in that lane and ignore, you know, and everything about it. And knowing that this was something that was manifest in someone's imagination that is played real in a domestic situation, which is very real as we talked about, Susie's design, Dylan's attention to detail, and what we brought alive from the book, it's very other. And then you just have to release into that and go, no, I'm treating this as if it is as real as the toaster or the kettle, apart from one very particular moment where he's practising magic on me and I'm spinning around with wine and whiskey and screaming, Jay Hawkins is playing piece to the Mao Mao. That was one of the most peculiar moments of my life. That's wild. I mean, I like the wildness of Dylan's crow and Eric's performance. The thing is to me, like the interpretive doorways always need to be kept open. I remember someone responding to the book rather cruelly, originally just saying, okay, I get it. The bird's a metaphor for death. No, there's multiple doors. I want them all open. But what this does well is for me that he's frightening. He's deeply, deeply tragic. He's like a pathetic assemblage of ideas, you know? Who's the crow you deserve? Dad's a graphic novelist and someone having a protracted sort of breakdown. And he's a parent and he's busy with toys and cars. It's a bit shaky. He's a bit wobbly and you can sort of see around him at certain points. You're like, is that a man in a suit? And then you're suddenly like, well, no, he has superpowers and can defeat demons. And then he's a hammer horror extra. And then he's a therapist. And so it's all go. But ultimately for me, that lands so beautifully in this adaptation as for the boys. He is a bespoke visitor for this unit of three. And therefore he's a joke. He's something to play with. He's an accomplice in their imaginary world. When after the demon scene, which is this astonishing homage to horror and to manga. And it's like really hard, really hard, spectacular, bombastic, grotesque, brilliant sequence. And then there's just this lovely, humbled, comedic, farcical intimacy. Yeah. With him lying on the floor and the boys are laughing at him. And you're like, that's love. And that is the beginning of the next stage. You're going to be all right. You're never, ever not going to be in abject pain. Yeah. I love it. And Nicholas sculptures, you know, these sort of half man, half animal dripping with hay and wax and things. So there is the sense that he sort of wobbled in from another film. Yes. Or he's still, you know, she's still attaching things as he comes in. Yeah. The makeup artist is slapping on a drop feather. Yeah. It's true. I mean, you speak to it very eloquently. I guess I was just attacking it as a technical reality on the day. But within the film, it does work. It does work for all those reasons. It's a sort of daring joke. My favourite shot in the film is when the two of you are just staring at each other. Everyone else has disappeared. That was my idea. I was very happy with that. I said, don't you think we should just have a moment where he stops and he's looking at Crow. Everyone else has gone. And it's like, it's another moment of like, no, I'm okay. I've got this. Yeah. Just have that frozen moment. But I love that because we're all the author of our own, you know, sorry to sound like a mindfulness app, but you're the author of your own consciousness. So if you want an imaginary friend that's one minute, you know, very real and very palpable and very threatening, fine. But if you want to render him squalid or laughable the next minute, go for it. Yeah. He's your trick. So the fact that you all do that together, you know, the moment it comes into that beautiful montage of Crow as therapist and friend and playing with the boys is really available to all of us at any time. It really is. And that is the power of imagination and storytelling, I guess. It can be that. It can be all of those things. It can be demented torture, but it can also be a crutch of security and support and love. It just, yeah, depends how much you've been working on your mindfulness app. Whether you forgot to pay your dues yet. Pay your subscriptions. Eric, when I met Eric, it was really amazing because obviously I can see him being assembled. I can see bits of Crow hanging around the place like a Leonard Baskin drawing pulled apart and left around. It's beautiful. And then I sort of went over and we said hello and he said, I hope you don't mind, I want to show you my script. Did you see it? I mean, it's a work of genius. He's annotated it, drawn all over it. He's got quotes from the book and from elsewhere. He really lived it. Oh, he did his work. He was very, very invested. Very invested. And physically, probably the toughest gig of all of this, I think. Really extraordinary commitment. It was a magic film. I'm worried now I've denigrated it a bit by saying all the different things, but I knew ultimately what it had to be turned into was going to be a little bit of it there, a lot less of it here, a sound of it or a shape of it or a mood of it or a full frontal sort of it. But on the day, it's like you and me on the sofa. It's all there. All the bits hanging off. And again, in a way, you're right. Maybe that's how I should have thought about what the obstacle was. But this is just, it's a bit of ---- because Dad's in a bit of a ---- place. I didn't think that. I thought, okay, this is going to be different than the film in particular. In the book, there's a bit where Ted says there's a drawing of Crow and he's got a hand puppet Ted and then Ted's got a hand puppet Crow and they're talking to one another. That kind of like, we've got no budget. I mean, you guys have a bit of budget, but that kind of like, can we do this with a sock? Could Crow be really frightening and really profound if it's just a dirty school sock? I think the way you see the gaps, that's what keeps this so alive. But it was a very beautiful creation. That head was extraordinary and Eric's work was really detailed and profound. I think the other part of creation is how the boys then try to fulfill Crow's challenge to rebuild their mum. And honestly, I can't watch that scene. I really can't. And the minute their voiceover comes on as well, that's what always catches me. Like, right, okay, here we go. Yeah, I was doing all right until that moment. Yeah. And on stage, it was remarkable watching Cillian become Crow. That was the beauty of that. It's a different decision, isn't it? Yeah, very, very different. But the boys weren't so present at all, really. And there were lots of things about the stage version which I thought, okay, there's definitely space still for a filmic version of this, which is why it came along. When Cillian puts his head up and becomes Crow and his entire body changes and up he's hopping on the table and there's a kind of roar, like he's been taken over. And we discussed how extraordinary that was on stage. But it's a very theatrical proposition because it's bodily between him and the audience. And it shocks between him and the people in the room. 1,100 people in one room. And I think the film is such a different thing. Yeah. One of my favourite scenes in the book because it's just so England, so unmistakably British is when he's with the in-laws and they're struggling. And it's just a heartbreaking scene. But he's never as a person been more alone. We're slightly alone at the in-laws anyway, aren't we? But even when our partners are with us. But it's like a loneliness, like this sort of existential desert that you can see from space, this poor guy sat in this context. And I'm like, now where are you, Crow? This is when he can do with you. And of course, he's out in the woods playing with the kids. Pissing around having fun with the boys. Beautiful. But that's what I think Dylan's harnessed the actual physical presence of Crow to do, is to shed light on the fact that you are always going to be bathed in this light. Yeah. We tried to film a departure. We tried to film a goodbye. Like, you're right now. I'll pop in from time to time sort of thing. But it was a telephone call. And it just, maybe it was my playing, but it just felt a little bit, oh, you know, it shouldn't be that. No. Love and respect and a little bit of fear that that's gone. Yeah, the occasional smack around the head, you know. But yeah. That brilliant story about Ted Hughes being on the train. Yes. Finishing Crow. Yeah. And then getting a punch around the head from Doberty. There's this beautiful question that one of the Favour members has sent in saying, how's Dad getting on 10 years later? Phil Intruro, thanks for your question. I don't need to tell you that because it's yours to think about. Right. And there's a mention in the book of him sort of always being sort of in his own weather system. Basically, that's it. You can tell it a mile off. I've got friends who are doing it now. And they're doing really well. And they're so impressive. And we're there for them in ways that we sometimes just have to accept we can't be there for them. They've got to do it on their own. But there they are from 50 yards down the street in that weather system of forever, forever pain. Doesn't stop them falling in love again. Doesn't stop them being incredibly varied and changeable people. But it's on them. Yeah. Some would call it a superpower because what it's done is completely re-engineered their relationship to others. But is that just the scar of living? Yeah. But a lot of people get quite a long way through without being thus scarred. Yeah. I don't envy them because the depth of feeling you get, the depth of connectivity to others is absolutely extraordinary. But yeah, I do like the idea that one day, you know, 15 years down the line, Dad's walking through the park. And Crow's just like suddenly back. Like a little eight-second sequel where Crow's just like, don't think I've forgotten about you. Oh, poor man. Wanker! Like a football hooligan. Yeah, exactly. Just bottle him and run. I think as far as a takeaway from the film, it's similar to what you're describing for the book. It's always yours. I mean, we created it off your thing. But it's our film, if you know what I mean. But it's everyone's art. And everyone will relate to it in a different way and translate it into their lives or their language or their experience. And I think you have to let that go. Totally. I think to tell people or have expectations of what you hope people will take from it. I don't know. I mean, you know, you wander into that thing as well of it being prescriptive for grief or a male dialogue with grief and parenting. And there's all sorts of themes in it which you could say, well, this could help or this would elucidate or this would amuse or distract. I don't know. I just I always feel that's prescriptive then. Yeah. It's a very difficult question for me to answer. I want the audience to come to it and have their experience with it. I can say this because I didn't make the film. OK. I'm really like I am. The work is good. The work is interesting and beautiful. So if I was to write, you know, I'll just do this in my books always before they come out. I'm like, what's the Hatchet drop? The Times is going to write this time. Yeah. I can never quite guess how bad it's going to be. But, you know, it's a bit of preparedness for the fact they don't like my ----. Right. They don't like the way I write. They don't buy it. They find they don't they don't they're not moved by it. The experiment doesn't come off for them. Whatever. Yeah. So say I were to do this film. OK. Don't write the horror elements. All right. OK. You don't think you don't. You know, you don't quite think that the crow should have been a guy in a suit. Or you think that it shouldn't be set flat. Or you think it's boring. It's a middle class white guy, you know, whose wife died. What happens to everyone? Whatever. Whatever sensibility you bring to this film. It's absolutely fine. Yeah. I'd be very surprised if if if if those sensibilities even even hardened by absolute hatred of my work or hatred of your work would survive. What is unarguably by any metric a spectacularly well observed and beautifully and strangely created movie with with astonishing performances that just yield this enormous amount of feeling. So I'm so excited to see it because it's it's it's weird and wonderful. Yeah. And this is a Marmite book. Yeah. You know, it doesn't have a conventional plot. It doesn't fix Crow into place. It does examine it does examine a serious subject with, I hope, a great deal of, you know, toilet humor and silliness. And that might not be everyone's cup of tea. But what is everyone's cup of tea is is the attention we're paying. Yeah. Paying. And that's our job, isn't it? Whatever medium we're working in. Yeah, I think so. I think it's spectacular.