Inside The Thing With Feathers： Benedict Cumberbatch & Dylan Southern on Art, Loss, and Performance

I take a great physical pleasure in that and I think for a large part of my life I have been a people pleaser and so playing characters like Sherlock or Strange, you know, they are, it's a vicarious pleasure both I think as an audience, as a viewer, but also as an actor to be given limitless sort of, you know, rope to be rude with. Necessity is the mother of all invention. It's one of these I love doing films in this kind of bracket as well, a proper indie on a small budget, but also the thing with the two children, these remarkable non-actors which he was going home, I in the audition I literally feel scared, I feel my life is in danger. There was sort of a real volatility and actual violence to being in the presence, but I fell in love with them and, you know, it was a wonderful thing to both parent them off camera and treat them as fellow actors. It was really important for me to bring on collaborators who are artists in their own right, so when I first got the rights to the book there was a sculptor called Nicola Hicks whose work I adored and she does these huge like half-man, half-beast sculptures, only person who can design crows her. A crow will bear a grudge. You, if suddenly a crow is following you and at some point you were mean to a crow, that might be the grandson of the crow that you f***ed over. Be kind to crows, be nice, they'll come for you, if not in this lifetime, in the next. Thank you guys for coming, my guest may or may not take off his jacket. His starring in an incredible film, an adaptation of the book, The Thing With Feathers, it's director and writer here. Help me welcome please Dylan Southern and Benedict Cumberbatch. Gosh Ben, it's always good to see you. Good to see you too. And a pleasure to meet you, I love your work and I think you've dealt with so many musicians who are wrestling with a kind of real-time sort of psychosis almost. Yes. So I wonder if that's one of the things that turned you to the book because so many people you had on camera, people who were working out their, what they used to call in the opera show, issues through their art. That's so insightful and something that hadn't occurred to me before. Really? Yeah, really, yeah. It's like moving from music documentaries to a film like this, I was like the complete opposite of what anything I've done before, but now you put it in that context, there is a line that you go from one to the other. Yeah, thank you, I'll use that. Yeah, you know, the James Murphy documentary that I made back in 2011, the thing that fascinated me about that was here was a guy sort of having a midlife crisis in reverse. Most 40-year-olds want to quit their job and start a band and he was in a band, wanted to quit and just live a normal life. And there's real tension in that story, too, because he's trying to analyze his really ambiguous feelings about what it is he's trying to create, which is very similar to what's happening with his character here. Yeah, I mean, they're both characters who are locked in a sort of internal dialogue with themselves. James in particular is very kind of, you know, he's a very self-analytical person. To a fault sometimes, you know, he's forever thinking a few steps ahead. I think the difference with Dad in this film is that he's a prisoner to this cycle of thoughts that's kind of been... It's not self-generated. Yeah, it's a traumatic shock and a complete seismic change in the situation of his life that's sort of pushed him into this, I think we've been calling it a grief hole, haven't we? Yeah, grief hole seems to be the phrase. It's not particularly, I don't know, caring to sort of describe what he calls a grief hole, but it's a pricey, so yeah. But I do think that's really, really interesting. And thank you for pointing that out. But my films are about men of a certain age who are having an internal battle against a force inside of them. So I think that's... Before we move away from James Murphy, I think it's fascinating because it's really interesting where he's at now. He has the most extraordinary, I think, I mean, I know this from other friends of his, not from him personally, but he has an amazing setup. He can kind of gig whenever he wants to. He's not beholden to a record company. He's kind of through a lot of self-doubt and struggle and he's been tearing down what he's built to feel who he is without that influencing every... But that's also part of the struggle too. An artist or an actor is a huge thing, you know, and you have other priorities, whether they're family or just your own headspace. Anything I go through, or decide, or sort of think about or prism through, it's really, really inspiring to see artists doing that and getting to a point where they construct something on their own terms. Unlike anything in life, whether it's politics or any kind of socialisation, we're such eager, people-pleasing things. We come into this world as children, we're full of this thing, which is utterly unique. But we are then turned into this thing, however subtly and however many different layers and forms. This is a tangent, but I'm enjoying it. We do, we get socialised, we get turned into sort of people that are expected to do things, and it really restricts you as an artist sometimes. So his struggle is a very honest one. It may seem self-indulgent or mad, but you have to kind of go there in order to get to something authentic. But without talking about Doctor Strange, what we can get into here with you is that, we talked about this before, you play a number of these characters who are pushing against these kinds of boundaries, because there are parts of them that are exploding in rebellion, maybe sometimes because they can't control themselves. But also this push against this need or this appetite for society to make them conform. Yeah, I take a great physical pleasure in that. And I think for a large part of my life, I have been a people-pleaser. And so playing characters like Sherlock or Strange, it's a vicarious pleasure, both, I think, as an audience, as a viewer, but also as an actor to be given limitless sort of rope to be rude with. But I mean, when I started with Jane Campion, she said, look, you are that thing of pushing me into that place where I could be comfortable with being that much of an entitled arsehole as Phil Burbank is at the beginning of the film, before you realise everything that's fuelling his inner pain and why he's like that. It was hard. And she said, you just you've got to stop asking for things. You've got to stop being nice. You've got to stop saying thank you. You need her. And she gave me full permission to be him beyond just the on-off of a take, because it was so far from my lived experience in many ways. And yeah, it was very, very helpful, actually. Very helpful. Gosh, there's so much to talk about here, just because we've gone far away from feathers. No, no, no, no, no. We can go back to James Murphy and forget about your movie. But I think what's interesting about this, too, and thinking back to the book, he's kind of in service to Ted Hughes. I mean, he's not really fighting with it the way he's fighting with grief in this. I mean, it's about trying to get off under somebody's shadow and by making it basically the id and living through these five stages of grief through the id, it becomes a whole different story. And I think that's almost when I heard you guys were doing this, I thought, well, I'm not sure it's quite filmable because it's so interior. I think he had the same thought. Yeah, I wrestled with that one for a long time. Because of all the things about the book that make it so unique, that it is so interior, but it's also told from three different perspectives. It's told in different tenses. One of the characters is, for all intents and purposes, imaginary. You know, it spans, especially in the third acts of the book, it spans decades. And my biggest challenge was to wrestle that into the shape of a movie. And it was never going to be a conventional movie shape. It was going to be an emotional arc, rather than plot driven. But yeah, it was it was it was a really kind of a first daunting challenge. But then when I started getting into it, and was sort of given the confidence by Max, the author of the Oh, what did he? Okay, he was fully in support from from day one. And he was there to use as much or as little as I wanted to. And he was he's just such a generous, caring, compassionate, creative partner. Like he really cares and really believed in the project. So loyal because there were a lot of people knocking on his door to do something with it. Oh, yeah, it was mad. I was ahead. I was ahead of the curve. I turned up one day in a coffee shop to meet him and was like, I have no idea how to make this into a film. But I feel so passionately about it. And he was like, Okay, good, go on, go away and do it. And then then weeks later, you know, there's all the great and good of the British film industry trying to option the book and I already had it. So I was like, no pressure. Don't you put it that way? No, of course not. Hey, are you familiar with the book to bandage? Yeah, it had the same impact to me as it was just a phenomenal eye opening, brilliant kind of way of looking at grief through the very unusual and unique lens. And I just fell in love with this form with its inventiveness and playfulness with how kind of sensory the language was. It was very filmic as a read. But not just that, it's the smell of it, the taste of the words, all of it. And I yeah, it felt unique. I don't think I've ever encountered something quite in that form before. He was also very supportive of my sister in law Megan Hunter with her book, The End We Start From which we also adapted. Yeah, yeah, Megan. Yeah. And so she that was her first novella outside of being a poetess, and she got great support from him. And so I knew him to be a good guy, I guess, as well as a talented, a real really supremely talented author. And when Dylan sort of came towards me with the script, I was trepidatious by Reddit and was blown away by how nuanced and brilliant his realisation was a pretty difficult proposition. And then the most important thing for me in meeting Dylan was just to establish could someone who's reached into the realms of psychological journeys, James and others in his documentaries, could he hold a fictionalisation of a character and the performance and the methodology, or at least, you know, give me the space or the care or holding you need to do that, that that work for dad. We hit it off as friends so quickly. And part of the reason I have a production company is to enjoy the process before, during and after production, more than I had done on certain jobs in the past. And I knew from that I have, I trusted him. And I knew that also through further discussions when we got off the hour long tangents we used to go on before talking about the script and how to realise it, you know, I knew that he'd really done his work on where actors sit and how how that translates and what they go through and how to help facilitate that. And then during production, again, I'm sort of veering massively off your initial question about the book, but I, I love talking this guy up. And that's part of what I love. It's great about what I do as a producer, you know, to be able to give somebody trust and respect, but also isn't necessarily known in that in that part of the, the art form, lift up a platform, a voice and chance to prove themselves. So to be able to do that and be his, his friend, as well as him be mine and try and support him through the difficulties of now you can't do that without the money now without the time being invented, you know, not the necessity is the mother of all invention. It's one of these, I love doing films in this kind of bracket as well, a proper indie on a small budget. But also the thing with the two children, these remarkable non actors, which he was going home I literally feel scared. I feel I feel my life is there was sort of a real volatility and actual violence to the presence. But I fell in love with them. And you know, it was it was a wonderful thing to both parent them off camera, and treat them as fellow actors, to help his process to capture what he needed to which was so ******* fleeting. It was really, really difficult sometimes to get their attention or their focus. But as you see in the film, that it's so authentic and nuanced and magic when we do. And to be able to do that to the to just have that bond and know that we're all going in and all these obstacles have to be held together. It's joyous. And it's you're doing it in rooms like this. It's a very intimate crew, very intimate relationship, very intimate piece. And yeah, I think I've spoken enough. Yeah, no, we can find a little tangent for you to go off on. But one of the things that I've I'm all caffeine, that's not a good idea. Yeah, can we bring some graham crackers? Yeah, sorry. Some milk or some caramel tea. Yes, please. I think you're talking about the intimacy, I've found this thing old school Ken Loach movies, and things like cares, or where you're really aware what's on the table of how low the ceilings are in the room, how the light gets into those houses, because the way those windows are constructed, and how people had to sort of sit with themselves in dark spaces. And I really felt that in watching this movie, was that for you doing kind of a visual touchdown some of those kinds of kitchen sink movies? It was good. I sort of wanted this to exist on the cusp of social realism, for want of a better word, you know, realism, at least, and to be able to depart from that into these more wild, kind of internal spaces so that so that the interplay, or the other points of inflection between reality and that psychological world were really important to me. So I wanted, I described in the script, maybe too often, those being in mundane reality, and the producers like financiers aren't gonna like that word. But but there is there's something of going from the domestic into the, you know, the unreality of dad's internal world that was key to me. And those are touchstones, like Ken Loach is one of my heroes. I think I watch Kaz probably two or three times a year. These are the first things I had thought of. But I guess I was just wondering, too, because you were talking about the language of the book, Ben, and I remember thinking that, because it's about a poet, how do you make... I was always coming, I was a pain in the ass after an hour with adaptations coming on set with the book, you're like, Oh, can we get this back in? Can we get Crowe to say more of this piece? Can I say some of that? And, you know, dramatically, does it work? Does it move the piece on? Is it something we need to make flesh in terms of speaking? Not always. But I do love that about the book. I think if I'd had my time again, I would have been more adamant. I'm just I'm in I've been sneaking it back in. A bit more Crowe's kind of like language from the book, because the rhythm of it and the insistence of it. Yeah. And just the violence of Crowe's language is really interesting. Very, very physical. It's very, yeah, it's very manifest. And that's that's an exciting thing for an audience to hear, I think, as well. I guess so, because he's almost... Just back to your kind of British realism thing as well. The choice of Crowe's voice, David Thewlis, very much came from the fact that one of my favorite films is Mike Lee's Naked. And when I was adapting the book, it was just, you know, David Thewlis going, What's up, Bart? Like, it was that whole, like, that sequence in Naked and just his rhythm of how amazing he is. You've seen the Mark of the Beast speech? Yeah. I can't. Oh, Marko's sexy. No, I can't do that. I'm terrible. I was going to ask you, please go ahead. You look good, so I'm doing that accent. Let's get you some alcohol there so we can, like, get this. I think it's just under this... It's not that cheap. No, I mean... Well, now my feelings are hurt. But I think that the interesting thing, and then the fascinating divide between the book and the movies, because we talked about before what an intensely physical actor you are, and that this guy doesn't know what to do with his body when he's not at the drawing board. There's one moment where he's making breakfast for the boys, which almost reaches the touch one and doesn't, as if he's afraid what that touch will do. You're like, in retrospect, you realize he's afraid it will, like, make him break down. Yeah, it's about, you know... It's something I guess I'm more familiar with being from that part of the world and that kind of age and that kind of milieu. You know, middle-class middle England, middle-aged North London. With our emotions, we don't do that. We're not very open. I mean, I was watching last night going, ******* lift your face up. But actually, if you look at Max Porter on stage, he's like, you know, we're like this. We're sort of slightly wounded animals when we're talking about emotions. We also, everything's hunched down and it looks away. It's very rare that you go, there, here I am. You can just get all of me. And that was very important. And this particular man is very intolerant and complex. He's not very communicative. He works through a visual medium, which is, I mean, and you can see he saves it all for that. It's pretty visceral, the stuff he's doing in these illustrations of the Crow poems for his next graphic novel. And it means in life, there is a containment. There's a sort of inability to give colour and texture, which is difficult, which is why the switch as an actor, because, you know, I'm, again, critiquing myself, watching myself going, do something different. But it was kind of, no, seriously, I'm honest. But that's my frustration. But you are doing great here. To get to it. Yeah. The sort of pressure valve of then those sort of really wild moments, those moments that are a little bit more abandoned, the kind of voodoo dance with Crow, the drunkenness, the sort of the private moments of him weeping on the couch, and also the pain of watching a man be a bad dad and get angry at his kids and export all of his emotional turmoil externally by blaming them because of his own inefficiency and his fear of it, but also the subtlety of them retreating into apology and acceptance and embarrassment and guilt and love. You know, those were lovely shifts to play with him. They're either really big gear changes into, you know, screening Jay Hawkins moments or a natural shift from anger into guilt and remorse, and just then letting the emotion flood through. I'd say it's physicality. Yeah, I'm sorry, I'm still talking. Sorry, I was going to say it speaks to something I wanted to do with the performance and the fact that that is in this kind of, you know, stasis emotionally. It speaks to something I wanted to do with time in the film. I read a book by an author called, I gave you a copy actually, Denise Riley, the Time Lived Without Its Blow, which talks about the temporal experience of grief and how time can slow down or there are inflection points between the present and memory. So for me, this film takes place in grief time rather than real time or film time, and that's something I think that performance really helps with. That and Year of Magical Thinking were sort of touchstones for us to talk about. That makes all the sense in the world to me, but I think this is something different for you because we've talked about this the last time we've spoken, as a matter of fact, talking about Jane Campion. The last few Campions you've played, be it Phil or Louis Wayne, are characters who are immeasurably physically articulate, who always know what they're doing with their hands, and he doesn't when he's not at the drawing board. He doesn't, again, that moment where he's trying to, do I touch him? If I touch him, will I fall apart? That lack of articulation because there's so much going on, yeah, maybe you hold your head down a little bit too much, but I feel like it's... It was a choice. Yeah, it was a choice. Whether it's the right choice, I don't know, still, because I find it very odd to sit at my own work and watch it, period. I started out on stage. There's a fourth wall that goes out there and that's it. You don't get a reflection of it. To sit there and watch it is always very, very odd, but I remember feeling comfortable with the choices on the day. There we go, I guess. Do you see what I'm saying? That sort of lack of physical articulation, we feel it becomes a claustrophobic character living in a emotionally claustrophobic world. Yeah, yeah, and that chime, like, you know, the film shot in 4.3 for a reason that, you know... I love that. This is a guy who's trapped inside his head, inside a flat, you know, and... Sort of the release of the beach at the end, this wide-open landscape to do the Italian. You just breathe out with the film as it ends. You know, it's a big exhale. But I do think that sort of lack of physicality, apart from these moments of creation or these moments of, like, visceral release, is part of the design of the film. And I think it's what kind of, like, makes those moments feel as extreme as they are. Yeah. I have to say, in watching this, I want that graphic novel. Yeah, me too. Funny you should say that. It has been mooted. You might well be, yeah. And the graphic novelist is... I've got a name check, Lucy Sullivan, who I just loved her work. And there's so many serendipitous things on this film. I loved her work, and then it turned out Max also loved her work and had written a blurb on the back of her book. I mean, you could throw a stunt in London and hit an author where Max has helped him out. But no, he really loved her work. And he said, yeah, she'd be great. And then I found out she lived two streets away from me. So suddenly we were working on it. It was COVID and, like, we're going for walks with her dog and talking about it. Everyone talks about the trauma of playing this role, but the joy of meeting and copping styles of artistry like hers was just heaven. I'm so lucky to do my job, you know. I think that was one of the real privileges. Oh, you had a day with her, didn't you? Yeah, she'd come in on set. We just had these wonderful sort of template copies to copy. It's this thing of, it's like a blind, non-commenting thing. There's the carbon paper and this blunt tool. So you're sort of etching something that you can't see the line of. You see a vague imprint of what you're drawing on top of the carbon paper, but you don't know until the paper's flipped over what you've imprinted on the page with the carbon. It's not like drawing with charcoal or pencil straight onto the piece. It's a remove, so it makes you freer, makes you more in tune with a kind of drive or impulse. And that was a wonderful thing to practice as an artist. It really stops you holding the piece and being too precious. It's interesting because we're talking about physical articulation too. There's a section where the violence of the strokes is more you're holding the charcoal like this, almost like a blade rather than with any delicacy at all. Yeah, and that, yeah, getting there purposely. And it's very much that moment that out of that creation, his physicality suddenly becomes very expressive and then Crow erupts into his space in the real way. I should probably mention Crow as well. This Crow, it was really important to me to bring on collaborators who are artists in their own right. So when I first got the rights to the book, there was a sculptor called Nicola Hicks whose work I adored. And she does these huge half-man, half-beast sculptures. And I was like, she's the only person who can design Crow's hair. But fine artists are quite hard to get hold of. I think I pursued her through her gallery for about two years. Then I just, again, met her. She loved the project. She was like, I know Max. And I bought the catalog from eBay of one of her shows and I pulled it off the shelf when I got home and opened it. And Max had written a whole essay in there. So there were just all of these connections and it always feels when things are joining off, it feels right. And that was always the guiding principle on this film. It's like, yeah, come on board. And everyone who joined was as passionate. And I think the film has a real handmade feel because of it. And it crafted and cared for and loved. Well, because so much of your work has been in rooms and people's houses. I feel like you have kind of an affinity for that. But the way people exist in their places and you brought that, there's that kind of verisimilitude here that feels like, in addition to feeling like Loach, it also feels like somebody who's studied people in places where they feel comfortable working that aren't offices. Yeah, I would say that's true. And I think with this specific space, the thing that fascinated me is there's people existing in the space but living completely different lives. So the boys very much have their own world in this film and dad has his. When I first got the book, I was a new parent. My kids were like four and two. Now they're 12 and 10 or something. And I don't know, I've been working. But I was seeing childhood from a new perspective. And there's a lot of my observations about my own experience of parenthood. There's a lot of Benedict's experience of parenthood that went into the film. My favourite scene is when the boys are jumping off the bed and they won't listen to him. He's like, you know, because that happens to me every single day. No acting required. But also, you watch it and as a dad, you're going, that's bad parenting, that's bad parenting. A lot of the bad parenting, I hope, existed on screen because of many reasons for dad. And then when we cut, it was lovely to try and parent those children, like I said before, and make them feel at ease in that environment and give them space to be at play. But in that moment, I go, Jess, you need to get down to it. Who the f*** thinks as an adult, they can stand in the doorway of two children who are completely engaged in an activity and go, come on guys, time to brush your teeth and think that they're going to be taken seriously. You have to either get involved with the game or at least get into their eye line and sit at their level and go, guys, we need to start slowing this down now. Just give them a bit of warning. Give them a bit of padding. If it's like now, you're never going to get any results. I'm just like, oh, dad, come on. It's ridiculous. But he's a man, he's locked in his work and there but for the grace of God, that's the truism. If you're trying to work with children on an adult's time or schedule and you're pushing them, forget about it. They're not interested and why should they be? So yeah, how do we start on this? No, but actually, as we're talking about this, I want to say, because this is also about, and this is really paramount to the movie because I was wondering how you're going to get this into the film, is the wife not being there? Because you realize that in that moment, she would have been there to say, well, no, we do this and this and this and this. I think she would have just come in and played with them and be more familiar and soft and just coax them into the idea that, oh, you know, this rhythm that you're in now, it's going to change in a little bit. And oh, here we go. I went into, you know, brushing teeth, washing face, bath or not, and bedtime. That thing, it's just how she engaged with them. And he is very reserved. And you don't see them together as a unit until really the end as this physical separation, which it works for dad. I found it very hard in me. Again, the people please it, but also just loving these kids. I wanted to, you know, go to them. But it was an artful thing. I'm sure it's the end of the film. It's essentially a film about a family finding a new shape. There's also frames. There's so much space between them. There's somebody in the center of the frame. Exactly. And that gets filled by crow at some points. And then, but by the end, by the end, you know, they are a united unit. Single silhouette on the beach. So by design, the film starts with this huge space between them. And the first time we see them and the last time we see them, there's no space between them. They'd come together again. And that was always just the, me just thinking like what image begins and what image ends this film. And that was the kind of simplest sort of, you know, boiling it down to the essence of what the film is. There's a great, there's a weird to say this too, because the book is mortally funny in the weirdest places. And that sort of like, sort of kitchen scene comedy though, that appends itself, the cantaloupe comes out, that moment the mother comes up to him with the baby in the stroll and just starts talking to him. And I'm not going to say anymore to give the scene, I don't want to give the scene away because it's so good. But the laugh comes out of nowhere. Can I just say those are my kids, the two, cheap labor. Couldn't afford any others. Good father or two, oh my God. Get him to work. Yeah, we, and I, I don't know if it's, it's true that thing as well of the crow being just that wonderful puncturing of the sort of grief hole over indulgence that you, you know, you're seeing a man privately lose it in whatever shape or form. Craig just goes, Oh no, here we go again. Tired trip. He pulls out all the cliches so that you're not, you're not feeling uncomfortable with the sort of. He lists the cliches. Over indulgence of the man's grief. He does. He literally, and that's. You'll have the photo album out. That's the classic shock. Yeah. You'll be talking to a Greg Stone. I've only ever seen that in films. So it's great advice to kind of push through that. And that's in the book as well. I love that sort of that. Cause I wonder, and this, I want to talk to you guys about this too. I wonder what crow would sound like. Cause you have these, you put together the voice in your head of what crow sounds like, especially because that language is so specific to it. And I find myself not missing the language so much anymore because I liked hearing that vocalization and how just assault of it was. And, and also the way you treat crow in the films that we don't really see by first. It's like with the moments of extreme grief, you're so close, you can't really get a full picture of it anyway. And so you need distance from it, which we get by the end of the film. I think there's so much kind of wonderful calculation in all of this. Yeah. I mean, it was, there was a lot of thought that went into that. I mean, part of it was, you know, how much screen time can a guy, you know, cause I wanted to do this for real. I want it to be a physical presence for Benedict and the boys to be able to act against. It was never going to be a CGI crow. So I wondered about that. Yeah. And I'm a huge, like, I mean, we're both eighties kids. So like monster movies and guys in suits is, is where we're at. And I, and it, it feels like, you know, this is a film about, about such a heavy subjects that, that kind of weirdness and off kilterness and just strangeness of crow. Like some of the scenes in isolation, I remember sitting in the, doing the sound mix and we were, we were looking at a particular scene. I was just, this is so silly. Like out of context of the film, but that's the thing that's brilliant about this book. And also, but it's, this is analog. It's not digital, which is a hard, that's a hard thing to, to live in a digital age. And I imagine certain people were having impatience with it and I'm fine with that. But, you know, we were, we're very honest about what it is. He's an artist. He's not, he's not, well, not so you don't, I don't know. Of course, you're an artist. But they're graphic artists. People would do stuff on the screen. I know. And I trust me. So I hear what you want to talk about here. I'm not afraid to get myself into some sort of ---- by saying I am or I'm not. Well, they haven't heard, but don't mind them. Please, please yourself. I never do. I mean, I'm not Tom Holland, but Jesus flung us some, some of the narrative. It's just, you know, I'm an actor, but no, the point is that is also artistry as of any occasion. But, but this, this is, is this, this hand eye coordination with, with, with something textile, you know, fashioned from a simpler medium. There's not another sort of cipher through it. It means that the guy in the suit is kind of, that's kind of the way it has to go. You know, I, it was led by that rather than budget. We did have those conversations, um, but it has to be visual, does it? We actually hear that. Yes, I got to come back to you. Something to play off. I didn't. I mean, it was very hard to play off him because after a very real moments where he's throwing me around a room, uh, in an imagined meeting, um, yeah, so at some moments of challenging and being spun by him and stuff, but it, it was still a, I still have played the magic trick. It wasn't quite a ping pong ball or a tennis ball on a blue screen, but there was a lot that I had to filter out or try to, um, the boys, the boys were like, when do we get to ask for power again? But, you know, it's a bit like the other guy I've acted with that big old fluffy thing, Eric, it's kind of like, it's there, but it's an, I know that's going to be a vocal performance that I'm going to give. I'm also watching in this one, a vocal performance that the actor who's great is also called Eric and Meta, but, you know, I'm a really well-trained physical actor from the Lecoq tradition in Paris. And, you know, he's assimilating a David Thewlis voice because he heard that he's going to be doing it. So I'm watching someone in a crow suit managing to go through takes as this really heavy animatronic head is kind of, you know, he's only got a few beats. He can do it for doing a David Thewlis impersonation. What am I actually acting with? What's going to end up on screen? So it's still an act of imagination. I have to say, as a jumping from documentaries, and this being my debut dramatic feature, I couldn't have made it any more difficult for myself. We had seven year old twins, real crows, guy in an animatronic suit. You know, it was, it was just, the crows were the easiest of all. Crows were the easiest actors I've ever worked. They were amazing. Just put one take every time for the guys. Seriously, they were amazing. They're very smart birds. We had crow facts every day in the call sheet. And they were mainly made up, by the way. You know, there was a bit kind of like, is it real? Is it real? One is, one is true, though, that's really held with me. I guess partly because of what this is, and a lot of what's going on in the world, which is kind of transgenerational memory. So a crow will bear a grudge. You, if suddenly, a crow is following you, and at some point you were mean to a crow, that might be the grandson of the crow that you f***ed over. So, be kind to crows, be nice. They'll come for you, if not in this lifetime, in the next. That explains so much of our political sphere now. But I think what I was, what I said, this was when he's drawing, we need to hear the sound of that, those, those tools on the paper. And I think you need to feel those too, don't you? And then he goes- That soundtrack over the credits at the beginning of the film for that as well, the image in that. I think that, because he could have been some guy who drew on a screen with an electronic pen, and you could have done that. Because it seems like you guys make a lot of choices to make this thing feel as close to the ground as possible. Yeah, homespun, you know, just something that was tangible. Also, you're right, those sounds are like so evocative, like, you know, he spends half the time with ink all over his face, and his clothes, and you know, there's just something very tactile, and very, you know, real to all of those textured elements of the film, I just think adds to the whole aesthetic. But you like the tactile anyway, at some point you want us to know how these characters sweat in their clothes for the most part. That's really a big part of the way you approach people. Yeah, I mean, you know, there's stuff that needs a gloss or something artificial, obviously sometimes, but most of the time, yeah, it's just getting down and dirty and being honest, trying to be anyway. What was your first day of shooting like, making a film where it wasn't real people at all? It was, we had a slight disaster in that you were supposed to be looking at the body of your dead wife on the floor. I know, yeah, that was the beginning of a badger. And, Clay, tell the story. I don't know, can't wait. I can tell this, can I tell the story? So, okay, I'm going to do this show, I know it's the first time, um, no, it's the first time that, you know, we're doing this repeated motif of dad space when he's looking at the ground where he discovers the dead body of his wife coming back from shopping and she's just there, collapsed on the floor and he goes into what's going on, panic, calling the ambulance and it's, you know, and I get there and, okay, and we're going to do that and I'd just been grieving her. I think the first thing we shot was me after the funeral on the, on the sofa, wasn't it? I mean, that's a whole other story because the boys wouldn't stop laughing. No, that's when I told them, yeah, they came in, I went, boys, I've got something to tell you and Richard would just go, ******* everyone's a critic. so, um, and then there's another moment as well, where he wasn't very tactile sometimes, he felt very awkward being held, but actually he kind of loved it. Um, and there was one that I needed to sort of put my arms around him and as he did it, sort of unwittingly, he whispered in my ear during a take that's on, that he picked up on the side, he went, you owe me big time. He did it again as a joke, he sort of learned that that got a good reaction, did it again in another moment where I'm crying, I'm sorry, I was so mean to you, I just miss your mom, I miss your mommy. He went, you owe me big time. At the risk of jumping onto another tangent, sorry, because we got away from the story about the arm on the sofa, yeah, but I was just going to say, the boys, um, on the very first day, they came up with a nickname for me, um, which, as a first time director on a dramatic feature, trying to get the respect of my career and get them to, you know, see me as a leader, and the boy's nickname for me was weak man. So I would walk into a room and they go, here's weak man. Oh, God, they cut you off at the knees, they really do. Didn't you have poop in your head at some point as well? Well, I had to come up with increasingly inventive ways to get them to do what I wanted to do, and there's a scene where they put on makeup and the mess around, they really didn't want to do it. And then we came to, a negotiation where they said, if we can do whatever we want to your face, we'll do it. So they wrote poop on my face, and I, that was me for the day. Man with poop on his face. I mean, you know, the things you wrote, whatever it takes. Well, your sympathy thing is much better than mine. So I go back to the kitchen, where I'm supposedly discovering my wife. Big moment, there's going to be the sort of, you know, a linchpin that we returned to again and again in the film, that that's the spot where I spotted her, where I saw her first. And he, it's this horrible, triggering bit of geography that, you know, he flashes through different times in the film and it gets hit by, um, I'll give it. So I'm just coming here. We're going to do the shot where you see your wife on the floor. And, um, do you want to just take your eyeliner? But yeah, sure. Sure. Where, uh, where? Oh, just the mark on the floor. I was like, what? Yeah, just the mark. There's a cross on the floor. That's, that's where you, your wife will be. That's okay. Right. Okay. I'm ready for a take. Um, yeah, sure. An action. Sorry. So it's just going to be a cross on the floor. This is the, this is me investing something in an actress. I had never met before. B who's not there. He's now turned into a bit of gaffer tape on it. Venonium kitchen floor. I'm going, it gets worse. Okay. This is, this is where I'm at. Um, I don't know if it did get worse. We then put, we then put one of the ADs on the floor. Uh, still, still wearing that walkie talkie. Still wearing the walkie talkie. During the take, as I was saying, can you, can you hear me? Are you breathing? Are you okay? Are you getting, you know, and you shut off door five, door five, shut up. And then, uh, and then yes, I think she then starts to play. She didn't know that she was dead. So she started to go, yeah. No, I'll go back to the masking tape on the floor. So that, uh, bringing you back to your original question that, that was kind of my first day on set. So he was, did not have what he needed to, to get reacted to a weak man. Well, I can't think of any question to top that answer. So let's just thank these guys for being here. Thank you guys so much, sir. Thank you so much.