Benedict Cumberbatch on the kinds of titles his production company Sunnymarch is looking to back

Benedict Cumberbatch outlined the kind of projects his production company Sunnymarch is looking to work on as well as the challenges facing new actors, in wide-ranging masterclass session at the Zurich Film Festival.

Cumberbatch was in Zurich to receive the festival’s Golden Eye Award, ahead of the screening of The Thing With Feathers, which he stars in and is produced through Sunnymarch.

The Sherlock and Doctor Strange star set up Sunnymarch with producer Adam Ackland in 2013, and its credits to date include recent release The Roses, We Live In Time, The End We Start From, The Mauritanian and The Courier. Production and financing company Anton took a minority stake in Sunnymarch in 2021.

“Our USP is to try to match quality with commerciality that understands the kind of films that we loved growing up watching,” said Cumberbatch, who is a two-time Oscar nominee for The Imitation Game and The Power Of The Dog.” 

The company looks to make movies with budgets between £9-20m, a price range that Cumberbatch said is “increasingly hard [for films] to get made.”

He described the company’s main focus as “character-driven fair that has cinematic flair, that has a purpose, a zeitgeist, not in a lecturing or bombastic or didactic way, but is open.”

He also stressed that Sunnymarch likes to “support first time filmmakers and writers and directors and an artists in general.” He cited the example of making The Thing With Feathers, the fiction feature directorial debut of Dylan Southern, based on Max Porter’s 2015 book Grief Is The Thing With Feather. It stars Cumberbatch as a father of two young boys, grieving after the sudden loss of his wife.

“Dylan is an experienced documentarian, but this is his first feature. We got the two boys. That’s their first work too.”

“Whether it’s filmmakers, whether it’s writers, whether it’s story and subject matter, our door is wide open. We love being surprised,” said Cumberbatch.

The Thing With Feathers debuted at Sundance in January, going on to play as a Special Gala at the Berlinale in February. It is produced by Adam Ackland and Leah Clarke for SunnyMarch, with Andrea Cornwell’s Lobo Films. It was developed with Film4, which co-financed alongside the BFI and Align, in association with Uncommon Creative Studio, mk2 Films and Rank and File, in co-production with Film i Väst and Filmgate Film.

Addressing his role as a producer, Cumberbatch said his involvement varies. “Sometimes I’m very available for chains of emails…I love looking at edits. I love helping with casting suggestions. I love workshopping bits of scripts or talking about how scenes might be shot, or hearing about how the creative team’s forming.”

“The stuff that’s really exciting is when you’re in the room at the beginning, from the inception, and then you’re there at the end delivering it to the audience like today. It’s nerve wracking, but it’s thrilling to have that kind of complete involvement. Sometimes I’m available to do that, and sometimes I’m not. It varies from project to project, but it’s hugely creatively satisfying.”

Cumberbatch, who is president of the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (LAAMDA) also addressed the challenges facing new actors starting out in the business and looking to forge a career. “I am fortunate to be the president of a drama school and look all that hope and future in the eye and to realise that 90% of them might not have a career as actors is pretty shocking. It’s a huge privilege to be able to do that: to tell stories that are important to you.”

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