Film-maker heading to Cornwall for ‘mermaid’ feature

A HENLEY film-maker is headed to Cornwall to shoot her next feature film starring Jonathan Rhys Meyers and Ben Miles.

Jo Southwell, 50, is to film The Catch, over five weeks next spring.

Meyers is set to star in the lead role as Matt Lourdes, with Miles to play Gus Pinker. Comedian Omid Djalili and actress Lizzie Aaryn-Stanton have also joined the cast.

The film is based on a Cornish novel written by Emily Barr and her husband Craig Barr-Green. It follows an obsessive chef who travels to the Cornish coast in search of “the rarest seafood of all”, a mermaid.

She said the authors approached her two years ago with a script for a short film and then adapted it for a feature film at Ms Southwell’s request.

She said: “It’s inspired by mermaid mythology and it is written by two brilliant Cornish writers.

“Over 18 months we’ve been developing the script with my producer. It’s an exploration of who is the monster in an elevated horror.”

Sara Gibbings, known for her work on the Emmy-winning sports documentary Welcome to Wrexham, is set to produce under Mermaid Pictures, a company founded by herself and Ms Southwell in 2024.

Ms Southwell, who worked with Aaryn-Stanton in her 2023 short film Echo, said she felt fortunate to be at a point in her career where she was able to cast actors who connected strongly with her roles.

She said: “It’s wonderful when you get to this point in your career and you can cast actors that you know really resonate with the role that you would like to cast them as.

“I think the combination of each one of them is just going to heighten the level of the story through their own depths as actors.

“Jonathan is a wonderful, intelligent, very knowledgeable actor that really understood all the layers that were in the script.

“Ben is really passionate about horror as well. He’s a big horror fan so he very much understood all the genre tropes that we’re trying to achieve and those narrative lines that run through the script so it’s going to be brilliant. I really can’t wait.”

Ms Southwell said the production will be working with Falmouth University to use some of its locations.

She said: “We’re also working closely with them to give opportunities to some of their students to kind of come on board and experience a working set of this nature.

“This shoot comes with a lot of challenges, it’s a very ambitious feature film, it’s underwater, there’s filming at sea, there’s mermaids, there’s VFX and prosthetics.”