Written by In 2025 Prog spoke to TV creative Mike Bennion about the movie script he co-wrote with Steven Wilson. It informed Porcupine Tree’s 2005 album Deadwing, but has never been turned into a full-length film.
When is a concept album not a concept album? When it cherrypicks ideas from an existing story, but doesn’t provide much else in the way of explanation or structure.
That’s the case with Deadwing, a record inspired by a mooted film script co-written by Steven Wilson and Mike Bennion that never quite turned into a full-fledged story.
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“I met Steve around 1989,” Bennion tells Prog. “My background was in graphic design and I’d just started directing TV commercials. One day I got a knock on the door and it was Tim Bowness from No-Man, who had briefly gone out with my sister. They didn’t have a record deal and they needed a little help.”
Bennion ended up doing some work for No-Man, and got to know both Bowness and Wilson socially. He and Wilson bonded over music and movies, especially arthouse and horror films, and Bennion enlisted his friend to write music for some of the commercials he was directing for the likes of Lego and Kellogg’s.
At some point in the late 1990s he decided to try his hand at writing and directing a feature-length film. “I’d started writing scripts for short films and sending them to Steve to see what he thought. There was one called The Hardest Cut and he said, ‘I like this one – why don’t you flesh it out, turn it into a movie script?’”
The story centred on a film editor named David, who’d escaped a religious cult before its members died in a suicide pact. Then he saw something ghostly in a film he was editing. “It was a really good idea,” says Bennion. “Steve and I spent quite a few years writing and refining it, and the plan was that I would direct it. We even had an idea for the actor to play the lead – Jake Gyllenhaal, who had been in Donnie Darko.”
But getting the movie made proved problematic. “There was just no interest,” says Bennion. “We couldn’t even get an agent to read it.”
The script for The Hardest Cut was languishing in a drawer when Wilson told Bennion that he had an idea to use it as inspiration for Deadwing. “I said, ‘Go for it,’” Bennion recalls. “We talked about how much would be revealed in the album. I think it was me who said, ‘It’s more interesting to just hint at what’s in the script – we don’t want to give the game away. But we can put in clues.’”
In the end, only a few of Deadwing’s songs were based on the pair’s plot, offering a tantalising hint of what it might have been. But the script itself refused to die – in 2020 they released a four-minute teaser based on The Hardest Cut, renamed And No Birds Sing, featuring a brief cameo by Wilson himself as a rough sleeper.
“We hoped that might take it forward, but again, that didn’t really come off,” says Bennion with a laugh. “But it’s a good script, and I never say it’s totally dead.”
