During a festival panel last year I sat in a room full of filmmakers, industry professionals and audience members all of whom I could feel physically, verbally and emotionally reacting to a short clip of the now BAFTA nominated Stomach Bug from writer/director Matty Crawford. After being selected for the Bridge to Industry scheme, Crawford – a filmmaker who we first took notice of on DN back in 2018 with his emotive debut short Addy and highlighted once again as part of our 2022 Best of Fest selection from that year’s National Film and Television School’s Graduate Showcases – wanted to take a step away from his previous quieter drama work and explore the kind of filmmaking that elicits involuntary physical reactions in audiences. Stomach Bug, ripe with primal, immersive visuals whilst deftly exploring a touching story of parental loneliness is one to be watched close-up, loud…and perhaps with your cinema snacks left unopened. As we continue our 2025 BAFTA awards coverage, we invited Crawford to explain how he wove together two seeds of inspiration to birth his unsettling short, choosing an evocative colour palette which helped define the film’s unique identity from the off and why subtitles were jettisoned from a crucially pivotal emotional monologue.

[The following interview is also available to watch at the end of this article.]

Matty welcome to Directors Notes I saw you on an Aesthetica panel last year with BBC Film where you showed a short clip from Stomach Bug that’s been seared into my mind ever since so I’m very much looking forward to digging into the film. Could you tell our readers what it’s about?

Stomach Bug is a psychological drama that morphs into body horror. It’s about a single father dealing with empty nest syndrome, which manifests as these physical symptoms. The film is partly inspired by my mum. She was going through a very similar experience, she used to live with my brother and his wife and their three kids so they lived in a very lively, loud household and my mum loved being a grandma and looking after her grandchildren. However, my brother and his wife found a place of their own and this lively house of six suddenly became a lonely house of one. She didn’t really cope with that so well and would call me a lot and complain about how quiet the house was. In one of these phone calls she very casually just said, “I wonder if my body would allow for it maybe I would have another baby so I wouldn’t have to be alone all the time”. That was the seed for Stomach Bug.

Are you someone who’s always jotting down film ideas on a notepad or phone?

Yeah, my iPhone notes are my go-to. I’m one of those annoying people who always buys a notebook and is sure I’m going to fill it with ideas then I end up getting bored and buying a new one. So I have a room full of unfinished notebooks. I got into trying to digitise all my notes, and that was unsuccessful, so I stick to iPhone notes. But sometimes I’ll intentionally not write something down and if I remember it, then it feels important enough for me to write down or maybe there’s something about that idea that is making me return to it so I tend to write things down after I’ve thought about them a few times, rather than straight away.

As I was researching for this interview I came across two quotes I wanted to talk to you about. You wrote about wanting to “make films that burrow under your skin” and then specifically about Stomach Bug, that you want people to “throw up and cry at the same time”. What is it about you that wants to make these really visceral films and how does that feed into your filmmaking?

Some of my favourite cinematic experiences are being in cinemas where you can really feel that the audience is not only engaged but are having a physical reaction. I remember being in the cinema in Poland where the seats were quite rickety, and you could feel someone shuffling in their seats five seats down. I remember really enjoying feeling someone’s physical reaction to a movie and I love films that can provoke a physical reaction. But not only that, I love films that can move you, make you care about something and get you emotionally involved. So I feel like that’s a double-pronged approach that I’m always trying to achieve in my films, something that can give you a physical reaction, like maybe throwing up and an emotional reaction, like crying. When I was pitching to BBC Film, that was one of the first things I said – I want to make something that will make you throw up and then cry. I don’t know if I achieved that, I feel like that’s up to the audience to decide.

I love films that can provoke a physical reaction. But not only that, I love films that can move you, make you care about something and get you emotionally involved.

Additionally, the type of filmmaking I went into with Stomach Bug was a reaction to my grad film that I made at the National Film and Television School, which was a very personal story. It was biographical and a quiet drama and up until this point a lot of my filmmaking was very restrained. I remember after that really wanting to make something that would grab the audience by the shoulders and physically shake them. So, when I was pitching the film I said I wanted to explore this louder form of filmmaking, especially as we live in an age where we’re scrolling on TikTok and Instagram reels, the attention economy is such that you really have to fight for anything to grab your attention. So I wrote Stomach Bug intentionally with these evocative images and brash filmmaking language because that’s the kind of stuff that really draws me personally to the cinema.

As well as providing a visceral reaction, I also found the film heartbreaking and really enjoyed the fact that you’re telling it from a father’s perspective which is quite unique. You were saying part of the inspiration came from your mother but empty nest syndrome from a male point of view is something I’ve not seen that often.

There was another seed to the idea. I’d just graduated from film school and I was itching to make something so I wrote a monologue for my friend who is an actor. I just wanted to film it myself and make something scrappy. This monologue was about this guy who felt invisible and insignificant, in order for him to feel big or visible, he would bite really hard objects and leave small impressions of himself which would make him feel seen. However, in one of these bitings, his tooth breaks and when that tooth breaks, he swallows it. That then led to a very visual growth on his stomach. However, when he tried to get help for it he wasn’t taken seriously, He wasn’t heard or seen, despite having this very visual stomach. I remember finding this image of this pregnant bloke really evocative so I had that as an idea. Then when my mum shared her story, these ideas collided and became Stomach Bug. That’s where the initial seed of the male stomach bug came from.

Going into the visuals, I loved the colours. There’s green everywhere and the more I watched the film, the more I could see it. It’s in the hospital walls, in the shower and peppered into almost every scene.

For every film I try to pick a colour palette because that gives the film its identity early on and helps inform every decision – costume, locations, set design and lighting. Green just made sense for this sickly stomach bug. I love green; it’s such an evocative colour. I made that decision quite early on and all the locations we picked had elements of green naturally within them. I also like to use colour to enhance a mood or put across a story beat. For example, the whole end sequence, the very heightened body horror was specifically written in the screenplay to happen underneath blue light which was going to be the first time we see this colour come through. That was to distinguish that scene from the rest of the film but also to show a transformation. In terms of lighting, we intentionally avoided having natural daylight in any of the interior scenes, so pretty much no windows are visible, and when there are, it’s at night. We wanted the lighting of his house and the hospital location to have this sterile green and blue aesthetic.

For every film I try to pick a colour palette because that gives the film its identity early on and helps inform every decision – costume, locations, set design and lighting.

Talking about that final scene, we shan’t do the big reveal here but did you film in an actual toilet cubicle? If so, where did you have your camera and how were you able to stage everything in such close quarters?

That was a real location, it is actually a disabled toilet at the Rich Mix cinema. It was very small but we liked the symmetry of it. It was a tight space and we ended up having to sacrifice the PeeWee, which is this very large mobile dolly, because it was such a massive thing and took up so much space. I’d shot listed that entire sequence quite heavily but it was hard to navigate that space. Once we got in there with Andri Haraldsson my DOP, we realized how limited we were in terms of angles. So a lot of times we had to cheat and move our actor into a different part of the toilet and frame it to look like he was closer to the toilet than he actually was.

I know the prosthetics you had to use for that final scene took up a lot of time, how did that affect the shoot?

We had three prosthetic changes so the majority of the time was spent in the makeup chair and there were long hours where we weren’t necessarily filming. My DOP and I shot listed in a way where, when he was off camera, we could film detail shots to make use of the time. There were certain shots where we just needed close-ups of a hand. So I was actually the body double. Watch the film closely and you’ll see certain moments where I’m playing Manny. I think that was helpful because it gave me a lot of empathy and I realised that I was putting this actor through a really physically demanding scene which in turn helped me direct him. I think Leslie Ching, who played Manny, seeing how far I was willing to go also pushed him. I was swallowing uncooked soup with coffee grounds and there was a moment where my real sick is in the film – I won’t say where, but my vomit makes an appearance.

The prosthetics were designed by Satinder Chumber, an amazing prosthetic artist. I’d met him on a Netflix feature where I was shadowing a director. The day I arrived, they were doing the special effects scenes and I got obsessed with the prosthetic dummies they had and kept following him around, asking him questions about my film and disturbing him while he was at work. At one point the director actually asked, “Where is my shadow?” That day, I was a prosthetic shadow. After that, I looked at the call sheet and sent him an email saying “Hey, this was the film I kept talking about, would you be interested?” Around that time it was either the writers’ strike or the actors’ strike so a lot of work wasn’t happening and he had time and was able to come on board. I love him to bits and hopefully I can work with him again.

You’ve got this great horror-fuelled sound design going on but there’s one bit that stood out to me in particular. When he’s in the hospital and he stands up and realises he’s not okay, everything freezes and goes silent apart from the conversation with his daughter. I loved that! What made you decide to cut the sound there?

We were playing with this barrage of sound and then immediately cutting to silence, we wanted to play with this very violent shift in atmosphere to highlight his subjective experience. In that moment, he felt completely alone and everyone in that waiting room was no longer important. The only important thing was this conversation with his daughter. I remember when I was talking to BBC about it during script development, I said I wanted this to feel like they were the only two people who existed in the world right then which was the intention behind that choice. In terms of sound design in general, I told my sound designer Oliver Mapp, who is incredible and already a BAFTA-nominated filmmaker before our film, that I wanted some really brash, in-your-face sound design. I wanted to physically slap the audience with these very violent choices.

Whenever he’d send me a new sound pass, it would reinvigorate me, give me all this energy and get me really excited about the film again. This film was made after film school, so everyone was juggling full-time jobs. My editor, sound designer, producer – we were all working full-time on other stuff and in between those jobs, we worked on this film. That stretched out the post-production period over a long time and there were a lot of times when I felt like the film was starting to drag, but then the editor would send me a new cut, or the sound designer would send me a new sound pass and I’d get reinvigorated by it. It gave me the energy to keep going.

Our sound designer was also the composer, he’s an author and musician. This was a production made with the NFTS as a graduate scheme and the majority of the heads of departments had to be NFTS filmmakers. However, for the composer, I was really attracted to the idea of working with a musician who had never scored a film. I kept approaching musicians who were too busy on tour, and the whole time, my sound designer kept asking to put his hat in the ring. Finally, after three musicians said they couldn’t do it, he ended up writing the score and sent it to me and he immediately got the job – it was the easiest decision. We both quickly realised that sound design and composing are very different skill sets, so some days we’d have to focus on one or the other because it was really hard to jump between the two.

I hadn’t really gone through such a rigorous development process before, but they were able to articulate something that was very subconscious for me and put into words what I was thinking but hadn’t quite realized.

Let’s go back to how this film was made through the Bridge to Industry initiative with BBC Film and the NFTS. What did that opportunity bring to the production? Do you think it opened doors?

Absolutely. The fact that BBC Film was attached gave me the opportunity to reach out to an incredible casting director, Lara Manwaring and the amazing prosthetics designer we spoke about. It helped validate the project and gave people more of a reason to pay attention and read the script. The biggest way it helped was the development process. I worked with two development execs from the BBC, Alice Ojha and Anu Henriques, and my NFTS exec Venetia Hawkes. They’re all incredible script execs and gave me great notes. I hadn’t really gone through such a rigorous development process before, but they were able to articulate something that was very subconscious for me and put into words what I was thinking but hadn’t quite realized. It always felt like they were helping me clarify my initial intentions rather than giving me pre-prescribed notes – it felt like they were throwing gas on a fire and making the idea as big as possible and I really appreciated that.

I love that you didn’t use subtitles during Manny’s conversation with his daughter. I’m finding more and more films these days adopting this technique.

That monologue was really difficult to write, I’d written so many different versions of it. It was this moment where he spills his guts out in his own language, the one he feels most comfortable opening up in. That was something I’ve experienced with my mum when we go to the Philippines. She speaks in Ilocano to the family and she’s so much more expressive than in English. There’s always this slight barrier because I don’t speak Ilocano and I wanted to recreate that in the film, you discover that his daughter doesn’t speak Cantonese so he’s unable to connect.

We were going to have subtitles, but when we put them in, I found myself constantly looking down at the subtitles and then up at the actor’s face but all the emotions were in his face, and I felt like hiding the subtitles puts you in the shoes of the daughter. When she reveals that she doesn’t understand, it makes you understand where she’s coming from and the heartbreak of that moment. Initially, I wanted to cast a Filipino actor, but there are very few Asian actors in the UK of that age. When we went with Leslie, who’s from Hong Kong and speaks Cantonese, I was so moved in the rehearsal room, even though I couldn’t understand what he was saying. All his emotion was in his voice and facial performance which confirmed to me that it didn’t it need to be subtitled.

It wasn’t until filmmaking that I realized your own personal history and experience are a real resource when telling stories.

Do you think your Filipino heritage has influenced your filmmaking?

I’m British Filipino, my mum’s Filipino and my dad’s English. I grew up in the countryside in a very small village where there were very few people of colour, and two of them were related to me. It’s very cliché and a lot of my Asian friends have a similar experience, but when you grow up in an environment like that, you distance yourself from anything that makes you different. You try to fit in with everyone. So I was never Filipino; I was always half Filipino or wouldn’t really address it at all. It wasn’t until filmmaking that I realized your own personal history and experience are a real resource when telling stories and that gave me permission to mine my personal experience and heritage and explore that on screen. One of my first lessons in screenwriting was, “Don’t write a film about skydiving if you’ve never skydived.” I took that literally, so I’d write very personal stories, figuring out where I was from. Then, as I got older and had more resources, I started to make slightly more ambitious films.

You’ve had an impressive festival run and are now BAFTA nominated alongside fellow NFTS graduates and other fabulous filmmakers.

We were really honoured and surprised. None of us expected to be in consideration. When you make a genre film like this, you make it with the intention to reach audiences and festivals, but you never really consider yourself in the running for the main competition awards. When the longlist came out, none of us woke up to look at it because we didn’t expect to be on there. We found out through mutual friends and it was incredible news to wake up to. However, once that news came out, and you knew that list of 10 films was going to be cut down to five, that entire week was filled with anxiety. I felt like I couldn’t celebrate being on the longlist because I was worried about not getting any further. My producer would constantly sit me down and say, “The longlist is an incredible achievement by itself. Please be proud of that.”

I couldn’t even watch the live stream. My girlfriend and I went ice skating so I could put my phone in a locker and not find out for a while. When we found out, it was incredible. I’m really happy that the crew are getting their work recognised, they poured so much of themselves and their time into this. A lot of these crew members I’ve worked with multiple times. My producer, Karima Sammout Kanellopoulou, is incredible, and we’re developing our feature together. My production designer, Sehar Kidwai and Oliver, the sound designer and composer, are all crew members I’ve worked with and met at film school. It’s nice to have their work recognised – it means a lot.

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