Behind the Scenes of Misery Guts: Rory Alexander Stewart and Cast
Last year, The Skinny teamed up with Innis & Gunn to launch a competition to find the best micro-budget short film (a short film produced for less than £1000) made in Scotland and give its filmmakers a modest budget to help take their creative vision to the next level. After a fantastic response, a shortlist of 11 films was chosen, from which a judging panel – consisting of Paul Welsh (DigiCult), Matt Lloyd (Glasgow Short Film Festival), Dougal Sharp (Innis & Gunn) and Jamie Dunn (The Skinny) – chose Rory Alexander Stewart's Good Girl, a genre-hopping mockumentary about a German Shepard who may also be an extraterrestrial, as their winner.
With his prize money Stewart made Misery Guts, which the director describes as a "cousin" of Good Girl. "We took the same approach in terms of filming on a DLSR and being very loose and, again, we were taking stuff from our life,” says Stewart. “For example, in the film [lead actress] Julie's appendix burst, and that's because Julie's appendix was taken out the week before, so we thought we'd just put that in, and it works as a [story] beat in the film."
Hear more from Stewart and his cast about Misery Guts' production in the video above.
Misery Guts has its world premiere on 12 March at Glasgow Short Film Festival, and will screen alongside Good Girl and several of the Skinny Short Film Competition runners-up. Tickets are free and can be picked up on the day from the CCA box office. Click here for more info.
Read our interview with Rory Alexander Stewart from the March issue.