Ciaran Lyons and Lorn Macdonald on Tummy Monster

One of the first films to sell out at this year’s Glasgow Film Festival was also the cheapest to make: Tummy Monster, the debut feature from talented young Glasgow filmmaker Ciaran Lyons. It’s a one-location, shot-for-buttons caustic comedy-drama centred on a vibrant turn from rising star Lorn Macdonald, best known for his livewire performance in 2019’s Beats. He plays Tales, a down-on-his-luck tattoo artist who gets into a bizarre standoff with an American pop star who visits his Glasgow tattoo parlour in the dead of night to get inked. 

Their battle of wills stems from a disagreement about boundaries. The pop star (played by Orlando Norman) refuses to take a selfie with Tales as he’s leaving the shop. Tales, perhaps justifiably, reacts badly to the snub, and the pop star abandons his busy schedule to spend a long dark night of the soul trying to teach Tales a lesson. 

When we catch up with Lyons and Macdonald a few weeks before Tummy Monster’s world premiere, the director explains his initial idea stemmed from a rumour about Justin Bieber. “Someone told me about Justin Bieber doing exactly this,” explains Lyons, “turning up at his friend's tattoo parlour in the middle of the night, and when the guy tried to get an autograph, Bieber said ‘no!’. And my friend, who was relaying this story said, ‘Can you believe that? What an arsehole!’” That was the end of his friend’s story, but it got Lyons wondering: Why did Canada's king of pop say no? “I was trying to think of how you create a story that takes a character with zero empathy for someone like Justin Bieber on a bit of a journey to the point where they have gone through whatever psychological torment Justin Bieber has gone through that causes him to say no.”

Macdonald recalls reading a very rough draft of Lyons’ script and initially being attracted to the danger of working with an inexperienced director with an extremely limited budget: “One of the first things I said to [Ciaran] was, 'I’m really drawn to the fact that this film feels like it could fall on its face and could be terrible.' There was a real risk of us not being able to pull something like this off. But that was a positive for me, because it felt very unique and odd, and a really exciting way of making something.” 

As if in retaliation, Lyons has his own backhanded compliment for Macdonald. “This isn't meant to be an insult, but what I was looking for in an actor wasn’t perfectionism,” says Lyons. “I was looking for that magic quality when someone’s performance is just really alive.” Because of the way Tummy Monster was going to be shot (fast, over five days), and there only being three on-screen characters (the third player is Michael Akinsulire as the pop star’s no-nonsense minder), Lyons needed actors who could hit the ground running. “​​I wanted the feeling of spontaneity, and I felt like I could see that in Lorn’s performance in Beats.”

Before the shoot, Macdonald spent several weeks trying to get into Tales’ head. “A lot of actors will tell you, ‘Oh, the character starts from this small space inside and you let it breathe’ and all that kind of stuff,” says Macdonald. “For me, this character was very much aesthetics first. He's a vain character, even though he'd say he wasn't, so deciding on a look, deciding on clothes, the tattoos, the piercings – it's not who you are, it's about how you want to be perceived.”

Macdonald didn’t go full method. The neck tattoos he sports in the film are only transfers, but he did notice that he was treated very differently in his Tales getup. “I really loved embodying Tales’s look and seeing how people react,” he says. “On the subway, I'd get people that were choosing not to sit next to me, or just giving me wary looks. Being like, ‘that guy's intense’.”

Making a low-budget feature is no mean feat, and Lyons has ploughed a lot of his own savings into the project. It’s a sad state of affairs that there aren’t better funding models available for ambitious young filmmakers trying to make their first feature, but Lyons seems to see the struggle to make Tummy Monster as a wholly positive experience. “Even if we lived in the land of milk and honey, where everyone could just rock up and be given a blank check, this has still been an incredible process," he says. "There's a freedom in risk-taking that has felt amazing.”

One ambition Lyons has for Tummy Monster is that it’ll give other young directors the confidence to take their own leaps of faith. “There are so many amazing filmmakers on the scene here,” says Lyons. ”I would love to see the feature films they could make. Hopefully when they see this, they think, ‘OK, it is possible. You can make a compelling, proper film with a very small budget.'” It’s risky advice, but Lyons doesn’t see the funding landscape improving in Scotland anytime soon (“it's just not the way the world's going”). He reckons an indie spirit is the way to go: “I would love to see a renewed vigour in low-budget filmmaking here.” The clamber for tickets at Glasgow Film Festival suggests local audiences would agree.

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Tummy Monster has its world premiere at Glasgow Film Festival, screening 2, 3 and 7 Mar
Ciaran Lyons' filmography: The Mad Shagger (2020), The Motorist (2020), Slaves: Sockets (2015)
Lorn Macdonald film and TV (selected): Bridgerton (2020-present), Shetland (2014-present), The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (2022), Beats (2019)