Noah Stratton-Twine talks his improvised creature feature and the desire to make a different kind of British indie… Read more about Two Big Feet below.
An expanded form of this interview will appear in Film Stories issue 56, available in June 2025.
“I grew up in West Sussex, around 30 minutes away from the Five Hundred Acre Wood – this very folkloric forest,” director Noah Stratton-Twine tells me. Most famous as the inspiration for Winnie The Pooh’s (significantly smaller) homestead, its chestnut towers would soon inspire another equally trouser-less character.
“I came up with this movie idea called Ashdown Sasquatch. It was about two elderly monster hunters who would go to Loch Ness, they would go to the woods, and use the idea of getting a Bigfoot on camera, or trying to get the Loch Ness monster on camera, as a means to spend time with each other.”
Two Big Feet is not that movie. Following the cryptid-obsessed ‘Lad’ (Luke Rollason) and his best friend ‘Bud’ (Oliver Woolf) on a Bigfoot-hunting camping trip as the former recovers from a break-up, Stratton-Twine makes the jump from shorts to a 82-minute improvised movie sound like no jump at all.
“Among a lot of my filmmaking friends, there’s sort of a big [question] of what your first feature is going to be,” Stratton-Twine says. “Because you have to throw the doors open, so to speak. I was having conversations with my friends, and they’re like: “I really like this idea, but it feels like a sophomore feature.” I’m like, “Think about that when they let you make another one!””
First feature anxiety is hardly uncommon in the independent film world, especially when resources are scarce. Two Big Feet’s entire outline was written on a train platform, and the finished film looks remarkably similar to the original pitch.
“I was at Ipswich station after two weeks of watching four or five zero-budget independent films a day. I remembered [Ashdown Sasquatch], and I thought, well, you could just make that two young guys, shoot for three or four days in the woods mostly, then a couple of [days] in interiors. That’s kind of a way in, because it’s not making an independent film for the sake of being easy to make – it’s an idea that I really liked.”
Shot largely in a North London forest over three days in September 2023, Two Big Feet makes use of limited locations and a naturalistic tone – partly inspired, Stratton-Twine says, by the New York mumblecore scene – almost by accident.
“Obviously it helps if you’re doing improvisation”, he says. “You can get an actor 24 hours before you start shooting, and you don’t have to be like, “This is the monologue you have to learn.”
It seems the director took this particular message to heart – star Luke Rollason’s first day on set was the second time the pair had met. “The first thing he said to Ollie [Woolf] on the first day was: “Dude, have you done any work for this?” He thought about that, and he’s like, “Not really.” And I think that was really the best thing for [the film].
Two Big Feet is screening at The Ritzy Picturehouse, Brixton, on Saturday 10th May.
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