Family dinners should be a time for connection and love, but more often than not they’re a breeding ground for drama. That’s certainly the case in Matthew Campanella’s Sunday Sauce. The setup is classic enough: a well-meaning Italian grandmother (Vincenza Campanella) tries to set her granddaughter (Nicole Ehinger) up with a good Italian boy (Matthew Campanella). We’ve all been there, but maybe we haven’t experienced that good Italian boy also matching with the granddaughter’s dad (Matthew Risch) on Grindr before showing up to Sunday dinner.

Writer, director, and star Matthew Campanella sat down with Beyond the Cinerama Dome after the Sunday Sauce screening at the Oscar-qualifying HollyShorts festival to talk about the film’s inspiration, the family affair of filmmaking, and the merits, or lack thereof, of jarred pasta sauce.

The conversation begins in the same unexpected place Sunday Sauce begins: the bathroom. This particular bathroom will feel like home to anyone with relatives from the Mediterranean. It’s both beautiful and tacky, the sort of blend that only seems to exist in the homes of the relatives you see once a year and are called aunt and uncle, but aren’t actually related to you. The tone is immediately set for the viewer by this one establishing shot.

“I really wanted to capture this very campy, grandiose, sort of…not gauche, but — Italian-Americans have this way of decorating their homes like it’s the Renaissance, but they don’t have the money to do the actual royal renaissance,” smiles Campanella. “The house where we shot is one of my relatives’ homes, my Aunt Maria, who also stars as the woman in the coma. That’s actually her childhood home. I walked into that bathroom and saw the swan murals and I was like, we have to shoot here.”

“My co-producer, my brother Anthony, and I, were always very set on really investing energy and time into the art for this piece. We wanted the world to feel very specific from the start. I really wanted it to feel like my childhood in these Italian-American homes. We had an incredible five-person art team led by our production designer, Catherine Gubernick, who’s actually an Emmy nominee, and Joyce Lao, our set decorator. It was such a cool experience to see how transforming this space can really make a big difference.”

Sunday Sauce is an Italian-American story, but it’s also something anyone can relate to: this idea that it’s difficult when you don’t live up to your family’s expectations. Gino is married to a woman, the aforementioned woman in the coma, but he’s hiding from his family the fact that he’s gay. Sunday Dinner is a helping of Catholic guilt served with a side of Lobster Fra Diavolo. In its specificity, Campanella has created a film that captures the unease of family that is universal.

“The family is so important because it plays into the idea that’s very relatable,” says Campanella. “Expectations versus finding your own authentic self and taking that leap of faith to go against the grain. It was really important to not show the family in a very prescriptive or topical way, but work on different set pieces, different people who I had seen in my real life.”

“I grew up in a family where, on my dad’s side, he’s first generation. His parents immigrated directly from Italy, so they were a bit more, I guess we can call it European Italian,” recounts Campanella. “They spoke the language in the house and had a certain way about them, a certain energy. On my mother’s side, she’s fourth or fifth generation. It’s that quintessential sort of New York Italian. Thick accent, the leopard print. I really wanted to capture that dichotomy in the film, because I felt like that was not only true to my childhood, but I thought it could make an interesting building of tension and pace that leads to the climax moment.”

If you haven’t seen the film, you might be creating a vision in your head of what the beats of Sunday Sauce are. You’ll likely be right about a few things. There’s familial shouting, miscommunication, and a dinner being served. What you likely didn’t guess is the body horror aspect of the film. Gino’s guilt and anxiety manifest in a physical manner throughout the dinner, before pushing the narrative to that climactic resolution. The idea to have this body horror element existed in Campanella’s script from the beginning.

“I was really interested in the symbolism behind it,” explains Campanella. “The Substance hadn’t been released yet in the states and I was very inspired by films like Black Swan and Shiva Baby, which aren’t body horror, but have that feel of family tension. You feel like you’re in the character’s mind and it’s anxiety-inducing. We don’t really see a lot of older males who are going through this experience. That was always a part of it.”

“The specific method of body horror in the final film is not what it was when I first wrote it,” clarifies Campanella. “It was spaghetti. This endless spaghetti coming out of Gino’s mouth, which would have been cool too, but a little bit more Black Swan.”

Most people write and make a short film as a proof-of-concept to raise the capital to make a feature film. Campanella decided to do things a little differently. The feature-length script of this idea was written before the short film. Campanella hopes to be able to make the feature, but wanted to prove that all the elements work together in a short film first.

“If you’re familiar with Italian-American culture, the script is structured around The Feast of the Seven Fishes. It’s all leading up to that Lobster Fra Diavolo,” Campanella states. “It was crazy to cut it down. It’s such a unique big-swing concept. I really wanted to nail down what this world feels like.”

“We had a lot of discussions about what direction we wanted to take the short. Maybe focus on just the body horror aspect and maybe there’s a little bit of tension and comedy, but not those surreal moments that you see. Or do we want to literally throw everything in the kitchen sink and shove cake down your throat?” asks Campanella with a smile. “Ultimately, we decided on the latter because we needed to figure out those genre-bending moments.”

Much like the family affair that’s happening on screen, there’s another happening behind the scenes. Campanella and his brother served as the producers, they shot at the home of Campanella’s aunt, and, perhaps most charmingly, Campanella’s real-life grandmother plays his character’s Nonna.

“She’s never acted before! So that was a delightful experience in itself,” reminisces Campanella. “My mother was making the meals on set every day, which just made so much sense because this film was all about this big, Sunday Italian family dinner. It was such a beautiful collaboration with everybody.”

There’s a frantic energy to Sunday Sauce. To some, it may cause anxiety, to others, it might just feel like they’re spending time with their own frantic family. John Rafanelli’s editing is a character all its own. Frenetic and creating chaos in one moment while also slowing down, allowing these characters brief moments of calm at others. The number of perfectly handled tonal shifts that occur within fourteen minutes is staggeringly impressive. Never too rushed, and arriving exactly at the right time.

“Editing is always such an interesting process for me as a director because I can do basic editing, but I don’t have that background,” Campanella acknowledges. “The most beautiful moments that happen in film for me are when we’re actually in the edit room and we can’t get past a moment. It feels like it needs momentum or the transitions are off. Then, when we discover something in the room and it just works, it’s so rewarding. A lot of times, that comes from the collaboration between me and my editor.”

“A lot of people say that my stuff is very efficient, there’s no wasted sort of breath. I think with the feature, I’ll work on that,” laughs Campanella. “With Sunday Sauce, it’s like, okay, where do we want to do really fast cuts, where do we want to hold? Ultimately, it’s a black comedy. A lot of times the editing is a little bit faster. We want to cut the breaths out. Not always, but you want to cut the breaths out so that it’s mostly fast cuts so when you make it to the quiet basement scene, in that solitary moment, it lives with the audience.”

For a film about food, there’s one aspect of Sunday dinner that ranks above all the others: the sauce. Gino is tasked with cooking the sauce based on his comatose wife’s beloved recipe, but he’s been a little distracted. Sunday tomato sauce is a labor of love, much like filmmaking is. You may not be able to taste the individual ingredients, so it’s about the larger product they come together to create. There are shortcuts, whether they be AI in film or jarred pasta sauce, but it never tastes as good as the real thing.

“In college, times were tough. We were pulling out Ragu,” jokes Campanella. “We didn’t have access to mom’s. Sauce has always been such an integral part of our family. Every Sunday in college, I do remember my mom giving me a whole container of frozen meatballs and just me bringing them to college. That’s the way of our family.”

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