24-year-old Zane Borg’s advice to other young filmmakers? “Your story is worth telling.”
“Move forward blindly, embrace naivety. Features are a marathon, not a sprint. Your script is your selling point, make it great before you do anything else. Listen to the film gods. And don’t take advice from first-time feature filmmakers,” he tells IF.
Borg’s debut feature The Library Boys, shot in Melbourne, premiered at the Austin Film Festival over the weekend, where it has since won the festival’s Comedy Vanguard award. The film’s second screening at the festival was sold out, with a third added.
The Library Boys follows three teenagers in their final year of school, with a cast that includes Jack Kenny, Joe Kenny, Uisce Goriss-Dazeley, Paige Joustra, Mia Barrett, Megan Douglas, Enna Blake, John McCullough, and Shirley Sydenham.
Borg modelled the lead character, played by Jack Kenny, on himself.
“I gave the film my name, my friends, my hometown, my vulnerabilities, everything,” he says.
The casting of The Library Boys was about a six-month process.
“Indie films live and die by their performances, and I couldn’t be happier with the ensemble we ended up with,” Borg says.
The filmmaker reached out to local acting schools to make up the predominantly teenage cast, taking a hands-on approach that focused on chemistry and characters.
“I prefer to just meet the actors for a coffee and talk about the character and the film.”
The Library Boys was made on a shoestring budget without any government funding. Borg played the roles of director, producer, writer, editor, costume designer production designer and more. Catering was done by his dad, and the extras were all his friends. A ‘labour of love’, Borg describes the film as “made by young people for young people”.
The filmmaker didn’t see the small budget as an entirely negative thing, forcing him to concentrate on performance – if you don’t have that, you have nothing.”
“The cons are huge restrictions around how and what you can shoot, but those parameters can be a filmmaker’s best friend sometimes.”
Borg found that his mindset of “you have no money” helped him to stay motivated.
“You can either let that defeat you… or you can say I’m going to find a way to make this work with what little I do have.”
But having a small budget was not the only challenge.
“I didn’t expect the internal struggles that came with making a film.”
Although initially driven by his passion for filmmaking, Borg says that it is the relationships – “the people I meet and get to build something with along that way” – that will drive him into his next project.
The budget also meant Borg had to be selective with the equipment they used. The Library Boys’ cinematographer, Bernard Winter, used a Canon C300 Mkll that he already owned. “We didn’t have the money to be picky.” To raise the production value of the film, they chose just a few big shots to spend money on; “three shots of the film were made using a Panther dolly and an Angenieux zoom lens. “It pays off in the film.”
The Library Boys was edited by Borg and Guss Mallmann using Adobe Premiere Pro and Resolve. Post-production was handled by Postlab.io. “They treated us with just as much respect and care as they put into their big-budget productions. You always remember people like that.”
After dropping out of film school, Borg created the production company Pancake Originals which focuses on empowering local and personal stories. “I lasted about two weeks in film school before dropping out. Classroom environments weren’t for me, and it never made sense to me that the school retained the copyright on your work.”
Borg’s production company Pancake Originals is currently in post-production for a coming-of-age film Sunflower. Borg is finalising the screenplay for Cherry which he hopes will be his next film. Odin’s Eye Entertainment picking up The Library Boys for international sales.