By Jake Moss
What changes when the same story is told as both a drama and a comedy? Young Queensland filmmaker Jake Moss found out when he made his short film Boys Will Be twice, first played straight, and then for laughs.
I made the same film twice. Well, sort of.
Boys Will Be is one sixty-five-minute film. The first half is a drama. When it ends, after its closing credits have rolled, the film continues…not with a sequel, but with a remake. The second half repeats the same story with the same actors, scenes, and locations, but as a comedy. All new footage. No overlap.
On paper, it’s a bad idea. Films aren’t built this way. They usually establish a tone early and stick to it, so the audience knows how to respond. This film doesn’t do that. It asks the viewer to watch the same material twice under different rules and see what changes. There are scenes in the drama that make audiences visibly uncomfortable. In the comedy, the same scenes – sometimes with almost the same dialogue – get laughs half an hour later. The facts don’t change. The outcome doesn’t change. Only the tone does.
That difference is the entire film. The project isn’t about comedy versus drama – it’s about how easily meaning shifts when the framing does. We often treat seriousness as a sign of honesty, and humour as a way of avoiding things. But when the story stays the same, that distinction starts to fall apart. The comedy doesn’t erase what happens. It just gives the audience a different way to sit with it.
All of that only mattered if the idea held up once we started shooting. The film was made on almost no budget. It was shot over five days, with a crew of five people, using locations we could return to. There was nowhere to hide, which suited the idea perfectly. Every scene had to work twice. Performances couldn’t be reinvented completely; they had to shift without breaking. The characters had to remain recognisable in both versions. The cast and crew understood early on that this wasn’t experimental for the sake of it. If those rules collapsed, the whole thing collapsed.
I’ve never been in a position to make glossy, expensive films, and as long as I’m self-funding, I probably never will be. I don’t have access to studios or large crews, and I’m not interested in wasting time pretending I do. Those constraints aren’t something to overcome. They’re the parameters the work is built for. There’s nothing unusual about working this way; thousands of filmmakers do the same. What mattered wasn’t the lack of resources, but what I chose to do with them.
Those decisions show up in every part of the film. One scene makes that easiest to see. There’s a scene that appears in both halves of the film. Zac visits his friend Joel, who’s been a shut-in since a workplace accident. In the drama version, Joel loses control. He shouts. He slams his fists into his wheelchair. “Now I’m in this fucking thing and I can’t fucking walk.”
Later, the same scene plays again. Same situation. The important facts stay the same. This time it’s a comedy. Joel tells the story casually. He fell at work. Now his legs don’t work. Maybe he was dancing to “Hollaback Girl” at the time of the fall. “Good song,” Zac says. The outcome doesn’t change. The stakes don’t change. What changes are the details the scene is allowed to lean on.
Most films avoid this kind of instability. Once a tone is set, they commit to it and guide the audience toward a single reading. Boys Will Be doesn’t. It lets the viewer feel themselves react differently to the same moment – and notice it happening. What the film exposes is how much of our response isn’t instinctive, but guided.
Most films tell you very early how you’re supposed to feel – through music, pacing, camera movement, and even marketing – and then reward you for responding correctly. Boys Will Be removes that guidance. Nothing in the story changes. Only the way you’re told to feel about it does – a pattern that extends far beyond film.
I didn’t release the film for almost two years. I’d promised the cast and crew I wouldn’t put it out until everyone had been paid properly. So it sat finished while I worked bar shifts and paid people back piece by piece. Once that was done, I sent it to festivals. It ended up circulating through small, mostly arthouse festivals. It kept being selected. It kept winning awards. What mattered wasn’t the scale, but that people were willing to spend time with something that didn’t resolve itself neatly.
The film has been written about in places I never expected – including by an Italian arthouse publication – and has since been taken up as a case study in academic research. The film is small. It’s rough in places. But it does something most films don’t try to do. It puts two readings of the same story next to each other and refuses to say which one is correct.
I made the same film twice because I don’t think stories only work one way. We’re comfortable with genre shifts when they happen decades later, in someone else’s hands. I wanted to see what changed when that shift happened immediately, with the same cast, the same crew, and the same story.
I’m not interested in which version people prefer. I’m interested in how quickly that preference forms. After that, you start watching films differently – and wondering how else they might have worked.
Jake Moss is an artist, author and filmmaker. For much more on Jake, head on over to his official website. Boys Will Be is embedded on Jake’s website and can be viewed for free. Click here to see the film.
