Loafers
Amid a post-grad haze, best friends Isaac and Cameron navigate the shifting terrain of their relationships, grappling with the deeper question of whether their once unbreakable friendship can survive the weight of change.
A film made for $6,000 by a group of friends…
Some Stills!
Director’s Statement
LOAFERS is a film about friends, made by friends.
I met most of the cast and crew while studying at DePaul University. We worked together on short films, theatre productions, and supported each other. Ryan Kitley, who plays the father of my character, Isaac, was one of my acting professors. Dan, who plays my roommate and best friend, is, in fact, my roommate and best friend.
In 2022, my cousin Nate, who produced and edited LOAFERS, asked me to be in his micro-budget feature film. After shooting it, I decided I wanted to make a feature of my own: one that represented my life, my friends, and my world. As I conceived of LOAFERS, I was hugely inspired by the slice-of-life mumblecore movies that came before me like Shithouse and Drinking Buddies.
I was grappling with questions of who I was, who I wanted to be, how my life would change, and if my friends would stay my friends. I finished the first draft in my final week of undergrad, and you can tell. That life-changing turbulence is all over it.
I made this film as a way of understanding the post-grad haze I’m engulfed in -- I’m confused, frustrated, and excited all at once. Movies have often been a lens through which I understand my life, but there were no movies that honestly depicted what its like to be 23. There are plenty, though, that are some 30-year-old guy’s version of being 23…
We wanted to tell our own story, to look at what it feels like to be young right now and represent it as only someone our age could. We scraped together money from our menial jobs, used whatever equipment we could get our hands on, and cashed in all of our favors, but this is what makes LOAFERS special. It’s DIY filmmaking at its best: rough around the edges but full of life. It’s a film we care deeply about, and we hope you do too.
— Zach Schnitzer,
writer, director, actor, editor
Production History
The production of LOAFERS was driven by a simple thesis: we’ll never be able to compete technically, so let’s put everything we can into emotion and story. We shot LOAFERS for $6,000 with a crew of four people (five if we were lucky) over 11 days in Chicago, and we all did a little bit of everything. Our DPs were PAs, our director acted and operated the camera, our producer recorded sound and grabbed lunch, and our actors helped out when they weren’t in frame. We had very limited resources–our only lights were candles–but we didn’t care. We wanted to make our movie, and we were going to do it no matter what.
We knew the only thing we truly had access to was ourselves, and we’re lucky enough to be surrounded by so many talented people who gave themselves fully to the shooting of this film. Our actors are beyond talented, and it meant a lot to us that mainstays of the Chicago theater scene like Ryan Kitley and Charin Alvarez put their trust in us and leant us their skills, even if it was only for a scene. Joe Swanberg, whose work is so influential to us, even cameoed!
In post, too, we were surrounded by so many talented and generous people who took massive pay cuts to work on our project because they believed in us and what we had to say (special thanks to C. Ryan Stemple and Quicksilver Color for making the movie look so beautiful!)
As we take LOAFERS out to market, we hope it will touch people in the same way it has touched us. We hope it feels as immediate and honest as it did when we shot it, and we hope it inspires people to make their own movie and tell their own story. Lucky for us, people seem to be responding already. Zach’s TikToks about LOAFERS have garnered more than 630,000 views and over 2000 comments! People are excited to watch our movie, and we hope you are too. Thanks for reading!
— Nate Simon,
producer, editor
The worldwide rights are currently available. Please contact Nate Simon and visit us on IMDb.