Bringing Out The Dead: An Interview with Christian Byers

Photo: Christian Byers

One of the most ambitious titles at this year's Sydney Film Festival is unequivocally Death of an Undertaker. It is an experimental fusion of truth and invention. It centres on Sparrow, an underling at a funeral home whose mind starts to unravel due to his constant milieu of expiration. That component is a fictional construct, and the factual elements are that the funeral home is a real Inner West business, with the supporting cast comprising of all its employees.

Shot primarily on tape, what's authentic and what's staged co-exist in an experience akin to a fever dream, as intended by writer, director, producer, cinematographer, and Sparrow himself, Christian Byers. Best known for his performances in films such as December Boys and television programs such as Bump, Byers has been working on this endeavour for almost half as long as the time he has been an active practitioner. In his first interview beyond his wonted position as actor, we sprawlingly discussed melting video tapes, the power of drama games, and secretly shooting in a hospital. This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

This story contains spoilers for the film Death of an Undertaker.

CONNOR DALTON: This is the first, and I'm sure only, film I will see set in a Leichhardt funeral parlour. How did you attain the location?

CHRISTIAN BYERS: I went to school just down the road from Norton Street, and sometimes we'd be local legends and wag around the area. The parlour always had this mysterious, eerie atmosphere to it. It was a funeral home on a bustling Sydney main street, right next to the mouth of Parramatta Road, and the number of people who passed through the place in a day was pretty huge. There was just something about it. Often, the garage door was open, and you could see people down the back moving gurneys and stuff around. It just seemed so absurd and strange to me. It was always in my head. 

I did an assignment at university where we had to write a nonfiction piece, and my tutor encouraged us to take it as an opportunity to talk to the most interesting person we would otherwise have no reason to talk to. I thought of these funeral directors, so I went and interviewed one of them and filmed it. I also filmed a little bit around the place. That was in 2014, and a lot of that material I shot then is in the film, so that's technically when the shooting of the film started, albeit under slightly different auspices. But then a few years later, I ran into the same guy again, Mick, who's in the film, and I asked him, 'Have you ever thought about anybody making a doco here?' He was like, 'Aww, yeah.' I then said, 'You reckon I could?' And over the course of a 10-minute conversation, we had a handshake deal to make the film. For the first year and a half, I worked without release forms. I wanted to build that trust. Then, eventually, we did make it formal. 

There's just something about it that completely captured my attention and interest. There's something very beautiful about the work that funeral directors do, and I think the fact that most of us only ever interact with them during a traumatic time means that they're really powerful figures. I think, as a result of that, there's a huge amount of stigma attached to the work that is understandable. But also, at the same time, these are human beings who are doing a pretty astounding feat of emotional labour for other people on a near-daily basis when you think about it. So I always felt like there was a tremendous amount of dignity in the work, and that was essentially what I pitched to Rosa when I first met her about why I wanted to make the film. Mick worked there as a consultant, but Rosa was the director, so I had to get her approval as well. Thankfully, I clicked with her, too. We had a similar sense of humour and worldview. From the consistent exposure to death, she had a slightly absurd awareness of her own smallness in a way that I vibed with. Does that answer the question? That wasn't a media-trained answer (laughs).

DALTON: What was your attitude to filming these morticians? Did you give much direction, or did you try to fit yourself into their day-to-day?

BYERS: It's worth mentioning that my fascination over the years of the funeral home and funerals led me to write a couple of shorts and features featuring funeral directors. I attempted to write them, but I realised that I had no fucking chance because I was like, 'This is such a specific world. I have no idea about it.' I was a 20-year-old trying to write these fictional funeral directors, and they were just rubbish. Then I met Mick, interviewed him, and got a bit of skin on the bone by writing that piece. It made me realise that if I were going to do anything in this world, it would probably have to be rooted in the actual people, which is where the desire to make the film came from. 

This was a documentary for the first year and a half, but at some point, I pivoted to make a more fly-on-the-wall observational cinema vérité type thing. Around that time, they actually invited me to come onto the staff because they realised there was a chance that the film might never get finished. They were like, 'Gee whiz, mate, we need to get something out of this,' so for continued access, I started working there.

Once I was on the team, I was like, 'Well, should I put myself in the film, foregrounding myself as a documentarian, or do I construct this fictional thing, the classic neorealist thing where you have an actor amongst non-actors, catalysing some kind of fictional work, but ultimately they're still in documentary conditions?' The latter idea appealed to me more because I felt like I'd seen it less. Also, the higher degree of difficulty was more exciting. It just seemed so ridiculous, so I decided to go with that. That meant the way I pitched it to them was, 'Guys, how do you feel about this technically becoming a fictional film? You don't have to behave any differently. I'll just come in with specific ideas of conversations and subjects, and you kind of have these central MacGuffins of the exhumation and repatriation.' I was able to construct that by cutting together different footage that I had of them talking about different exhumations and repats. I could make it all look like it was one thing that crystallises into plot threads really nicely. So I didn't change the game on them. I told them, 'Here's what it is for me. How does that affect you?' And they were like, 'You keep doing what you're doing. We're going to keep doing what we're doing. If that works, then that works.' 

There are scenes where we're performing as if. That's what I called it at the time. Most of those are with Rosa; she was an incredible collaborator. She would be shocked to hear the word collaborator applied to her, which gives you some idea of how much I kept the artifice separate from her. But there's a certain section of the film — we can put this in spoiler territory — where Rosa and I start to interact a lot within a fictional conceit because Mick didn't die, but we used his recounting of his real heart attack to construct it to look as if he had. To Rosa, I was like, 'Here's the situation. Mick has died. My character is having a breakdown. All you need to do is respond to me as if I'm your worker. You can dismiss me for the day or for a while or whatever. Do what you would do. Dismiss me so I'm out of your hair formally, and then look after me. Show people what it is that I know you would do in this situation because I know how much you care.' It might sound strange, but by that stage, I'd known her for three or four years. Another time, I said, 'This is a competition for who cares more for the other, and you cannot let me win.' 

Those drama games come from being an actor. They're designed to get somebody in the right mindset. It's not about how you look; it's about your psyche and what you're trying to do to the other person. If you can get them focused on that, then they forget there's a camera. That was the benefit of being an actor among non-professional actors, and that was what I found with Rosa. It's a real testament to her that she was open and responsive. It was a pretty surreal experience. I knew that she would be the heart of the film, and she was the way you would shift your view of what a funeral director is and what they do because I saw her coming in and out of meetings all day in tears, an empathy machine just going and going and going. I don't know how she does it; she cops a lot of judgment. But I knew if I gave her a platform, audiences would empathise with her. I know I'm not giving you little soundbite answers, but it was a complicated process. I shot for the better part of eight years, probably amassing 180 hours of footage.

DALTON: It was interesting to watch specific threads come into prominence. You and the team go into depth about coffin decay, for example. For someone with limited knowledge of this line of work, that is a concern I wouldn't even consider.

BYERS: Yeah, man. I was responding to this stuff as new information, and I had that little radar in my head that was like, 'Ooh, that's fascinating. I had no idea about that.' I love those little things that wouldn't occur to you if you were not in the environment. That was what I found when I was trying to construct fictional stories in this world — it had none of that detail, especially the detail of the psyche that does this on a daily basis and their rationalisations. There are bits in Mick's interview where he's like, 'Oh, look, I've seen all this shit and it doesn't affect me … oh, look, it does.' To get to the admission of when it was most difficult, you have to go through this Teflon defence mechanism to get to the pain of it. You can't be walking around with the pain of it on a day-to-day basis. 

But I think I only clicked on what the story was going to be in April 2020. I put all my chips in and started shooting in earnest in June 2018, after shooting that earlier material in October 2014. So there was a four-year hiatus, then I committed to it, and then the pandemic hit. To be honest, the pandemic kind of clicked everything into gear because the lockdowns forced you to be inside. There was a reason to be stuck inside the funeral home. There was also something about the face masks and the sanitiser. I was filming that stuff as it was happening, and I was like, 'Well, this is the film.' It was also the fact that the pandemic first hit in northern Italy, where these guys have family, and I was filming moments where they're talking about relatives dying in Italy. Those moments determined the tone. It was the right sort of details. It was telling something very honest in and of itself. Those moments were pretty self-evident, and then I was like, 'Okay, what can I fashion from the clay that I have of these moments?' 

In that sense, whatever ideas I had, I had to be humble and let them go because the film was telling me what it wanted to be. I think you can feel that spirit in the film. It's very raw and very wild. And I was editing pretty much the whole time I was shooting, so I was looking at what I had and then building on that, seeing where the gaps were and shooting for those gaps. That's where Sparrow's unravelling came from. I was like, 'Oh, man, I built up this pressure in the first 40 minutes. This needs to unravel. This thing feels like it wants to explode.' To some degree, it wasn't a cruisy time for me. Working solo on a feature is difficult enough at the best of times, let alone in a funeral home during the pandemic. It did take a toll on me, and I think I knew it would, but I knew that you were only in your twenties once. And I think there's a certain kind of filmmaking that is enabled by being young and having the energy to throw yourself at something. 

A lot of my favourite guerrilla, DIY films are made by younger filmmakers. I love Amiel Courtin-Wilson's films, especially Hail and Bastardy, and Jem Cohen's films from the '90s. I love a lot of documentaries shot on tape. There are TV shows like Frontline that I love, as well as the first five seasons of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. I think they never should have gone to high definition. There's something about it that feels handmade, and playing with cheap, readily available materials felt quite ambitious formally. I shot a lot of this film on the Handycam my dad bought when I was 10 or 11. I had more professional equipment, but it just didn't feel right. I was like, 'No, I want this to feel handmade. I want this to feel artisanally made.' There was a film at Sydney Film Festival a few years ago called Bait, which I loved. I absolutely love Mark Jenkin. I think he developed his own film by hand. I'll have to learn how to develop film next because that would be the next step. But I love watching films where you can feel it has the quality of a handmade garment by a tailor. It feels like they're following the line of the fabric, and the material is dictating what the garment wants to be. I love films and art that are built around that kind of ethos and energy. Undertaker is my entry into that spirit.

DALTON: To me, it had a lost media quality, as if it were something I was not supposed to watch.

BYERS: Hell yeah, brother. That's a lovely way of wording it; thank you for that. To hear what you did put into words in someone else's lexicon, both emotionally and intuitively, is so gratifying to hear. I love a term like lost media. It conjures images of $3 bins at an old video store or just a videotape that's got Death of an Undertaker scrolled across it in pen that's gone over and half run out and you have to get a new pen to keep writing it on the rest of the label. There are so many films that I discovered that way. 

VHS is how I discovered cinema. I watched everything on a 4:3 box through the VHS player from birth. I grew up in a time when TV and culture were still at the point where my folks would say, 'Christie, if you watch too much telly, you'll get square eyes.' And there's something about it now feeling like a bit of an artefact that feels right to me. Obviously, there's a lot to be said for the incredible progress that's been made in digital technology and cinema and what that means for democratisation and the fact that anybody can pick up a camera. With the right lenses and grading presets, you can have a world-class image. We've seen a huge boom in indie filmmaking as a result of that. 

But on a personal level, that aesthetic is not something I feel hugely emotionally invested in. I feel more emotionally invested in your busted 16mm and 35mm tapes. To me, film is cinema. This might sound a little bit purist, but it's a physical medium for me, and that's why I shot on tape. The good, honest truth is I grew up on film sets shooting on 35mm, and there's something chemical about it. It's magic. I'm personally switched on in a different way. It is very much a devotional thing to me. It's a tricky thing as an actor because you're so much at the mercy of other writers, directors, and producers as to whether or not you get to work. You could go years not being in that moment between action and cut. Starting to make my own stuff was a desire to get back there because it's like going to church, and shooting on tape was definitely part of it. But beyond that, I can feel something when it is shot on tape or film. 

Additionally, my sound designer, an absolute wizard named Luke Fuller, and I, once we finished the full sound mix, mastered it to tape at Golden Retriever Studios in Marrickville. We ran the whole 20 channels through a 24-track tape recorder. It was a Studer, a beautiful '60s analogue valve machine. It sounds amazing. Now, it is one thing to shoot on tape or film, but it's another thing altogether to process the sound entirely analogue as well. It gives a richness and depth that literally hits the body differently. You have different harmonics present that digital recording and processing eliminates. There's something about that lostness as well that I think metaphorically and poetically underpins the meaning of the film, which is the way death can take things away from us, but we're still left with these ghosts. 

DALTON: Press notes label Undertaker as a docudrama, but it doesn't adhere to what that genre traditionally feels like. It isn't 60 Minutes. Your storytelling is emphatically freeform, and I imagine you didn't find that rhythm overnight.

BYERS: Like I mentioned, I was editing and shooting as I was going. I was shooting unplanned; it was the opposite of storyboarding. However, over the years, I was able to have a sense of what was working in the edit and what was capturing my feeling of the place in the right way. It was a piecemeal process. There were multiple stages of picture locking. There was a straight-up picture lock with all the footage on the timeline, and I also ran the whole thing through VHS. That was on a 40-degree day. I went out, came back, and the machine had stopped working, only getting through 75 minutes. Then I found it had done this warping thing. It would have been 50 degrees inside the VCR, and it melted the tape. I thought it was fucking perfect. Metaphorically, the bend-ability and break-ability of tape has parallels with the human body.

Then I did another VHS transfer in much cooler conditions. From there, I did other VHS transfers where I slowed it down to a frame a second and then fast-forwarded it to create this shuttering slow-motion effect. There were so many different things that came out of that process from what I initially thought was a picture lock. Working with it was probably another year, and then I went back and shot little bits and pieces, continuing to respond to the material and seeing how it naturally evolved. When I didn't have the images I needed to make it work, I could go out and shoot purposely. That was more traditional filmmaking. When Sparrow attends the funeral at Botany General towards the end of the film, I was shooting with specific intentions of how it would fit in with the sound design and everything else. It was a laborious, intuitive process that came in waves. I would interrupt one thing and then bring another in.

DALTON: With the amount of material you had, I'm staggered you were able to not just keep track but lock it at under an hour and a half.

BYERS: Well, I categorised all the video files, so the 23rd of April 2020 would be 200423. I could look at probably any image in the film and tell you the day I shot it. I had to have a level of knowledge of everything. I don't want to count the number of hats I was wearing. I edited the film, but I followed the Coen Brothers and pulled a Roderick Jaynes. My full name is Christian Paul John Mitten Byers, and the editor was PJ Mitten. I thought, 'It's already enough of dickhead central having my name plastered everywhere as it is. I'm not putting that up there, too!' Plus, I sat with about 50 people one-on-one and watched it with them. Most of them are thanked in the credits. We had some incredible conversations about cinema and the film. Some were filmmaker friends and some weren't, so I could get to see how it was playing to everybody.

But in terms of how I knew when it was done, once I'd thrown two nervous breakdowns and a few burnouts at it, I finished it before it finished me. There was one point when I needed some hospital shots. I messaged a bunch of hospitals and got no response or an outright no, but that wouldn't do. I couldn't edit the next stage of the film until I had these shots. I was so stressed about getting them that I woke up one night at 2:30am with a golf ball-sized lump on the side of my face, swelling like crazy. I was like, 'Holy fuck!' I didn't know what it was. In a haze, I got myself to [REDACTED], and as I was sitting in the waiting room, I realised I didn't have my mini DV camera, but I did have my iPhone camera, and I had an app on it called Filmic Pro, which is what they shot Tangerine on. I had the opportunity then, so when I got taken through, I asked for directions to the loo, made a beeline down the corridors as far as I could, and got as much footage as I could get. The doctor later said it was probably a stress reaction, but I had taken care of what was causing the stress. It was shit like that, man. I think the perfect metaphor for filmmaking is a heist. The bank is the world, the bag is the camera, and the lights and sounds are the money. That's what it felt like when I made this film, especially with my resources.

DALTON: I want to spotlight the other professional actor involved, Ashleigh Cummings. She plays your character's deceased sister, and her performance is entirely vocal. She operates as a whispery half-angel, half-devil on your shoulder. How did the two of you shape her function?

BYERS: Look, there are so many different routes I could have gone with that. For a long time, the voiceover was just Sparrow talking to himself, but it didn't feel right to me. There was something in the story that I wanted to draw out: this feeling of being haunted. The mortuary feels like a haunted place, and I'm someone that's a hundred percent on board with spirits and ghosts and whatnot, especially in that place. The atmosphere is thick. You feel like you're wading through something material. To give a voice to that in some way came from conversations with Luke, who's also a deeply sensitive, deeply spiritual guy. 

Ash is one of my best mates. We've been mates since before Puberty Blues, and we've been meaning to work on something for years. We've got a couple of things in the pipeline, but we were chatting at one point about this film. I was saying what I needed, which was someone who was in the same world as me, rather than the same world of the funeral directors, and to be this other presence. But I wanted it to also feel like Sparrow has a split soul. She's his twin, but there needs to be an entanglement thing going on. I also think there's some power in there being this almost seductive quality. So I knew I wanted it to be really breathy and not have a body to it. Ash has a naturally breathy voice, and I think we both realised as we were talking about it that we might be on. I then asked her if she wanted to do it. She lives in LA, so we did it over the phone. A lot of the sound in the film is iPhone voice memos, but they're high-quality recordings. Luke and I can tell you what's recorded on voice memo and what's not, but most people won't be able to. There are a number of effects on the voice memos. We put them through a particular tape effect as well to almost evoke this feeling that she's on the end of an old rotary phone to reinforce that feeling of distance and lostness.

I didn't want her to be perceived. It's not in the spirit of the film to have stunt casting. It was important to me that it was just this twisted spirit, and not a kid. It could have been trite if it was a visible 11-year-old because then it just becomes, 'Oh, the poor child! Woe are we to be cosmic lambs to the cosmic slaughter.' She's almost the antagonist; she's almost coaxing him into death. A friend of mine interpreted her as a metaphor for depression. He wasn't entirely wrong, but I view her as more of a poetic response to the feeling I had when I was in the mortuary. Also, if you name it, you kill it, so I said, 'Absolutely not!'

DALTON: Do you have the film's distribution sorted, or are you hoping its sold-out screenings at the Sydney Film Festival will get it on the radar of distributors?

BYERS: I'm definitely feeling it out, but I'm in a very fortunate position. A month ago, I couldn't get arrested with this thing, so to be selected is a huge vote of confidence from the [Sydney Film Festival] programming team. It really is. It changes what's possible for the film now, and that's now a process that can begin. I'm definitely fielding all inquiries, definitely looking at sales agents and all that sort of stuff, but I'm still very much finding my feet. I’ve had some much more experienced friends in the industry reach out and get behind me. The thing that's gratifying to see is that even though this is very much an underground film, they have been not only happy to help out but also pass on how inspiring they think it is to see someone go absolute hell for leather on something with pretty much nothing but the smell of an oily rag. 

This is a labour of love, purely out of devotion to cinema, and this is finally the moment it seems to be generating a little bit of steam. I've reached out a lot, but until you get that first co-sign, the conversation can't really start. So I think now I'll be in a position to field some inquiries, which is nice. Let's see if we can give it a life, be it on a streamer or a cinema run. If people take it in the spirit that you've taken it, it'll have a chance to get seen by people, which, at the end of the day, is why I made it. I certainly didn't make it to sit on a hard drive.

But I'm just a student at this point of the process and just taking on as much as I can because I am really invested in Australian cinema. I love Australian cinema. It's been a part of my life for 20 years professionally, so to be able to be in a position to make a contribution back to the pantheon that's given me so much is very humbling and exciting. I'm ready, brother.

This article was originally published by The Curb