This TV star spent so long making a film in a Sydney funeral home that they put him on staff

Christian Byers spent so long making a new Australian film in a funeral parlour – eight years between other acting gigs - that he ended up on staff, placing bodies in coffins, organising flowers and washing hearses.

Christian Byers at A. O’Hare Funeral Directors, where he shot Death of an Undertaker, in Leichhardt.Credit: Kate Geraghty

“It felt like I was part of the team anyway so they formalised it,” the actor turned director said. “They gave me the suit I wear in character in the film. It was a real handshake - ‘you’re part of the family so don’t screw us’.”

What started as a documentary about old-style Italian funeral directors evolved into a low-fi docudrama, Death of an Undertaker, which will have its a world premiere at Sydney Film Festival next Friday.

Byers, best known for the TV series Friday On My Mind and Bump, plays a young mortician, Sparrow, whose fragile psyche unravels dealing with so much death.

Real life morticians from A. O’Hare Funeral Directors in Leichhardt appear in a film shot with an edgy, experimental quality.

Its genesis dates back to almost when Byers, now 31, was a child actor who starred alongside Daniel Radcliffe and Teresa Palmer in the 2007 film December Boys.

Walking along Norton Street after school, he would pass the funeral parlour and be fascinated to see the morticians at work – sometimes wheeling coffins into hearses – through the open garage door.

“It just seemed so eerie and weird and spectral, this house of the dead on a bustling city main street,” he said. “For a 13-, 14-year-old, it was a pretty wild thing.”

Years later, he met one of the funeral directors, Michele Salamone, in a cafe and thought he seemed like “the John Wayne of Leichhardt”. When the cafe owner asked whether business was good, Salamone deadpanned “yeah, fridge is full”.

Christian Byers, right, with Michele Salamone in Death of an Undertaker.Credit: Sydney Film Festival

Byers thought the dignified work of an Italian funeral parlour would make a great documentary and, once filming was under way, he was given an unpaid job.

“I think they realised I may never finish the film and they were like ‘we’ve got to get something out of this’,” he said.

But doing everything himself – writing, directing, acting, shooting, recording sound, producing and editing – proved challenging.

“It’s not a chill thing to make a feature film in a funeral home,” Byers said. “It’s not a chill thing to make a feature film at all, let alone on your own, let alone in a funeral home, let alone for six years, seven years, eight years by the end of it.

“So I just threw everything I had and more at it until it was done. I’m quite glad that I finished it before it finished me.”

Like Sparrow, Byers struggled as he shot during the pandemic after the Black Summer bushfires, running out of money, and going through a break-up and some distressing funerals.

“This film, rather than this beautiful centre point of expression and release in my life, just became this ultimate liability,” he said. “This terrible decision that I’d made that was not going to solve itself.”

At the premiere, Byers will dispel any funereal vibes by having the film’s composer and sound designer, Luke Fuller, bring a boombox to play “some ’80s Italian Bocelli [style music] which I know will please all the Italians in the house”.

Naomi Watts and Bill Murray in The FriendCredit: Sydney Film Festival

The festival, which runs from June 4 to 15, opens with Australian director Michael Shanks’ horror film Together, which became controversial when an American production company filed a lawsuit claiming it was a “blatant rip-off” of a 2023 comic romance - an allegation the Together team’s agent called “frivolous and without merit”.

Festival director Nashen Moodley described Together as probably the most anticipated Australian film of the year. “It’s so smart, it’s so funny,” he said. “Wickedly funny.”

Daisy Edgar-Jones and Jacob Elordi in On Swift Horses.Credit: Sydney Film Festival

Films from 70 countries will screen in the State Theatre and nine other venues. While stories from exotic locations are always part of the festival’s charm, there are Hollywood stars right across the program.

Naomi Watts plays a New York novelist with Bill Murray as her mentor in The Friend, Tilda Swinton and Michael Shannon are living underground after the apocalypse in The End, Jodie Foster is a psychiatrist turned investigator in Vie Privee, Jacob Elordi and Daisy Edgar-Jones are gamblers drawn to each other in On Swift Horses, Carey Mulligan plays a musician in The Ballad of Wallis Island and Tom Hiddleston is a mysterious businessman in The Life Of Chuck.

The Iranian thriller that won at Cannes last weekend, Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just An Accident, is among 12 films running in the $60,000 competition for “audacious, courageous and cutting-edge” cinema.

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