Dead Serious

A no-nonsense funeral home director and his unflappingly buoyant protégé get to know one another through their daily routine.

  • Lily Brown
    Director
  • Gregory A. Noël
    Writer
  • Lily Brown
    Producer
  • Woody Brown
    Producer
  • Tim Cummings
    Key Cast
    "Roger"
  • Deniz Himmetoğlu
    Key Cast
    "Glen"
  • Doug Green
    Executive Producers
  • Corey Lanier
    Executive Producers
  • Patrick Lashly
    Executive Producers
  • Kim Maxwell
    Executive Producers
  • Emily Noël
    Executive Producers
  • Emma Maltby
    Associate Producers
  • Adrien Bourguignon
    Colorist
  • Stevie Kincheloe
    Composers
  • Steve McKellar
    Composers
  • Henry Mann
    Editor
  • Aidan Mastrogiorgio
    Post-Production Sound Mixer
  • Molly Allison
    Assistant Director
  • Adrien Bourguignon
    Director of Photography
  • Nora Crawford
    Props Master
  • Denny Dormody
    Funeral Advisor
  • Fabio Lauretta
    Production Assistant
  • Henry Mann
    First Camera Assistant
  • Henry Mann
    Gaffer
  • Kim Maxwell
    Craft Services
  • Anthony Paredes
    Location Sound Mixer
  • Amaury Saugrain
    Tech Coordinator
  • Project Type:
    Short
  • Genres:
    Dark Comedy, Comedy
  • Runtime:
    6 minutes 57 seconds
  • Completion Date:
    April 18, 2023
  • Production Budget:
    4,000 USD
  • Country of Origin:
    United States
  • Country of Filming:
    United States
  • Language:
    English
  • Shooting Format:
    Digital
  • Aspect Ratio:
    4:3
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    Yes
  • Student Project:
    No
Director Biography - Lily Brown

Lily Brown is a Director-Writer-Actor from a tiny California town with a passion for language and stories in all their forms, particularly film and her first love, theater. A true collaborator, Lily values long-term creative partnerships and cultivates community with every project. While varying in theme and subject-matter, Lily’s work leans comedic, political and personal. Lily’s directing background is based in theater, primarily new works; she will make her film directorial debut with the dark-comedy short, Dead Serious. As a writer, recent accolades include Semifinalist in Screencraft’s Virtual Pitch Contest and Quarterfinalist in Filmmatic’s Short Screenplay Awards.

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Director Statement

Three years ago, I was ready to make my film directorial debut so I asked my immensely talented college friend Gregory A. Noël if he had a script. We had our first production meeting the next week, in March 2020, not knowing, of course, that the world would be shut down the very next week.
Two years and some change later, in May 2022, it felt like the time to pick it up again so we had our second official production meeting. What I didn’t expect was that I would have so much more passion for and understanding of the script as a result of the years since we first met about the film.
In late 2021, one of my best and oldest friends passed away from cancer and my grief process included a lot of writing and creating around that grief; this, added to the context of the previous one and a half years of Covid-19, only added to my sense that we all had collectively entered into a shroud of death. It was everywhere. And yet, our relationship with death and grief had largely remained the same – it is to be a solitary process, dealt with in private, not shared except for perhaps singular Instagram posts in memoriam.
Over the course of pre-production, I watched countless interviews with morticians and Funeral Directors. I even established a relationship with the Funeral Director at the Mortuary where we filmed, consulting him on logistics (his name is listed in our credits under “Funeral Advisor”). And what I found is a collection of people who exist in stark contrast to the caricatures we so often see on film: a morose, emotionless creep with greasy hair or a swindler upselling coffins to grieving families. What I found were people who chose this profession out of a desire to usher folks through some of the darkest moments in their lives. And so again, almost accidentally, I found myself even more passionate about bringing this short film to life.
What I love about Dead Serious is that it pulls back the curtain on a portion of the death two-step that we rarely get to see and does so in a way that re-characterizes Funeral Directors as regular people – people who have annoying coworkers, who feel passionately about their job. I love to call this “a workplace comedy” because that’s exactly what it is, the workplace just so happens to be a morgue.
In the course of my own grief, I found a lot of comfort in a quote by Andrew Garfield who said in an interview with Steven Colbert that, “grief is the unexpressed love,” that you have for the person who you’ve lost. Death, of course, is hard. Grief, of course, is hard. But I sometimes wish we treated grief this way; as something beautiful born out of something hard.