Eephus follows two unprofessional baseball teams gathering for their final match, as their beloved field is about to give way to a construction project. A hangout film full of quirky characters and a big heart, I sat down with director Carson Lund to chat about his home run.
Where did the idea of Eephus come from? It seems like you have a really good knowledge of baseball, and I’m assuming maybe you played it as a kid?
For sure, it’s been a huge part of my life for a long time. I wanted to be a baseball player as a career. It was one of those things that as a kid, you’re really invested in, and then your life takes a turn, and you realise that was kind of an insane thing to ever dream of, because it’s so hard to get to that level. But I did pursue it for quite a long time, all the way through high school, and I swerved from it just because I got more interested in filmmaking and found that a little more exciting for me, and the culture around baseball was getting a little too tiresome, too much stress and pressure.
I became a filmmaker, and then I thought I’d abandon the game, at least as a player, I was still a fan. I moved to Los Angeles back in 2015 and I joined an adult recreational league, just because I was missing playing it. And here in LA it’s beautiful all year round, so you can play at any time. I fell back in love with playing the game, because the stakes were much lower in this sort of league, it’s just a bunch of men who are in love with it. They have a shared passion, and they’re trying to spend a few hours a week with no stress, and just enjoy themselves.
I started playing in this league and I developed these unique relationships that only happened once a week, and I felt that that was a subject that I hadn’t really seen explored in cinema, in the way that I feel like I could bring my own sensibility to. I thought, this film’s about getting older and losing touch with some childlike self, some version of yourself that you had as a kid, and losing touch with passions and losing touch with the outdoors and with recreation and hobbies, and so I thought that this would be a great subject for my debut.
I was watching it and the characters felt so real, and they’re so fun to be in the space with. I was thinking this feels like you must have met these people, so were the characters based off of the guys you met in the recreational group?
A little bit, or they’re just some sort of composite of different people. My dad is a player, and played in a league much like this as well, back in New England, where I’m from. I’ve seen his games and there were some characters there that I wanted to riff off of. There’s something about team sports that people like to create a persona, or fill a certain archetype, when they join a sport and they’re playing a certain role within their team.
People fall into these categories and so you see them over the course of your life on the teams that you play on, and that’s certainly true for the team I’m on now. I was working from a place of familiarity with these archetypes, like, “Okay, this is this character, and he’s like that guy that I play with. This character is like the guy I played with 20 years ago.” And then when you get past the script writing stage and you start casting, you start getting on the field with all these people, everything gets more specific, and the actors bring their own life experience into the role, and they tweak a few lines of dialog here and there so that feels more appropriate.
We talked quite a bit about each character and their backstory with every actor outside the production process, trying to figure out who this person is outside this one day a week, this Sunday, what are they like? How much do they look forward to this game? Everybody went into production with a very thorough sense of who their character was, and then they could bring that to their performance. Whatever archetypes I began with, we ultimately got to a place of very specific characterization.
That’s very reflected on screen. You mentioned earlier, this is your directorial debut. So how did it feel getting to step away from the camera and just getting to direct?
I should note that it’s not the first time I’ve ever directed, I’ve made several films throughout my life, shorts. But I’ve been working on films my whole life and sometimes the roles are really fluid when you work on really low budget independent films with your friends. Even when I’ve shot films in the past, I feel like I’m part of that directorial process too, because we’re making the shot lists and everything. This didn’t feel like a big departure in that sense, I feel like I’ve always played different roles.
What was new for me was the size of this cast. I mean, there were so many of them. I was dealing with upwards of 35 actors on any given day, because we wanted to make sure that both teams were always present, often just in the background. I realised early on, the role of the director in this case was just to be like a coach, a wrangler of people and the leader.
And when I say coach, I mean a literal coach. These people hadn’t played the game in a long time, and because I’m more familiar with it, I had to teach them some of the minutiae of the game and just play catch with them on the sidelines, to get them back up to speed.
At some point early on, I relinquished my desire to be a cameraman on the film too. I thought for a while I might do that. I had to give up the reins to my buddy Greg Tango, who I think did an amazing job. He and I worked through some very rigorous storyboards so that we had a really clear idea of what we were doing once we got to set.
I will say that as a director, so much of it was on the page. We created a great script with my buddies, Mike [Basta] and Nate [Fisher]. Once those words got in the hands of our actors, they really took them somewhere else, and then once they became close with each other, the chemistry just built up. I basically had them all live in a cabin near set together in the woods. These are grown men sacrificing a lot of their obligations to be part of this film and by living together, and spending all that time together, they naturally built up this chemistry that took off some of the pressure. They already understood the characters, just from the script and the prep time and then being together, it just blossomed because of that.
You mentioned the really lovely, rich script. I wanted to know more about your collaboration process and where this dialogue focus came from?
Mike is a long, long time friend. I grew up with him. Nate is a friend more from my Los Angeles years, he and I share an appreciation for what we find funny. I had been talking to them about the idea for a while. I knew I wanted to make something that would be logistically simple in some way. In my mind, that was one location, but of course, it ended up being very challenging because of all the other aspects that made it hard.
I’m not someone who writes a lot of scripts. It took me a long time to land on this subject as the one that I wanted to sink my teeth into. I had this concept that I would create a narrative based around one single baseball game, and I know that’s like, an unorthodox idea. I felt, how do I navigate this? I want to bring in some collaborators to help me think through that proposition. Because of the ensemble nature of it, I needed other voices to help me wrap my head around all these different voices and characters.
We started with something called a box score, which is like a visual map of the progression of a baseball game. It shows you every out, every inning, everything that happens throughout the game. We built it like that, and then went back and figured out all the narrative beats that would happen per inning that would lead us to a certain conclusion that we wanted. It’s a very strange way to write a script. We had a big poster board that mapped everything out and also an overhead view of the ideal field and where everything was placed on the fields to satisfy the certain narrative beats that we established.
It was very satisfying once we felt we had a very strong outline for the events that we wanted through the film. Then I could divvy up the responsibilities between the other writers, like this is a Mike scene, or this is a Nate scene, and then we would all come together and share what we were working on and form a consensus before moving on. I felt that this particular film required that level of collaboration for us to find something new in the narrative form, something new and exciting and kind of spontaneous.
You’ve touched on this a little bit before, the idea of having people in the background, and the film feels very reminiscent of a Robert Altman film, where you have these little quips of dialogue coming about the place, would you say that that was an inspiration? And what were some of your other inspirations for the film?
For sure. Altman does keep getting brought up, and that’s totally fine with me. I love Altman. I love his use of overlapping dialog and big ensemble casts. When you have these large ensembles to play with, you just free the camera up to float around the set in a way that I find really interesting. I think especially A Prairie Home Companion was an influence, because it’s one of these films about the end of an era, which Eephus is very much in that pantheon. I’m not saying it’s as great as those films, but it’s in that lineage.
The other films that inspired me were Goodbye Dragon Inn, the Taiwanese film by Ming-liang Tsai, very important to me. It’s about the closing of a cinema and there’s a certain feeling that I get at the end of that film, the bittersweet, poignant feeling of where do we go next? I wanted to try to capture that, but in my own language, in a different milieu, the baseball milieu, because baseball is often just as precarious within our culture as cinema is,
The way that we shot the film and the outdoors and the use of cinema scope and all the men in uniform was certainly pulled from mid century westerns, the films of John Ford or Budd Boetticher, all these standoffs between groups of people. The use of the widescreen frame to position everyone and create and use of negative space, that was a big influence on us visually.
I feel like it’s a good segue. We like to end all of our Film in Revolt interviews with the question: what film impacted your youth?
I’ll say two just off the top of my head, Albert Lamorisse The Red Balloon. As a kid I watched that quite a bit at my grandmother’s house, she had a VHS tape of it. And the location photography in that movie is just freaking beautiful. It’s also a wordless film for most of it, it’s really pared down visual storytelling. It’s a movie that showed me the power of visual language at an early age.
Another filmmaker that we’ve been compared to a lot with this film, Richard Linklater, his film, Slacker. I was watching it at a time when I was really actively interested in filmmaking in highschool, and what really intrigued me about it is the mix of formal and technical ambition with an extremely low budget and regional specificity. It’s very unconventional, but it’s also made with so little money, and so that kick started my interest in trying to find ingenious ways to make the most of your small budget.
By Parker C. Constantine
Eephus
Sydney Film Festival