Eephus, which opens theatrically in limited release beginning March 7, is “designed to break your heart.” Directed and co-written by Carson Lund in his feature debut, the film unfolds across the length of a single Sunday afternoon adult recreational baseball league between Adler’s Paint and the Riverdogs, beginning as the players get dressed in the parking lot and warm up with soft toss, continuing through nine innings of hamstring-testing hustle doubles and crushed cans of Narragansett, and ending as the October dusk fades to night. It’s the last game, and not just of the season: The field will soon be bulldozed to make way for a new elementary school.
Shot over the course of a month on a local field in Douglas, Mass., Eephus is something like the concentrated essence of baseball, packing in a season’s worth of sense memory—the saltiness of a sunflower seed shell, the weight of a batting donut, the greasiness of a streak of eye black—at the languid tempo of a second baseman holding up his index and pinkie fingers for the right fielder after the second out of an inning. The banter ebbs and flows between baserunners and fielders, between teammates on either side of the dugout, alternately hotheaded and banal.
Those of us who reside at the cursed intersection of baseball fandom and terminal cinephilia often talk about whether baseball, as a spectacle, has more in common with narrative, structuralist, or slow cinema. There are elements of each in Eephus. There’s a game here to be won and lost, players who succeed and fail—some with herniated discs and kids to get back to, others with post-graduation plans to consider or girlfriends to impress in the stands. The film nods to the more lyrical side of the national pastime with chapter breaks heralded by quotes from the likes of Yogi Berra and Satchel Paige. How can you not be romantic about baseball?
Yet the drama is circumscribed by the rules of the game: Lund can’t move on to the next scene until the fielding team has made three outs, but within that framework, the ball can go anywhere.
Most of all, though, the film fits within a global festival-circuit zeitgeist, with its hangout vibes, puckish refusal of dramatic consequence, dreamy pacing, foregrounded textures of everyday life, and anticlimax. Due to its subject matter, Eephus will reach audiences who would not normally be excited to see a movie that has been compared to the work of Tsai Ming-liang, I told Lund when we spoke. “Yeah,” he replied, “that was part of my long game.”
Lund is interested in the ambience of baseball, the way that it fades into the background to, in A. Bartlett Giamatti’s words, “buffer the passage of time.” Joe Castiglione, the Hall of Fame voice of the Boston Red Sox, appears here as a food truck vendor pondering retirement. (The film has a distinct Red Sox Nation flavor, evident also in a lively cameo by Bill “Spaceman” Lee.) Radio is like oxygen in the movie, beginning with the sound of drolly weird local news reports and call-ins voiced by leftist podcasters and comedians such as Chapo Trap House’s Will Menaker and Defector contributor Will Sennett. (Another contributor to this website, Nate Fisher, co-wrote the film with Lund and Michael Basta, and appears as Adler’s Paint’s hyperfocused relief ace.) Also on the soundtrack is the raspy, rueful voice of the great documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman, known for his portraits of American institutions. The constellation of voices is apt: The film is aural, collectivist, absurd, observational, and All-American.
Set in a slightly indeterminate point in the 1990s, the film’s nostalgia is in part personal for the New Hampshire–bred millennial Lund. The films made by the loose collective Omnes Films, which includes Lund, Basta, and Eephus producer Tyler Taormina, frequently depict American rituals haunted by an awareness of finality.
In addition to the end of summer and the end of childhood, Eephus is a film about the end of history: Smartphones and other traces of 21st-century online life are absent, but the prospect of their arrival—and the subsequent retreat of the American citizenry into antiseptic and despondent digital solitude, with political polarization to follow, looms over the film’s diverse but largely harmonious red and blue teams. In his film about baseball’s fading monocultural importance to American society, Lund has perhaps found a subject analogous to cinema.
Our conversation, which follows below, has been edited for length and clarity.
Is it correct that you wrote the box score before you wrote the script?
I think that gradually became the legend, and, you know, “print the legend.” We were working on a box score in tandem with the script from day one, and we definitely finished the box score before we finished the script. [The box score was] in addition to other things, like a defensive map that you'd see in a broadcast—we would fill that in with faces we thought were appropriate to each character. Stock photos, anything we managed to scrounge up from online, sometimes, people who had a Twitter account and posted a selfie that looked right for these roles. So we were building the game and the rosters hand in hand with the script.
There's no continuity errors, nobody batting out of order.
Is that a question or a comment?
It can be either.
In the original script, there are no leaps in time. It is very much continuous. However, as we got deep into the editing and needed to consider things like cutting time, we had to make some sacrifices. But the rules we break typically happen offscreen in such a way that no viewer would ever notice it. I sort of stopped keeping track myself. I also think it's very appropriate to the nature of the game that's dramatized in the film that, as it gets later, the umpires leave, everyone’s lost a sense of what inning it is and who's up and how many outs there are.
The films that have made their way into the baseball canon are almost strictly narrative films, and this is why they weren't our reference points, because the demands of narrative and the three-act structure leeches some of the specificity from the game, some of the unique rhythms that, typically, a Hollywood exec is not going to want to deal with on a bigger-budget film. For me, [baseball’s] a game that privileges meditation, moments of mundanity and distraction, and just socializing in the dugout before something eventful happens. That, to me, is closer to slow cinema, or a feeling like pure time.
That sense of time passing is present especially in terms of the importance of radio in the film: There’s drawling local media in the background, but also, you have Joe Castiglione. I’m curious what he knew of the film, because when he talked about it on the radio, once the Red Sox were well and truly out of the wild card race, he did not seem to understand the movie.
Not at all. “Well, I know baseball is the theme,” that's what I remember him saying, “but I'm not sure what the story's about.” I didn't share the full script with him, he was only cast mid-production. It was a one-day walk-on role, and we saved [casting] it, hoping some magic would happen and we'd find someone like him. I didn't have him in mind, particularly, but one of my actors had worked in radio and was like, “I think I have his email.” And the Red Sox were not in the playoffs, so he was available, and fortunately, hadn't gone down to Florida yet for the winter. I think he's always up for a gig, basically.
It's apt that he did, in fact, retire between when this film premiered and now when it's coming out. We have the leaves changing, the field being bulldozed, and the physical decline of the players is a significant aspect of the film. You get older, life gets in the way, and at a certain point, you play in a game, you won't necessarily know it at the time, but it's the last time you'll ever play baseball. But you still play. You're the same age as, who, Nolan Arenado?
Yeah, he’s considered a veteran, right? Over the past five years, I've started to notice it bit by bit, a sore arm would get a little sorer every time I'd play. I have to include the fact that my dad himself plays in rec leagues in New England; I’ve been to his games, and that was a huge influence on this film, spending time with his teammates.
I went to the baseball game that the Eephus cast and crew had at the East River Park when you were in town for the New York Film Festival. You have a compact inside-out swing from the right side, you’re an aggressive baserunner. Were you good growing up?
Yeah.
Are you good now?
I’m probably the best player on my team, but I'm also on the younger side. So I still play shortstop, because no one else is quick enough. I was quite good when I was younger, but when I could have gone all in and potentially had a chance to play in college and then hopefully further, I just didn't have the stamina for it. I was tired of that culture and being around those kinds of people and the stress and the pressure of it all. I was getting much more interested in art, filmmaking and music.
To go into logistics: Every actor knows to exaggerate on the “special skills” portion of their CV, and no man at any age is a reliable narrator on the subject of his own athletic ability. So I’m curious about casting for the ability to play baseball. Did you have to do any rewriting?
Some major on-the-fly revisions. There were certain beliefs about the script that I clung to for a very long time, because I really wanted this character to pitch this inning, or I wanted this character to make this play. And somewhere in the process, enough people were lobbying for that not happening, that I made the very wise choice to make those amendments. The casting process was largely conducted over Zoom, because I live here, and I was drawing from a Boston casting pool. I had to take these guys at their word that they've played before, they've played semi-recently, they have a real knowledge of the game. Sometimes it was just, “I love the Red Sox, my dad watches all the time,” but I would love their face so much, and feel they were so right for the character, that I would overlook any red flags. There were some people I was very confident about in their athletic ability, but some of those first rehearsals were a real eye-opener. Some people simply couldn't throw the ball 60 feet.
Was your rehearsal period just baseball practice? And at the beginning of each day, were the actors warming up by, instead of say, vocal exercises, stretching and playing long toss?
Every day. I really stressed that, especially because we knew the shoot would be one straight month of shooting, “You guys got to get your stretching regimen going early, because you'll be falling apart by day five.” And I think they fell apart anyway, but people did listen to that.
I think there was a real draw to these rehearsals, because they were fun, just going into a field and playing. They really did feel like practices. Once you go through those motions, you understand the dialog that much more, it starts to come out naturally. They would take infield, I would hit them ground balls, we'd play catch, some batting practice, and then eventually we would get to some scene work.
After that first week, everyone had been on the field together, and were stretching and playing catch and even if someone hadn't played in 30 years, it would come rushing back. So many American boys played baseball, right? Even if it’s been decades, you're going to tap into that.
Did you adjust the shooting schedule to give the actors playing the pitchers four days’ rest between shooting pitching scenes? Or were they like rubber-armed Dead Ball Era guys?
They were rubber arms. They just had to go! The guys who play the starting pitchers, Keith William Richards and David Pridemore, it helps that they're kind of both masochists. They never complained and would just bite through the pain. But anytime the pitcher was not in the frame, they didn't have to throw the pitch. I would throw it, or a PA would throw it. So we tried to minimize the pitch count as much as possible. [Laughs]
Did having the cast be old, slow guys make it easier to stage the baseball action, or did you find yourself shooting more stuff in montage versus in a master shot than you expected? Because you still have to execute a pitch and swing, and even if you're supposed to swing and miss, that’s actually kind of hard to do.
One of the guys, Theo Bouloukos, had not played in ages—if the ball were five times as big, he couldn't hit it. And then the one time when we needed him to hit, we started rolling, and he hit it on the first take. We got a certain elegant clumsiness; it wasn't a perfectly executed play, but there was something balletic in the slapstick messiness of it all. It was important to me that this film was shot in masters as much as possible, and that we see the interaction between the different people moving across the field. Inevitably, we had to resort to montage at times, and for me those were always difficult compromises in the moment.
Are those the real dimensions of the field? 410 straightaway center, 353 to left and 260 to right?
Yeah, those are the real dimensions. The right field wall, we made into a mini Green Monster, because we didn't want to see the cars passing by, which would have given away the contemporary world outside of our world. So we built that fence higher, and we had to repaint the 260, which wasn't on the original fence. We had to measure it.
TV baseball is shot with a zoom lens from outside of the field of play, and you’re shooting at what looks like a number of different focal lengths, from a lot of different angles, and it looks different from what's on TV.
I want to show it from a very experiential level, right there with the characters—which obviously presents a lot of challenges when you need to capture a guy hitting a ball up close, and then it's like, well, the camera and crew are actually only a few feet away, and what happens if he swings too late and hits it right in someone's grill? We had to come up with creative solutions, like putting up a pitching net, cutting a hole in it, and hoping the ball doesn't go through the hole and break the lens.
How about positioning players for widescreen composition versus defensive alignment? Because a couple of times when Nate Fisher’s character is on the mound, the Adler's Paint second baseman and shortstop are cheated up the middle at double-play depth, even though there's no one on first. I assume that's to have a little bit of visual interest in the background.
You are a very discerning viewer, my friend … That's the sort of thing that, yeah, it bothers me a bit. But yes, I felt that if they were where they're supposed to be, in this game situation, the shot is just not as interesting. I need them to cheat towards second so I see those two bodies—and I don't think anyone else notices that. I do appreciate it. [Laughs]
The field is a great location. There's a little grass growing on the infield dirt—what level of maintenance versus disrepair did you find this field in, and what did the production team do to it? Were they out there chalking the lines every morning, or…
Oh no, no. That was a tough line to straddle: The guy who runs the field—he works for the parks department, Tim Bonin, he's credited as an associate producer on the film—was a great, great local partner. But he really keeps that field in shape. I had to ask him to lay off for about three weeks before we shot there. I said, like, let it fall apart a bit. There were still fall ball leagues going at that time, so he felt a little uncomfortable about that, but I said, trust me, the film is going to live longer than the results of this fall ball game.
For the signage at the field, what was the ratio of found to sourced? The Ground Round sign on the outfield fence was a powerful Proustian trigger for me...
We had a lot of fun with those advertisements. Everything is a degree removed from a business that existed in my hometown and that I recall from the '90s, or that existed in Nate's hometown. Adler's Paint, for instance: The name of that team is based on Adler's Hardware in Providence, which is powerful Proustian business for Nate. M & N Sports made the trophies in my hometown, but we called it MG Sports. I'm not sure why we couldn't just use the real businesses. I think I like having things feel a little bit removed from reality.
I think of the exchange on Twitter where someone was talking about the streaming world prioritizing second-screen content, and Jon Bois quote-tweeting “just watch baseball. this is what baseball is and why it exists.” But crucially, despite capturing the dailyness in which baseball measures out time, Eephus is not meant as second-screen entertainment. You have to pay attention and engage with art on art’s own terms.
Baseball’s not exactly art, but it's a way of being, a way of thinking and a way of experiencing time. I think that's all a bit in jeopardy with the introduction of new rules, the pitch clock specifically, about making baseball just one other thing to plug into your day and to monetize and to make sure that the game's over by 10:00 p.m. so I can go to bed and wake up for my job the next day to make money for someone else. In that process, it's losing its poeticism, it's losing its funk and its charm and humor and frankly, its boredom. I think the boredom is key—I don't like the word boredom, I'm using it almost ironically, but that boredom, or that stasis, allows for a greater sense of present tense and being in the moment. In a culture that's always getting faster and faster, and prioritizing profit over everything else, it’s really dangerous for me. I know it's silly to say the pitch clock is one of the biggest threats in modern society, but it's a microcosm of this larger cultural shift towards a fear of dead time. This is a film that's trying to invite you to experience that "dead time" and see that there's a richness to it.
Writing about this movie on a couple of occasions in the last year, I've talked about it as a political film, one that looks ahead to the 21st century and the loss of a third place, such as the baseball field. It looks forward to “the male loneliness crisis,” if you want to call it that. In one way, the film is quite utopian in the collective presence of these characters from disparate backgrounds, and on the other hand, it's quite foreboding about what's going to happen to them when this all goes away. The question of whether these guys ever meet up again, whether they have other hobbies or anything, seems like it's very much on the film's mind.
The world outside, we wanted it to feel very mysterious, dark and chaotic, like the woods surrounding the field. We wanted them to speak purely in the vernacular of this game and their shared history together on this field, and not bring their own lives into it (very often).
I've witnessed, in the town I'm from and in my own family, what happens when we lose those spaces; when socializing becomes less of a ritual and more like a chore. COVID, obviously, was massively detrimental, but I've observed a fear of leaving one's home, fear of meeting people and a lack of opportunity to do so. Walking around in my neighborhood in New Hampshire, when I was home for the holidays, at a late hour, for instance, it's almost seen as this transgression. That’s something that Tyler Taormina and I are both very interested in, and his movies deal with this question a lot, too. I've found there to be a solitude and sadness to it all.
I've been reading Bowling Alone, and it's confirming all these feelings. [Robert Putnam] discusses the value of being forced out of your comfort zone and meeting people that you might not run into on a daily basis. It's a real question mark as to how we move forward from all this—we're watching it on a daily basis, a total collapse. I don't want the film to propose any solutions; I want for you to home in on the experience we're presenting in the film, with these characters having a spiritual communion, and seeing the value of that on screen makes you maybe reflect on the place of that sort of community in your own life, whether you have it, or whether you once had it. I want to heighten the awareness of that kind of experience.
