“Half the time I was directing, I also had a glove on my hand,” says filmmaker Carson Lund of making his feature directorial debut with the Cannes title Eephus.
The film, which is premiering in Directors’ Fortnight and is being sold worldwide by Film Constellation, follows a men’s recreational New England baseball team as they play their final game on their longtime field before its planned demolition.
From Pride of the Yankees to Bull Durham to Moneyball, baseball has a long and varied onscreen tradition. For his part, Lund wanted to take a different approach. “No baseball film, I feel, has ever really captured the rhythms of the game and what it feels like to actually play it,” says the director. “A lot of these films are ultimately about single characters, protagonists who are undergoing some sort of transformation and self-enlightenment over the course of a narrative. It’s classic Hollywood structure that just happens to be on a baseball field.”
Taking inspiration from his childhood playing baseball in New Hampshire, his recreational league in Los Angeles, and his dad’s recreational league in New England, Lund hoped to make a film that used “the game itself as a template.”
“There’s something about that pace of baseball, this meditativeness, and then sudden action that goes by so quick you can barely process it,” he says. “That feels like it’s very appropriate for this story of aging men in a crisis moment.”
By design, the entirety of Eephus (the title is the name of a low-speed pitch that is particularly difficult for batters and is considered one of the rarest throws in the sport), takes place at a single location — an aging baseball field. To find the right one, Lund scoured the East Coast. The production needed a field that felt lived in, with old wooden bleachers as opposed to newer and now more common aluminum ones, and that wouldn’t be overtaken by recreational soccer leagues during their October 2022 shoot.
“I looked at probably hundreds of fields in New England and visited probably about 50 of them,” says the filmmaker of the hunt. He found his pick in Douglas, Massachusetts, with a field that at one time hosted an exhibition game between the Red Sox and the Joe DiMaggio-era Yankees in the 1950s.
The casting process was done remotely, with Lund and his team wanting to cast as locally as possible. “I love regional specificity, so a New England accent and a face that feels like it’s from New England — a working-class New Englander — that’s what this movie’s all about,” he says. The cast — which includes the former Red Sox lefty pitcher Bill “Spaceman” Lee — came in with varying degrees of athletic ability: “What we got in the film is this wonderful variety of different skill levels, and you really get a sense this is a movie about a small suburban league.” (For eagle-eared Red Sox fans in the Cannes audience, the longtime radio announcer for Boston’s team, Joe Castiglione, plays a role in the film.)
As for the film’s visuals, Lund looked less to sports dramas and more toward John Ford’s midcentury Westerns, employing master shots as opposed to quick cuts. Given that the film takes place over the course of a single game, and the filming location meant the production had lots of natural light, he and his cinematographer were particularly conscious of lighting. “Every part of the day we’d be shooting different parts of the film based on where the sun was at so that we had a certain continuity,” says Lund.
Despite the setting, title, and action of the film, Lund notes that Eephus doesn’t require viewers to possess an extensive knowledge of America’s pastime. “I do want audiences to see it’s not an intimidatingly baseball-centric film.” He insists, “This is ultimately a humanist character study, a movie about a time and a place.”
