Ambient Comedy: Carson Lund on “Eephus” | Interviews

A poignant, slow-fading comedy about two teams running out of time, Carson Lund’s “Eephus” chronicles one final game for an amateur New England baseball league whose beloved field is about to be demolished. 

Set in 1990s Massachusetts (and populated by mostly older players whose love of the game far outpaces their grasp of it), the film is named for a high-arcing, off-speed pitch that’s at once too fast and too slow for the batter to hit. The “eephus” pitch can disorient a batter and make them lose track of time, appearing endless right up until it’s passed them by. 

In Lund’s film (now in U.S. theaters via Music Box Films), it’s the perfect metaphor. As one long day slowly darkens, between the basepaths and the dugout, these teammates realize no one’s ready to stop playing. With their ill-fitted uniforms, well-creased features, and coolers full of Narragansett, most of the men—divided between two teams, the Riverdogs and Adler’s Paint, whose habitual face-offs reflect less rivalry than time-honored ritual—aren’t serious athletes. Still, they take the game seriously enough to see the end of their years playing on Soldiers Field as another in a long line of the indignities time’s passage makes inevitable. 

A bittersweet elegy for America’s favorite pastime, the film is also a lighthearted and frequently hilarious ode to the camaraderie between its characters, all men of a certain age who mourn the end of a cherished tradition by making it last, if just once more. Lund, who co-wrote the screenplay with Nate Fisher and Michael Basta, drafts a garrulous ensemble of 18 players to cover the bases, and part of the great joy of “Eephus” is in watching them interact, telling bad jokes and busting each other’s chops, even as the daylight fades away.

“Eephus” premiered in the Directors’ Fortnight section of last year’s Cannes Film Festival, along with “Christmas Eve at Miller’s Point,” on which Lund served as a cinematographer; he and that film’s director, Tyler Taormina, belong to Omnes Films, a Los Angeles-based collective that’s long been uniquely attentive to this type of durational group portrait. 

Ahead of the Chicago release of “Eephus” this Friday, March 21, here’s RogerEbert.com’s conversation with Lund, conducted at Cannes; in a wide-ranging conversation, the filmmaker discussed bonding with the film’s ensemble cast, his approach to working with time, and the extraordinarily layered sounds of one last ballgame at Soldiers Field. 

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Let’s start with the eephus pitch, which is so unnaturally slow that it can seem to bend or distort time. Tell me about finding that guiding metaphor and about your interest in duration as a cinematic concept. 

That idea of the pitch developed organically during the screenwriting process; we got to that scene, and [co-writer] Nate [Fisher] came up with that. And I feel like a few days after we wrote the scene, we were like, “Oh, the film should be called that.” We didn’t have a title up to that point. But, to me, time is the tool of cinema. It’s what interests me most about it: playing with time. I like it when duration feels tangible and real; over the course of an hour and a half, you’re puzzled as to how more or less time elapsed than you might have thought. 

I like the subtle ways you can play with time; at least in what I want to accomplish, I’m not as interested in time travel or montage to mess with time, at least not right now. I’d always been interested in making something in a compressed timeline. Day elapsing into night was always a phenomenon I wanted to capture on film. It’s a simple thing to capture, but it’s so delicate. I wanted to be able to cinematographically capture those little gradations of light. 

I’d always been looking for a narrative container to do that with, so I really at first thought about “Eephus” as a landscape film in which we would be capturing this day passing into night in a space that would be irrevocably changed after the film. I didn’t know quite what it would be, but I had been thinking a lot about rec-league baseball because I play it. My father also plays it, and he’s playing it less and less because his knee is in trouble.  I was thinking about the drift of all these passions from our lives as we get older and the way the environments around us change. In thinking about myself and my own life in relation to baseball, as well as my dad’s life in relation to baseball, I just started to think about time and an inevitable drifting away from all these passions.

The film is set in the 1990s, though not at a precise point, and you recreate the feeling of this decade through vintage cars, radio announcements for local businesses, and all these tiny details. 

It’s this half-remembered milieu; I didn’t care about when exactly “Eephus” was taking place. It was important to me that it was happening in an era before technology completely took over our lives. I didn’t want that distraction on screen. It’s very touching to me, the way these characters cling to their cars, for example. These people need material objects to define themselves, and, in the end, they’re all cars from prior eras. You have this composite of all these different memories on screen. 

Because it’s a field, I could play fast and loose with time. There are fewer temporal markers. It was very important to have a field that wouldn’t have a road nearby. On the right field, there’s a wall we created—a little Green Monster in right field—and we extended the height of that wall. We added the logos and signs on the wall, all made-up companies or lightly fictionalized versions of stores and businesses I remember from my youth.

We built that wall so you wouldn’t see the road in the back; otherwise, you’d see the cars passing by. I didn’t want to see those modern cars. I wanted this space to feel very insular and isolated, a sanctuary. The uniforms are a composite of different eras and generations of the same team jersey. You can tell they’re not all the same; they’re not uniform. [laughs] And that was important to me, that the older players would have a certain jersey, and the younger players might have a different jersey. There’d be various degrees of aging on them. 

The visual evidence of the history was important to me, even on the field. I wanted to find a field with those wooden fences where the paint was chipping away. That was hard to find in New England because a lot of these fields have been renovated, with aluminum everywhere again. 

Score 1 for Douglas, Massachusetts.

I’d probably already seen 100 fields in New England. We knew we didn’t have the right one yet. There was one that we were excited about, and the town wouldn’t give us enough time to shoot there; we needed free rein. We were visiting [co-writer Michael Basta’s] grandfather—who plays Howie in the film, the man on the bleachers—to go over some of the script and decided to check out a couple of fields in the general area. Soldiers Field was the first one we looked at; we didn’t know what to expect but the minute we drove in, we were like, “This is the field. It has to be this field.” 

A detail I love is that Soldiers Field is being demolished to make way for a new elementary school. It’s an investment in the future that these guys can’t get mad about—but some do, and it’s hilarious.

They feel victimized by it. They’re looking for a scapegoat to blame for their ritual disappearing, and they have a sense their relationships will fade. I’ve observed a syndrome in the suburbs, where middle-aged people are sometimes too set in their ways. They think, “This is my lot in life,” that everything’s fixed, right? They have a job, this house, and they can’t push beyond that; this league is a way to escape that. But there are other ways to escape that, and there’s a sense, as the film is coming to its conclusion, that these men have not reckoned with that or tried to find a way to extend their relationships and that special bond they have. 

But the truth is that it may never work in the same way because they only work out on this field, in this particular context, through this kind of competition. I did not want it to be some didactic film about gentrification, about corporations coming into small towns to build high-rises. Gentrification is a theme, but it’s more that environments will change in the flow of time, no matter what. This population will grow large. Green space eventually has to be repurposed in certain places. These are inevitabilities. The film is more poignant when it’s about something positive for the community because the scapegoat doesn’t make sense. You, as a viewer, recognize that they’re being petty, but ultimately, it’s poignant. Everyone is contending with this. There’s always a generation behind you. It’s about dealing with mortality and change in that way.

Filming outdoors and capturing light loss over a day must have been such a rich cinematographic challenge. What can you say about your approach to capturing the passage of time from a camera standpoint and the larger visual strategy?    

Originally, I had this conception of the film that was more detached or rigid in its execution, something more in the vein of James Benning, where the game itself is very much secondary, sort of incidental. The characters are there, but the camera’s set back, so the people and the trees are all equalized. It would have almost been a static surveillance camera on a tripod. 

In the process of writing, I fleshed out the idea more, and I started to fall in love with the characters, at which point I felt it would be a disservice to do that. There was probably a lower-budget version of this film if we hadn’t found our executive producers, where I was just going to shoot an actual recreational league, which would have felt more like that. And that would be a cool film, too. But as I got so invested in the writing process, I wanted to make sure that the camera reflected the energy of all these men together. 

Sometimes, we are static, letting their interactions and movement across the frame become the animating feature. It’s very important the film feels so lively at the beginning; gradually, the camera slows down and becomes more static for the second half. It mirrors their declining enthusiasm in the game itself. The sense that they’re getting there to enact a ritual that they’ve done many times before with enthusiasm, the camera’s reflecting that: it’s moving around, it’s performing a ballet around everyone; we get that feeling of ritualistic activity. As the game wears on, it becomes more exhausting, and they feel obligated to be there, though they’re emotionally tied to it, and the camera becomes more fixed. 

A big factor in capturing that passage was thorough storyboards. I shot photos in the field for every image of the film; they were empty frames at first, and I inserted characters in Photoshop across each composition because I felt I needed that precise visual map. It would initiate these discussions with Greg Tango, my cinematographer, and with Mike Basta, who was the film’s assistant director and co-writer; we could go through, “Where is the sun in the sky at any given point? If we’re pointing this way, is the sun behind them, or is the sun in front, and how does that cut next to the shots that precede and succeed it?”

It was laborious to figure out that schedule, and we ended up with a film that was jumping around on any given day. You end up dealing with weather factors you didn’t anticipate, lots of rain, and scheduling factors that throw everything off. On the fly, we had to figure out how to reschedule this film in a way that didn’t complicate the temporal continuity. But we had created these sections of time, these buckets for scheduling: high noon, a little slanted light in the afternoon, magic hour… When the field was shaded, because the sun would go behind the trees, that could be our dusk period. Sometimes, that would happen in the morning, too, before the sun had risen over the trees. If we reached a certain time of the day and hadn’t finished a scene, we’d have to move on because the sun was where it needed to be for that third inning.

We gave ourselves time, of course, but there were times when a shot was taking too long; we had done too many takes. It was frustrating to break down what we were working on and move on. But that was so important to us that the lighting felt right, and we just couldn’t have control over a massive space like that. We had some control; we had large bounce boards, and we had lights at times as it got darker, but we just didn’t have control. We were very at the mercy of it, which is appropriate to the film, to be at the mercy of nature.

I have to imagine you all became custodians of this field for a month.

It changed a little from the script because it rained a lot. The field was wet, so we had to get the whole crew out there to do the groundskeeping. We were pushing puddles away, bringing in fresh dirt and stamping it down, then running around and trampling it with cleats so it looked like it’d been run on before. Eventually, you can’t control every little aspect—but as long as the feeling is right. 

Twenty-five days of shooting, 33 calendar days—a lengthy shoot for an independent film of this scale and focus, but “Eephus” comes in at 98 minutes. Tell me about shaping the film and honing it to the length you ended up with.

There was a period where, true to that very conceptually pure original idea, I wanted the film to be real-time and three hours long. We had written a film that was 10 innings at first; we cut the shooting script to a nine-inning version. The first cut was two hours 15 minutes long; of course, we were still eliding time in some ways throughout, but the exhaustion that set in for the players was much more pronounced. 

That was an exciting sensation for me, but I recognized early on that if this film had any hope for commercial success, it wouldn’t be with 45 minutes of people tediously trying to find balls in the darkness. I thought that if we took that idea to an almost absurd extreme, it would become more poignant, and for me, that was true at first. The essence of that idea is still in the film, so you still feel the time dragging—but without it dragging. 

It was a long process of not quite feeling 100% harmonious with the film in those longer lengths. There were a lot of scenes I had trouble getting rid of, more ambling digression, and I love those scenes. But I had a good conversation with an editor, Scott Morris, who had worked on “Armageddon Time” and a few other James Gray films; he had seen a one-hour-50-minute cut, and he said, “I love this film, and I want to see it enter the world, and I want to see your vision be embraced. And, right now, the length of time this film has impedes that.” 

It’s all optics. People see they’re less inclined to watch a film from a first-time director. That’s a cynical way to look at it; ultimately, you’re trying to boil down the essence of what this film is trying to communicate. He said, “Try that, make some aggressive cuts, get it as short as possible, and then watch the film. Get rid of 20 minutes, then come back, and you put back five or 10, right? Do this exercise; it will be painful, but then watch the film and see if you’re left with that feeling.” 

I did that, I didn’t go as aggressive as he suggested, but I did end up agreeing. There were scenes that we didn’t truly need. The biggest challenge was that I wanted to maintain accurate logic. I didn’t want to make cuts that would imply the loss of four outs, wiping a whole inning off the map. That didn’t make sense; I believe a savvy viewer would notice that, and it would bug me forever. 

The film doesn’t actually go nine innings; it goes eight, but I make it feel like nine. A big part of that was making sure I wasn’t too diligent about showing you the score sheet, as the game’s outcome doesn’t matter. Another breakthrough I had was using chapter cards to delineate different times of day. This allowed me to cut out time between innings, making Franny, [the scorekeeper, played by Cliff Blake] this spiritual center.

You have an ensemble cast in “Eephus,” and there are little moments in which certain actors stand apart, but there’s always a rhythm to the communal repartee, and I’m curious how you went about building that. 

Casting was a fun, long, demanding process. I saw so many different faces. What’s tricky about it is, sometimes, you know right away if the person is a real contender. You also know right away if there’s no chance. I’m still trying to be polite to everyone. I did it all through Zoom because I live in California, so I had to go based on folks’ intelligence, the sense that they understood the film deeply, their face, their gestures, their voices. I can’t determine their athletic ability over a call. I had to press them on their history with baseball.

When we got on the field, there were things I didn’t anticipate about what they could do. At first, that was a panic moment, but I embraced it and realized this is a film about amateurs, and it should be this motley crew where the skill level ranges wildly. Getting them to the place where they’re at in the film was the function of a few things: being on a field together, there’s something about putting on the cleats, glove, and uniform, then running around on a field with a bunch of guys, that connects you to youth. At least for American men, most of us have had some connection to this sport, whether we played it or our fathers did. It’s a warm feeling that you connect to that inner child. Most of our rehearsals were practices.

I also put them together, living in the same space in the woods; it was a summer camp atmosphere. That was a strategy. If they were all together, we would develop these bonds and this familiarity beyond what I could instill in them. It could happen organically without my oversight. Over time, that created these authentic characters and this chemistry that exceeded what I could have written in the script.

Keith William Richards, who plays Adler’s Paint pitcher Ed Mortanian, exits the film at a surprisingly early juncture. 

He was originally scripted in the whole film. He would be there the whole time, but scheduling complications came up, and he had to leave. It was a blessing in disguise, not because I wanted to get rid of Keith—he was amazing, and I love Keith—but it was the first domino to fall in this story, where you have this gravitational center for that team that suddenly shifts. He has to leave, and the bottom just falls out. Now what? As a viewer, it’s interesting to feel slightly lost and curious. Where is this film going? 

We had to write that scene a few days before entering production. We were shooting that scene at the beginning of the second week, which was when it worked out in the schedule, but we had to write it quickly. We had a few options, some more absurd than others. It’s tonal whiplash; it’s a funny scene, but it feels like something out of “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” He’s suddenly a different person; it gives you the sense these people are different in this field together than they are outside of it. There’s a different identity they inhabit. 

Wayne Diamond, in that scene, was also better off-script. He had a sense of what the scene was. I gave him the bullet points, and he was on set for one whirlwind of a day. He flew in, full of energy, and shot the scene in an hour, then flew back out. It was crazy, but it’s the first sign that time is the enemy. The inevitability of all these things is the villain of the story. It’s light fading, time passing, people having to leave, balls disappearing—all these factors you can’t control. 

Cliff Blake, as Franny, somehow manages to put such emotion behind that final call—“Ball four”—that I felt tears welling up. It’s a gut punch for him as well.

He doesn’t want it to end. And I would argue he makes a bad call. [laughs] It’s a borderline pitch, but what’s critical is that he doesn’t want it to end. He’d much rather say “strike three,” so the inning’s over, and they can keep going, but he’s doing what he thinks is right. He’s trying to be faithful to the game, and it hurts him to do that. But he would hate, for the final time on this field, for it to be a botched call—even if it is a botched call. He made sure that the game was played ethically and that he cared about that. The dash he makes to inscribe the end of the inning, and therefore the end of the game, there’s such a finality to that one stroke of the pencil. It crushes me almost more than the line.

Tell me about your collaboration with Joseph Fiorillo, who worked on the sound for “Eephus.” It’s such an essential element: the cacophony of trash-talking, the abiding sense of environment, the sounds of gameplay.

Joe Fiorillo is a very close friend of mine; he has such a great work ethic, and he did so much for us with this film. He owns his equipment, so he was able to customize his kit for this film. I showed him a script early on so he would think, “How can we capture this?” Ultimately, he had 12 wireless channels to play with. We didn’t always use it to 12, but most of the time, we would have 12, with 12 different characters mic’d up so we could get a feed from every single one. 

There were even plant boom mics in different areas. On set, he would be live mixing what he felt would be helpful for me later; we’d have a whole folder of files for any given scene, sometimes up to 14 tracks when you think about the boom and all the different lav mics. It conjures up that image of Altman and his sound mixers; he would bring a truck to set, and they would do all the live mixing there on set. Of course, with Altman, that’s the final print. Joe always wanted to set us up for success with post-production, where he’s doing a live mix, and that’s very challenging because he’s hearing all these different feeds, and he’s trying to watch and see what the focus should be and what we should bring up and bring down. That was a challenge on set, and he did a great job.

We ended up going into everything else and pulling out what we felt was the focus. There was a lot to discover in post-production: it wasn’t part of Joe’s mix, but underneath, someone might have said something hilarious, so we’d dig that out, put it in the background, and perspective-ize it, so it would be off to the left or wherever that character was. There were so many tracks in every given scene, trying to think about, “Where do I place these tracks? Do I need this line or not?”

It was challenging on set, also given how far everything was. A wireless signal can’t go that far, and you have interference you’re trying to compete with, so he’s trying to find the best place to put the antenna. You’re covering a lot of space, running back and forth with everything; it was a physically demanding shoot. He had a little pushcart; it was a fairly contained rig.

During post, I brought in two sound mixers: Joel Numa and Georgios Melimopoulos. Joel understood the film early on; we had a great conversation about it. He plays in a softball league, so he already understood the milieu. Early on, I told him I wanted an unconventional mix here; not all the dialogue would be in the center channel. I tried to place the audience right there on the field; wherever the camera is, that sets the perspective. It was a rigorous process of going into each channel and placing it somewhere within the theater, which will only play for theatrical viewers. I like the idea that some of the audience members won’t hear these jokes because they’re too far from that part of the field.

Ambient comedy is what I’ve been calling it. It’s a cacophony. I’ve been playing in a league for so long; everyone’s so boisterous. There’s so much happening. People are cheering on their teammates. There’s that ratatat dialogue happening, and I wanted to make sure that we captured the texture of what it feels like to get a game with all these voices shouting from many different places, the natural reverberation across the field. That whole mix process took six or seven months, probably the most laborious. The final two months before Cannes, it was constant. I had no social life. I was just working on that. At a certain point, you’re just executing a plan. 

All the films you’ve made within Omnes Films, including “Eephus,” fill in the parameters of a time and a space and explore them fully, including emotional associations as well as temporal and tactile ones. Tyler Taormina, whom you’ve worked with as a cinematographer on “Ham on Rye” and “Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point,” has termed them “ecosystem films.” I’m curious how you see them. 

I’ve always struggled a bit with screenwriting and storytelling. I’m just not particularly inspired by films driven by one protagonist on a journey across a three-act structure. It bores me. I’ve always been looking for an alternative form that was still narrative, and Tyler helped stimulate my imagination about how I wanted to tell a story. I don’t know if I would have arrived at “Eephus” in quite the way I arrived at it if it hadn’t been for “Ham on Rye,” realizing what we could achieve with that.

Myself, Tyler, and all of us are growing up and falling in love with cinema at a time when culture in America is in a perilous state. Cinema is dying, especially in America; everything’s content. We’re leaving college with loans, needing to find work that’s not inspiring to us, moving away from the East Coast, and ending up as far away from that as we can be. We’re pursuing what we want, but we’re all in a similar situation. We all feel like we’ve lost something. What was very true of our lives 15 years ago is gone, and a lot of the time, the common thread, what’s gone, is a sense of these communities that existed around us. 

Whether it’s school or college, or—for me–baseball, or—for Tyler—family relationships, we’re always thinking about this cultural decline and how it’s affected our lives. People are becoming more isolated in America, so we want to make films that celebrate what we’ve lost; that’s what draws us to the ensemble stories, emotionally. Formally, we’re just interested in finding a new way to tell a story.

“Eephus” is now in theaters via Music Box Films.