One of the best sports movies in years, Carson Lund’s Eephus, is now available to watch at home. It’s a somber film in many ways, but also one that is deeply romantic and full of comfort. From the gorgeous visuals to capturing just how poetic a sport baseball can be, Eephus is a film perfect for baseball fans, cinephiles, and anybody who has ever experienced the beauty of having a third place in their life. I was able to chat with writer/director/editor Carson Lund and cinematographer Greg Tango about their process, the unpredictable nature of baseball on film, and what a third place means to them.
Alex Papaioannou: I figure there’s no better place to start than by asking how you both got into baseball.
Carson Lund: Well, I’ve been playing forever. Greg, maybe you weren’t even a baseball guy before this [Laughs.] Did I bring you into baseball through Eephus?
Greg Tango: I played a lot growing up and in high school with friends. I didn’t play to the level that Carson did, but when I was a kid, it was Little League. Then in high school, it was playing pickup with my friends. That’s sort of why this story resonated with me in the first place.
Carson Lund: I should also say we played some pickup games as a cast and crew, and Greg was one of the better hitters. [We all laugh.] But I’ve been playing forever. I played in travel leagues when I was a kid, and when I moved to LA, I joined an adult rec league. So for the last 10 years, I’ve been playing in that, and it’s a big influence on the film. It’s all in the people that I play with and the characters I’ve met over the years. It’s just such a great kind of escape from daily life, and I wanted to capture the feeling of playing a game like that on a Sunday.
Alex Papaioannou: One of my favorite things about this film is it embodies the essential nature of a third place. We’re losing so many of them for a variety of reasons, and I’m curious about the impact it may have had on the film. Have you had any examples of losing a place that meant a lot to you, like the players do in the film?
Carson Lund: There are honestly too many to count. One of the most direct ways is how now that I live in LA, I don’t just have access to a park like I did in the past. There are parks, obviously, but I have to drive quite a ways to them. I mean in the sense of just a place that I can walk to and run around and shoot a basketball or something like that. All the space is already accounted for. That’s a space I always had in my life: a park that I could quickly get to. There’s also the change that’s occurred in going to the movies at the movie theater. Obviously, those can be a for-profit space, so it’s not quite the same. But I just remember growing up, and theaters being such a rallying point for people. Same thing with coffee shops. They were places where people all hung out. I think of my hometown library. It used to be really busy all the time, and now people don’t go in as much because everyone reads on their Kindle or they stream whatever. Mine had a great media section, so I grew up there while talking to people… And you know what? The biggest one is the video store. For me, losing a video store in my hometown cuts off such a great source of discovery for people. When you just doom scroll through a streaming service, it’s not quite the same.
Alex Papaioannou: Here’s hoping places like these, to lounge and connect and be off your phone, make a comeback. By any chance, are either of you familiar with John DeMarsico?
Carson Lund: The broadcaster, right?
Alex Papaioannou: Yes! The game director for the Mets on SNY. I’m a big fan of his, and what he’s doing for the live telecast of baseball is exciting. He’s been quoted as saying that baseball is inherently cinematic, more so than other sports. He provides his own details, but I’m curious: After shooting a baseball film, in your own words, what do you think it is about baseball that makes it such a cinematic experience?
Greg Tango: In a lot of ways, baseball is all about reacting, right? It’s a lot of waiting, which is one of the themes of the movie. I think what makes it cinematic is that you never know where something’s going to go. The ball moves from person to person, and it’s almost like a dance in a weird way. You’re capturing these people move. With our film, we constructed it based on how baseball is played. There are people crossing the frame. There’s a lot of movement and depth. I feel that in other sports, everything follows the ball in one direction. It all starts in one place and goes back and forth. In baseball, we go to every corner of the field. You can hit a ball to left field, then it might come back all the way to home, or quickly head to third base, or something like that. It moves around quite a bit. And as that happens, the depth of the area changes. You’re seeing people in both the outfield and infield. It just has a lot of range to it.
Carson Lund: Yeah, that’s a great point. The spacing is very different from a lot of other sports, where people move in a group or in a big chunk. And I think that’s always fun within deciding composition and cinematography. How can you place people quite far away from each other, but still make sure they have a relationship? You can work with deep focus to guide the eye around a very wide frame. That was something we really enjoyed doing with this film. I’d say the other part of it that makes it inherently cinematic is that it’s a sport that facilitates socializing. All that downtime results in people just chatting. That’s something I always enjoy seeing: how people fill their time with small talk. And then the dugout itself is so much like a Plato’s cave situation. At least the one we picked is. Everyone’s enclosed, and they’re looking out on this world that, when we’re shooting into the dugout, we don’t see. But we watch their faces watch it. And I think that’s always a very cinematic feeling: being able to look in at someone who’s looking out, and not being able to see what they’re looking out into.
Alex Papaioannou: Greg mentioned one of the things about baseball that is exciting is how unpredictable it is. You’re hitting a small ball with a bat that’s rounded, and it could just go anywhere. So, in terms of shot composition and planning out a film around the game, can you both talk about the challenges of capturing the unpredictable side of the sport?
Carson Lund: It’s almost a casting question. When we cast this film, I was looking for people with baseball experience, but you also have to be flexible. It’s a very specific thing that we needed: men in their 40s or 50s, or 60s even, who had somewhat recent experience and had some athletic skill in the Boston area. It was a very small peg we were trying to hit [said while laughing.] So inevitably, the skill level was not quite where I would have hoped or expected it would be, but I think that actually ended up being a blessing and produced a lot of very comical sloppiness. And so we just tried to embrace that. Part of that was by shooting in master shots, so we could see everything happening at once. There’s a lot of funny stuff happening, and I’ve seen it a few times in theaters recently, and people always laugh at certain moments. I think it’s because you can see everything happening. It sort of follows Chaplin’s idea of comedy being in long shots, and tragedy being in close-up. As far as choreographing it, a lot of the time it was very carefully thrown to a specific part of the frame. So Greg and I would have to collaborate on that. Usually, I’d be the one throwing because no one else in the crew had that accuracy. [Laughs].
Greg Tango: And sometimes, there were certain things we were worried about taking a long time to get, and we would get it really quickly. Or the opposite would happen, and things we weren’t worried about would take longer. Baseball is funny in that way. There’s one shot specifically that I’m thinking of. I think the ball comes from third to first, and I’m kind of shooting from behind first base, looking towards third. I remember we had a wall of flags around me. We had a crew member ready to jump in front to try and grab the ball if it happened to go over. So we did a lot of protecting the camera and ourselves. Luckily, we never even came close to hitting the camera or anything like that. It all ended up being pretty smooth.
Carson Lund: I will say one thing about that. There was one time when we had the camera set up between the mound and home plate. We put up a huge tent around the camera, so there was only a little hole where the lens could see out. And I remember Ethan [Ward] was hitting, and he hit it a few inches away from that little lens hole. But otherwise we were fine. If it went through that hole, the very expensive lens would have been shattered, and it would have thrown off the shoot, but we didn’t really have another way. We didn’t want to resort to VFX. So everything you see is a real ball moving through space, and real people catching it or throwing it.
Alex Papaioannou: Going off of what you’re both saying, a lot of baseball feels miraculous. That meant both in the context of baseball being played and in capturing it in a way that translates to an audience. And there are a lot of moments that feel organic and spontaneous throughout the film. Were some of these moments where you just followed the dugout or batters prepping the swing? Did you have these images in your mind going into the film, or was it after the fact that you could play around with the items commonly found on a baseball field?
Carson Lund: The film was thoroughly shot-listed and storyboarded. Greg and I did so much work in the run-up to the film. We just went over every single shot and talked it through to make sure we understood exactly what we were trying to capture. That was really important for scheduling, in terms of figuring out where the sun would be at any given moment. As the editor, I’m editing the film in my head as I make the storyboards, and even as I write the script. So we don’t always feel that we need anything extra on set. But there’s always going to be something that happens that excites you, or there’s a detail that a character does that you then want to spotlight in some way. A lot of this was figured out very carefully, but I should also note that sometimes an actor had their schedule change, so they couldn’t be on set. You might have to suddenly think about how a shot needs to be shrunk entirely if there’s nobody to fill the spot from far away. So there were cases where it wasn’t exactly what we planned, but we always had a lot of people on set, so we could always figure something out to get the shot.
Alex Papaioannou: There’s a lot of idle time, both in the film and in baseball in general. It works so well in the film. Greg, there are moments where you’ll just be shooting the outfield, and the characters aren’t really doing much of anything, and it’s intentional. Sometimes they’re muttering to themselves or chatting. Can you talk about whether there was any challenge in making “nothing” look cinematic?
Greg Tango: Yeah, we talked a lot about it in prep. It goes for any sort of movie as well. You just ask the question: What’s the point of the scene? What are we trying to say? We might to build something up visually before the payoff later. It’s figuring out the point of the scene and just building around that. One example is how we see Dilberto (David Torres Jr.) build up to getting mad in the film. Sometimes you’ll see him in the background looking off at other things, or there’s a shot where you see him getting ready to start leaving the field. It’s all about figuring out what the point of a moment is, and then layering your shot that way.
Carson Lund: Sometimes there’s what you call a pillow shot, where it’s just the clouds or the trees. I think those are really important for the editing flow. And here we also have people just hanging out when there’s not a play happening with them. We really did talk about all those moments. The script was written in such a way that every unit of time was accounted for. Every out. Every inning. What is happening now? And how is that advancing something that happens later? So it really was constructed in such a way that everything had some kind of payoff, even if it’s just a very small, subtle payoff. But the film just keeps planting seeds.
Alex Papaioannou: It all lends itself to the naturalistic feeling the film has, and it capitalizes on it in a wonderful way. We mentioned comedy beats earlier, and this is also a very funny film. The Linda Belinda line gets me every single time. I adore it. But it’s also a very somber film at the end of the day. It’s upsetting, but in a cathartic way. So can you talk about balancing that comedy versus that sadness, and never sacrificing one for the other?
Carson Lund: I think the somberness or melancholy is just inherent in the scenario: this is the last time they’re going to do this. The whole film is a slow march towards the end. And the conflicts that arise in the film have everything to do with light and the passage of time, right? The ball disappears, the light fades. People start leaving, and they get sore. It’s a very funereal film. So it’s hard to escape that somberness. And for me, the comedy is there to evade the darkness. It’s in all these men trying to find ways to ward off that creeping feeling of the end. And they’re using their old tricks, their old jokes, and their old lingo to avoid talking about the end. So in a way, I see the beginning to be just as somber as the ending. In some sense, if you’re really watching it and thinking about what these guys are doing, it’s like they’re all just performing this ritual for the last time. They’re just being a version of themselves in a very active, deliberate way so that they can avoid the fact that they’re actually quite sad about this. So I don’t really think of the two as completely different. But the film certainly does slow down in its pacing, and then as it gets darker, we play with a lot of new visual ideas that create bigger areas of darkness. It makes that feeling very literal. Greg, could you talk about shooting some of that night stuff?
Greg Tango: Shooting the night stuff was super fun. It was a big, elaborate setup. We created layers with the headlights and the park itself to make the streaks of light sort of separate the space between the players.
Alex Papaioannou: Greg, this is a very natural film in terms of its imagery and shot composition, but there are two moments that I was just blown away by. There’s such a stark shift in the style and visual language of the film. One is when the eephus pitch is first brought up, and we just see the ball in the frame. It’s almost like a moment from a Wong Kar-Wai film, that slow-moving blur, as if it’s frozen in time. And then there’s a home run scene at golden hour, which follows the batter through some slow motion. Can you talk about filming those two specific moments and the shift they take?
Greg Tango: For the eephus pitch, the first few shots focus on the pitcher in that really weird light. It was just a moment where we got to set, and it was one of those days that was a little hazy, and the sun wasn’t up yet. Carson and I were like, “We gotta get this. Let’s get the camera.” I think it was just me, Carson, and Nate [Fisher]. Everybody else was still getting ready. But we knew we just had to roll. And then it changed five minutes later. So I think we only got two or three shots, and one made the film. And then that shot you’re talking about with the ball itself, that’s actually Carson. He did that in LA afterwards!
Carson Lund: [Laughs.] It’s funny, you picked one of the only shots in the film that was a pickup we did away from the East Coast. Originally, that scene was just playing purely as a dialogue with comedy. But I wanted to get at some other level of the idea that he’s talking about. It’s kind of like the essence of the film. He’s talking about trying to stop time and achieve this dream-like state through a pitch or through the game. So I knew I wanted that kind of thing there. I didn’t know if it would completely work because, you’re right, it is sort of an outlier. But I didn’t have the right camera or lenses to pull that off on set. It wasn’t the same stuff we shot with, but I did my best to color it the same. Essentially, we tried a lot of different ways to capture that shot. At first, I was actually planning with the ball being thrown. But it was just too fast to follow, so I knew I wanted that slow shutter effect, like Wong Kar-Wai. I was thinking about David Lynch, too. But we ended up actually dangling a ball from a string, and the camera is actually in one place. My friend was holding the camera, and I was dangling the ball. He was slowly turning the camera, and we were dangling the ball so that the slight pan of the camera created that background motion. It’s just very small-scale trickery [laughs.] But it ends up looking pretty real. I had to paint out some moments where the string was falling into frame, but I can’t think of another way to capture that shot, short of maybe having a studio and some complicated wind rig.
Greg Tango: For the home run moment, I think that was the first time of two moments that we used slow motion in the movie. We just wanted to build up this moment, and then, as they come into home plate, to slow it down. We did a lot to try and keep flair out. I’m not big on a lot of flair, but this felt like a good moment to have some. We could sort of make it a little more cinematic, to use that term. But it’s a Steadicam shot pushing in and following him home. And then we have all the players come in. That’s one of my favorite shots, just because there are so many moments that happen with all the different players as he comes in from the home run. It’s one of those things that, the more times you watch the shot, the more funny interactions you observe between all the players.
Carson Lund: Totally.
Alex Papaioannou: It’s magical.
Carson Lund: And we really didn’t want it to be a hard cut from slow motion back to regular 24 frames per second. So we actually speed ramp it all the way back to normal. I just wanted this very smooth viewing experience where you slip into a dream-like state in a very almost unnoticeable way. It’s just: suddenly you’re in it. I think a hard cut would feel too jarring in this context.
Alex Papaioannou: At the end of the day, this is also a film about guys hanging out. So I’m curious if either of you has a favorite hangout film, or one that you just throw on thinking, “I need this as a comfort watch right now.”
Carson Lund: Honestly, I don’t really have that kind of movie for myself. There are films I like, like Dazed and Confused, for example, that I just absolutely love. I very rarely turn on a film just to hang out now. I’m always watching something new or going to the movie theater. If a 35-millimeter print of Dazed and Confused is playing down the street for me, I’ll go watch it again. But I guess I’m always trying to discover something new in the movies, so I don’t necessarily have that sort of comfort thing. But I’m sure Greg does. I’m probably the outlier here.
Greg Tango: I mean, it’s not always my go-to, but it makes a nice story. Right before we shot Eephus on, I think the last day of prep, for whatever reason, I was by myself in one of the houses where we were staying. Nobody else was around, and I watched Everybody Wants Some!!, which is one of the things we referenced a little bit in pre-production. There are some baseball scenes in there, where people are practicing, but it’s Linklater, so they’re also just hanging out. That was a fun one to get myself in the headspace to work on a baseball movie for six weeks.
Carson Lund: I did see that three times in theaters! At least one of those viewings was just pure comfort. At first it was discovery, but then I was like, “I just got to go back.” Two Linklater answers. He is the master of that; he knows how to hang out.
