Twilight's Last Gleaming: In Conversation With The Team Behind Eephus

Chatting with co-writer/editor/director Carson Lund and co-writer/star Nate Fisher about their collaborative process and artistic ethos.

By the time you see the Toronto premiere of Eephus, Carson Lund and Nate Fisher will have been in the thick of a tour that’s taken them across the United States. Despite the heavily American subject matter of their film, it initially debuted in France last year, where it was met with equal raves from European and English-speaking critics alike. Bleeding Edge was lucky enough to catch up with the team behind the film over Zoom to discuss the genesis of the project, the physical challenges of making it as well as what sports movies make them cry.

Bleeding Edge: First off, how’s the tour going?

Carson Lund: Well, we just got off a week of the Barnstorming tour. We screened the film in six different places, mostly small towns. We did hit Boston on the way at my alma mater. So that was more like an alumni screening. But everything else was small-town movie houses, like the only one surviving in a 40-mile radius [laughs]. And it was extremely gratifying, in the way that I got a sense that we were screening the film for people who probably wouldn't have seen it otherwise and they came out because Bill Lee was there or because they saw that there was an event tied to it. Every screening had at least 50 people there and it went really well and people had a very emotional experience with the movie. For a lot of them, it reminded them of their playing days. I say this because most of the people there were over 60 years old [laughs]. They’ve been very different screenings than what we've been having on the festival circuit. There’s a different tone to everything. The Q&As were mostly questions directed at Bill [Lee] more so than me about the filmmaking.

Nate Fisher: I have nothing to add about the tour. Obviously, I've been sitting here ensconced in work. But I will say, that is the most gratifying aspect of getting this movie out in front of people, it registers with both A24 tote bag zoomers and people who haven't been to the movie theater since Titanic. If we can get both of those polls, that's a job well done. And it's a challenge for us to get that second group to actually know about the movie, because we've got to send them The Pony Express or something.

CL: We might have to just tour it everywhere. That's what we might have to do.

NF: I would love to do that. Like, get a van, go every day. If our lives and the life status of independent movie theaters allowed for it, that would be the most rewarding way to spend a year. But sadly we live in precarious times.

BE: When the film premiered at the Cannes sidebar Quinzane des cinéastes, how did the French audience respond? I can imagine a lot of them weren't familiar with the game of baseball. Did they jump to viewing the movie as a representation of America in a certain way?

CL: It's tough to read any kind of global meaning on all that stuff because there are people from everywhere [seeing it]. I didn't get too many people asking me “Is this how you feel about America” or “is this about the political situation in America?” We get the occasional question that's about that. And actually, one of the funniest ones was when, I think it was in Spain, someone asked about the red and blue jerseys and said, “Is that about the Democrats and the Republicans?” But no, a lot of people have told me that they connect to the movie because of its themes of loss and change and time passing and getting older, mortality. They see those aspects, even if they don't understand a thing about baseball.

NF: As far as the French audience goes, what I've noticed is it kind of goes in three directions. The first direction is probably the most predominant, which is them going [exaggerated French accent] “Oh, America, baseball, hot dog”. And they love that stuff. That's why they love John Wayne and all that. Our movie being so American probably helped us get at least some sort of a foothold in the French sphere. The other slightly smaller subsection of their audience is I've noticed are the European art house movie snobs who are still culturally 10 years behind us where they don't know that it's okay to like sports. So all their Letterboxd reviews are like “Ugh, I hate sports, why would I watch a sports movie? I didn't like this because it's about sports, which is bad”. And then the third, my personal favorite subsection of French viewers that watched our movie is French baseball enthusiasts, who I didn't know existed. But they have a very robust, if not large, dedicated community. And there were like group outings and stuff, like they would bring all their teams or a local community rec team somewhere [to see the film]. I don't know where there are baseball fields in France, but they have them and they were doing organized outings.

CL: I forgot about that, it's amazing. There were random parts of the South of France that would have theaters filled up for one night because the local league was there.

NF: I mean, can you imagine being in the South of France and you get to go to a baseball game, but you get to tuck in a nice 93 Bordeaux, and perhaps a little tiny sausage or something. Oh my God, that'd be great. Best of both worlds!

BE: Nate, I remember when the film did premiere last year, you had a Letterboxd capsule you wrote where you said the film was about how hard it is for men to be friends with each other. Is doing so much of this press together kind of reinforcing that idea?

NF: I think for me there's nothing better in the world. I mean, this is probably the easiest environment to stay friends with people. Everybody's slapping each other on the back and going “Hey, remember that thing we did 30 months ago? Gosh that was swell”.

That actually makes it perennially rewarding to just constantly talk to each other about how much fun you had shooting this. So I would say that it's the coming storm that worries me more. It's gonna be harder to keep and sustain the friendships when we're 55 versus when we're 30. It’s going to be like when the fanfare and the hullaballoo go away, are people going to be willing to still hang out and reminisce and put all the work into that kind of thing? I'd like to think that I'm immune to the ills of time passing but we’ll see.

CL: Well I think we’ll all just need to make a movie again, which is my plan at least. I really think that the production itself was like a mirror for what's happening in the film. I mean, we created a big team and spent every day with each other on a field, and those bonds are unbreakable. On the tour this week I had cast members coming out to every screening and driving three hours to the furthest part of western Maine to carry boxes of merch into the theater and wait until the end. I guess in the hellscape that is 21st-century America, it can be hard to maintain friendships, but you have to fight against the tide and form some sort of collective experience, whether it's making a film or having a rec league or whatever.

NF: If anything, our movie is an ode to the toil of sustaining friendships, rather than throwing up our hands and saying, friendship is impossible in this alienated time. No, it's doable, it just takes some elbow grease. I will also say, Carson, I am devastated more than anything that I couldn't make the 15-person baseball player/actor DVD commentary that you guys did, that looked so fun.

CL: Oh, man. I wish we could have had everyone, but we had a great opportunity to record in a studio in Boston and we had to take it. However, I'm thinking we could just put like five different commentaries on this thing. We could just take all the other actors and do another commentary. The actors who weren't in that one put them in another one. We could just do it somewhere else. I think it's possible.

NF: We still gotta do the 9-9-9 challenge though. That's my big proposition. Do you know about the 9-9-9 challenge?

CL: I think you mentioned it to me.

NF: It's nine innings of baseball, nine beers, nine hot dogs. That's it. People around the country, go to say the Tigers game and do the 99--9 challenge to get the most plastered they’ve ever been in their life. I would love to see how many beers and hot dogs I could finish in a 98-minute movie. You might have to start before the commentary.

BE: Can you each talk about your relationship to cinema and baseball? Did they ever intersect before?

CL: Probably the first time they really intersected was when Nate and I first started hanging out and talking about it. We both stumbled upon the idea that our tastes were aligned and that some of the qualities of slow cinema that we love are also inherent to baseball. It's not something I think I had considered in a really tangible way before that. But I think they're both major pastimes that define the 20th century and are now in a place where they're in crisis in some way. And the opportunities to indulge in either passion are dwindling. So I definitely see the relationship there, but also just in terms of the pace of it, the rhythm of it, there's a similarity and we just knew we wanted to make a movie that would tie those things together.

NF: I can safely say that we can take credit for seven years ago, those conversations spearheading the cultural shift where it became okay for American snobs to say that sports are good again. We brought it back. It's been our mission to return the joy of sports to the art house nerd masses. And I think that's something we've been talking about. We talked about the cinematic qualities of baseball since time immemorial. We've had to defend why we like it so much in comparison to the more exciting sports. Like no, the boredom is the point and anybody that's ever watched the films of Lisandro Alonso can kind of get where we're coming from with that.

CL: The problem is that most of the good baseball movies never really capture the game in a way that feels like it's true to its rhythm and its spirit. Because they don't want to capture the boredom.

NF: The good baseball movies, at least I find, are about really weird guys. Probably like 40% of what is interesting about the history of baseball is the just demented nutjobs that play the game, especially at a high level. I was listening to an episode of [podcast] The Dollop, which has done a ton of great episodes about old baseball players, and there's a guy in the 1880s who was one of the best baseball players, and he referred to his eyes as his lamps. And he talked about how he would rub weird oils on his eyeballs before the game, because it was going to help him see better. it's very, very strange stuff so there are a lot of great baseball movies in that tradition and we try to sort of pay homage to that by having a bunch of weird-looking freaks in our movies which I think is very, very important if you're gonna talk about baseball.

CL: So we did that but again we felt like no other baseball film actually captured the way it’s played.

NF: Yeah, they never actually bothered to do the visual component of it.

CL: The visual component, the temporal component of it, the slowness, all the distractedness of it, the fact that half the time you're just watching, and not doing anything, you're powerless.

NF: I will lastly say that the time, apart from our conversations, when I most understood the goldmine that was the cinematic potential of baseball was when I started watching the baseball documentaries by John Bois. I mean this is a guy doing something very different from what we do, but it’s just tremendous baseball storytelling, taking the statistics and the meta-narratives of the game and turning them into things that are incredibly funny and poignant in equal measure. So that was probably my first brush with people being like, oh wow, there's, this sport, more than any that has this weird, poetic quality to it.

BE: As director and actor, what are some of the real technical challenges of shooting baseball scenes?

NF: The technical challenge as an actor is throwing a curveball. It is not easy. It is really, really hard to make a ball not go to the plate but also start to break as it's at the plate to get that sort of 12 to 6 vertical movement. It is unbelievably hard. Anytime I was on set and we weren't shooting most of the time I was going up to people and being like “Will you please go stand out there and be my catcher I'm gonna huck balls at you not very accurately and I'm gonna throw ninety pitches a day until I can look almost serviceable”. That is so hard especially when the camera's rolling and you know you have to not just throw a good pitch but throw a pitch that looks good being thrown.

CL: Yeah and then factor in a very long shoot and bodies that weren't meant to be playing every single day, or just aren't conditioned to do that, and then you have a bunch of aging guys who are falling apart by week two.

NF: My elbow, I need a Tommy John, it hurts so bad.

CF: Like all of that is hard enough to begin with, right? But add to that the fact that I wanted to capture this film in a lot of master shots, moving master shots sometimes, like some of the actual gameplay. I was very adamant about that because I think a lot of baseball films cut up all the action into montage, and you lose the rhythm of it, you lose the convincing quality of it. So I wanted to see everything in one shot, but then you have to rely on four, five, six guys to get a ball to go exactly where you want it. And that's extremely hard. It just means a lot of takes. So we would schedule this film in such a way that we gave ourselves a lot of time to handle some of the more complicated plays of baseball action. And of course, we're shooting this digitally, so we can kind of just keep rolling, we're not burning film. And oftentimes, I would know that the first ten takes were useless, so we could delete them if we had to. And then in terms of actually deciding when you have a shot that works, It wasn't really about finding the play that actually had the right snap to it or was proficiently executed. It was really just about finding a certain comedy in it. And sometimes it was just like the right kind of fumbling, sloppy quality that produced something humorous or elegant. And then we'd move on. But a lot of the time, if you see a ball fly from off-screen, that's because I'm throwing it because I needed it to go exactly to a certain spot in the frame. And it's also like, as you go on, and you shoot for longer, you sometimes have to adjust the script, and you realize that certain actors can't achieve certain things, so you have to change the script a little bit or move someone to a different position. You just keep adapting as you go. But it's a miracle that we didn't have more challenges related to that.

NF: It in microcosm, was like having to run an entire 162-game baseball season and be like, all right, we got to stash this guy that can't field somewhere over here for this shot. We have to make sure this person's elbow is okay and good to go. It's just like getting over the line, executing on as many of the things we wanted to shoot or as we wanted to do and just being happy with getting 100 out of the 162 things, that's still a huge success, I think.

CL: The other thing is that, I think it's very important that everybody really wanted to be there. They were there for the whole month because the film is shot in sequence, there needs to be that continuity. So pretty much everyone was there every day and there was always that group camaraderie. People really enjoyed it. I think if people were fighting through it it would have been really hard to get them to achieve those athletic things. So anytime we might be busy with something else or we're having lunch or let's just finish, people would go out and do some drills, they’d get in a batting cage and I could teach someone how to try to hit to right field in between takes because we needed that for the next shot or something. So there was a lot of actual baseball practice happening in the margins of the shoot.

BE: How hard was casting the ensemble of the film? Because after all, in this film, all these actors have to be very believable as people who've known and been playing with each other for years.

CL: It took a long time. But I didn't find it that hard, because I knew right away when I got the right weirdo freak, to Nate's point. Like, I’d see the face and I’d hear the voice and I’d go, that's someone who belongs in this world. Because there's a lot of actors who just don't have that sauce, you know? They just don't speak to you. I'm looking for a certain type of person who looks like they're from this region, who’s lived a life, who has a sense of history and a common sense of humor. And then the big question is have you played baseball before? When was the last time you played? What's your relationship to the game? That was kind of the final hurdle. And sometimes I got some guys who had fairly recently played, and other times it was like decades since they had and I had to ask myself if it's still worth casting this person. And that's a big challenge when you know you think they're right for that character and that's where some of the revisions to the script had to come in, because we'd fall in love with a person and then realize that they couldn't throw a ball more than five feet. We were just always having to adapt. But I mean, the film is cast with locals that we found from casting websites in the Boston area and also friends of mine and people from my hometown that I remembered and thought that they would be great in a film. So it's a real ragtag group. There are also people from New York and people from L.A. as well. Maybe only a few of them had worked together before. So everything was like building this camaraderie from the ground up.

BE: Maybe I can end on this question, but what are some of your favorite sports movies, outside of the obvious?

NF: The one that comes to mind, if I'm trying to be Mr. I-Know-Everything and have this cool movie that you've never heard of, the one that always comes to mind for me is …All the Marbles, which is Robert Aldrich's last movie. It's about these two low-tier, rust-belt, female professional wrestlers and their manager, Peter Falk, taking them on from show to show through the dregs and humiliations of being a small-time athlete. It is funny, gross, ugly, awesome. It's the best.

CL: It’s a real litany of ugly late winter excerpts. It's such a grey, brown movie, it's beautiful. It's really great. But yeah, I really like Downhill Racer. I think [director] Michael Ritchie's very underrated. He's got a very up-and-down career, but that film is really special. I really love American Dreams: Lost and Found by James Benning, which I'm going to introduce I think two days before I'll be in Toronto. You could argue it’s not really a sports movie, but I think it also is in a very deep way. I wish there were more great sports movies, to be honest. I think The Longest Yard, which is another Aldrich film, is quite good, actually.

NF: Should we give more? Are we being interviewed by Letterboxd?

BE: Yeah, we’re on the red carpet right now and doing the *ding-ding* thing.

NF: Like doing the top four.

BE: Yeah, and you’re doing the top four fed by your publicist, like *ding-ding* Baby Driver *ding-ding* Andrei Rublev.

NF: Which sports movie should we pick to prove that we're actually approachable and quirky and fun?

BE: If you're in Canada it has to be a hockey movie.

CL: We'll give you a hockey movie. I haven't seen Slapshot in ages, but I've been told that it's a good comparison with Eephus because of its working-class characters. I'm not sure. Have you guys seen it recently?

NF: I actually don't think I have seen a single hockey movie ever in my life.

BE: Nate, aren’t you a huge Russell Crowe fan though? I thought you would have seen Mystery, Alaska for that reason alone.

NF: I shamefully have to admit that I don’t even know if I’ve heard of that movie. I gotta look this up now.

BE: It’s a Jay Roach movie, I think he made it and The Spy Who Shagged Me in the same year. 1999 was like the Jay Roach twofer.

NF: Wow, what a run. I’ll save some face by saying that Jon Bois’ four-part documentary about Blue Jays legend Dave Steib has made me cry more than once. It is a total masterpiece and one of the best movies I’ve ever seen.

CL: It’s great. I also love The History of the Seattle Mariners. So definitely Jon Bois.

Join us for the Toronto premiere of Eephus on Sunday, March 23rd at The Paradise Theatre. Tickets on sale here.