Q&A WITH CARSON LUND

Q. Your film presents a heartfelt representation of characters specific to New Hampshire that seems both sincere and self-aware. All of the characters in your film feel very authentic — from their conversations to their look. What is your relationship to the community depicted in the film and New England overall?

A. Throughout my youth, my whole world was playing baseball on fields in New Hampshire. I’d travel all around the state. Then, when I was in a traveling league, I got to see the whole eastern seaboard playing baseball.

I remember my time in the ‘90s and early 2000s as the time of a lot of green space — hanging out in parks and fields. As I grew up and got more interested in filmmaking, spent more time editing and behind a computer, and living in cities, I began to miss that. I think that being outside and being in nature connects us to the present moment in a way that becomes hard to keep track of as we get older.

There’s a character in the film, Franny, who is based on a local I remember from my youth who’d be at all the baseball games and walk up-and-down Main Street saying hi to people. He was what you’d call a townie. There was a mysteriousness to him and I think that the character in the film is removed from that real person, but he remains as the soul of the film. And the film is a tribute to these people who are not interested in anything outside this little town. For them, that’s the whole universe. For me, there is something very beautiful, and perhaps aspirational, about the type of person who can find so much meaning in one space.

Q. Dialogue acts as your narrative’s driving force, albeit in an understated fashion. What is your writing process like?

A. I wrote the film with two friends: Michael Basta and Nate Fisher. I’ve never been someone who naturally, or ravenously, generates screenplay ideas. I approach film from a much more atmospheric or visual perspective. So, I wanted this to be a collaborative writing process because those are two people whom I share a sense of humor with, as well as some experiences. Mike is from my hometown and Nate is from New England — both are interested in baseball.

It took a long time to write because no one was holding our feet to the flame and saying, “You have to finish this by such and such a date.” It was more like a long process of exploration and we gave ourselves a lot of time to envision what the game looks like. For example, we would write a box score and map out how the game progressed — how many runs are scored, who hit, who strikes out. Figuring out what plays we wanted to focus on and which were not as important allowed us to partition the narrative. The architecture of the baseball game itself provided a nice rigid structure that allowed us to be more creative.

Q. Your decision to structure Eephus over the course of one day creates a series of surprising compositions throughout the film. How does camerawork inform your approach to storytelling?

A. For better or worse, I cannot get away from envisioning how each scene is set-up when I’m writing it. If I’m reading someone else’s script — and I’m a very slow reader because of this — my mind naturally creates pictures for each scene. I’ve been a DP for a long time and at first I thought I’d shoot this film in addition to directing it. Over the course of rehearsing, I realized that was not feasible. Too much was demanded of my attention, so I brought in a very good friend of mine, Greg Tango.

But I did all the scouting myself and once I landed on this location, I knew I needed to spend a lot of time there on my own. I took a ton of pictures, and then I started to build storyboards around the photographs that I took. I went from the beginning of the script to the end and shot the angle that I thought would make most sense. Then, I photoshopped figures into the frame. So, I had a very solid idea of how this film would be visually communicated and was able to communicate that with Tango ahead of the shoot.

Q. Eeephus makes it clear that the disappearance of a baseball field corresponds with the hollowing out of American traditions and working-class recreational activities. What inspired you to make this the focus of your film?

A. Recreational activities, such as these, become deprioritized for people as they age, especially among working-class people, of which I would consider my family. As economic realities intervene, you lose time to do the things you love, and I think that the spaces to do those things are increasingly disappearing in America because if there is not a profit motive, there’s less and less implication for those spaces to exist. This is just a natural result of late capitalism in its ugliest form.

Third spaces, as they’re called, are places where you can form a bond and community outside of your work and outside of your home. And those spaces have almost ceased to exist. They’re an interest of mine and of Tyler Taormina, whose films I have shot and who is also a close friend of mine. Naturally, these percolate amongst our small group of friends and we’re preoccupied with making films about this.

Parks themselves are more scarce nowadays. Partially, for me, this is a result of my observations living in a suburb and now living in a city. But, I live in a city that is full of privatized space and privatized parks. Even in my hometown, I’ve seen parks turn into developments. This is not just my screed against gentrification, but it’s about the inevitable fact that we occupy this planet, the human race is growing, times change, and therefore, we have less space to do the things that we love, as well as less time to do those things. This film is about trying to take stock of those things — about being present and aware that they disappear, and trying to carve out time for myself, and hopefully viewers, to reflect on that.

Q. Who, or what, do you think is the future of filmmaking?

A. I have noticed, in a lot of conversations, that independent films that are $5 million and more — which is still considered low budget in Hollywood — have diminishing profit opportunities, and that investors are much more frightened to put money into those sorts of things because it’s too risky. We [Omnes Films] find ways to make movies for very cheap that don’t look cheap, and I’m not saying this to toot our own horn, but I think that we’ll see more and more films under $2 million while we weather this very precarious time for independent film.

And, we don’t want to make mumblecore films. At some point, that may have been seen as the future of cinema, but I think resourceful uses of smaller amounts of money will be the way to continue to make movies that are personal and idiosyncratic because it’s less of a risk for people at a time when no one is throwing $10 million at the next small town character-study.

The future of cinema is not these overly-conceptualized, highly-budgeted “elevated” genre films. The future of cinema is always going to be with personal and idiosyncratic visions, it’s just that the nature of how those visions are put to screen has changed and people need to be able to adapt and make them for less resources. Hopefully, we weather that storm, things change, and more resources become available for everyone.

Q. What have you been listening to lately?

A. The new record by Sam Amidon, who is a Vermont folk musician that I really love. Folk music is a limited way to describe what he does, but he does re-interpret a lot of old folks songs and finds new forms for them.

Last night, I was at a show for Hamilton Leithauser, who’s a musician and frontman of The Walkmen, of 2000s indie-rock fame, or partial fame at least. We licensed his music for the trailer in Eephus and he came through LA last night, so I was listening to his music all over again to get excited for that.

Q. What’s the last film you saw and loved?

A. Pilgrim, Farewell. I was briefly in New York a couple weeks ago and saw it at Film Forum on a beautiful print. I really fell in love with it. It’s a gorgeous, under-recognized film. I think it was made for television and resigned to obscurity.

It’s like a Maurice Pialat film. I found it to be like The Mouth Agape, but less overtly somber and a lot more cruel — and with a lot more dialogue as well. That film really floored me.

Q. What is a project that you’d like to make someday, however impossible it may seem now?

A. I don’t think that far ahead or on that grand of a scale. If I have a film idea, it’s because I know I can have a shot at producing it. It’s a function of thinking within my means as an independent filmmaker.

But, there’s always been something kicking around in my head about the missions in California. I got very interested in the different missions across the state and going to them. But period pieces are something I usually avoid, because I know they are going to cost too much money. But I do think, “Wouldn’t a film about Franciscan monks coming to California and the genocide that occurred be interesting?” It’s a very heavy topic, but I think that maybe if Paul Thomas Anderson continued on the path of exploring California’s history he could eventually get there. But if he isn’t going to get there, maybe I could get there with a bigger budget.

Q. What image would you like to end this interview with?

Taken in 2023, in Boothbay Harbor, Maine as the seed for a new film idea (which I’m now writing) was growing.