“Half the time I was directing, I also had a glove on my hand,” says filmmaker Carson Lund of making his feature film debut with the Cannes title Eefhus.
The film that premieres Fourteen days of the directors and sold worldwide by Film Constellation, follows a New England recreational men's baseball team as they play their last game at their old field before its planned demolition.
By Pride of the Yankees Unpleasant Taurus Durham Unpleasant MoneyballBaseball has a long and varied tradition on screen. Lund, for his part, wanted to take a different approach. “No baseball movie, in my opinion, has ever really captured the rhythms of the game and what it feels like to actually play it,” the director says. “Many of these films are ultimately about individual characters, protagonists who undergo some kind of transformation and self-illumination over the course of a story. It's a classic Hollywood building that just happens to be on a baseball field.”
Inspired by his youth as a baseball player in New Hampshire, his recreational league in Los Angeles, and his father'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 baseball pace, this meditative nature and the sudden action that goes by so quickly that you can barely process it,” he says. “That feels like it's very appropriate for this story of aging men in a moment of crisis.”
The design makes it whole Eefhus (the title is the name of a slow-speed pitch that is particularly difficult for batters and is considered one of the rarest pitches in sports), and takes place in one 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 instead of newer and now more common aluminum bleachers, and that wouldn't be overtaken by recreational football leagues during their October 2022 taping.
“I've probably looked at hundreds of fields in New England and probably visited about 50 of them,” says the hunt filmmaker. He settled on Douglas, Massachusetts, with a field that once hosted an exhibition game between the Red Sox and the Joe DiMaggio-era Yankees in the 1950s.
The casting process was conducted remotely, with Lund and his team aiming to cast as locally as possible. “I like 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 is about,” he says. The cast – which included former Red Sox lefty pitcher Bill “Spaceman” Lee – came in with varying levels of athleticism: “What we got in the movie is this wonderful variety of different skill levels, and you really get the sense that this is . a film about a small suburban league.” (For eagle-eared Red Sox fans in the Cannes audience, Boston's team's longtime radio announcer Joe Castiglione has a role in the film.)
In terms of the film's visuals, Lund looked less to sports dramas and more to John Ford's mid-century westerns, using master shots instead of quick edits. Since the film takes place over the course of one game and the filming location ensured the production had plenty of natural light, he and his cinematographer were particularly conscious of lighting. “Each part of the day we shot different parts of the film depending on where the sun was, so we had some continuity,” says Lund.
Despite the film's setting, title, and action, Lund notes this Eefhus does not require viewers to have an extensive knowledge of America's pastimes. “I want the audience to see that it's not an intimidating baseball movie.” He emphasizes: “This is ultimately a humanistic character study, a film about a time and a place.”