We interviewed filmmaker Carson Lund on his debut directorial feature Eephus, a film about a small-town baseball team who has to reckon with inevitable change. The film premiered at the 2024 Director’s Fortnight as part of the 77th Cannes Film Festival.
Eephus follows two community baseball teams in a small suburb as they play their last game together. The field they play on is set to be demolished very soon, and all players are aware of the finality of the game. The film follows the course of the game, set in the same location: past a few setbacks at the beginning, all players get into the groove of things—but the game drags on for far longer than anyone expects, and the innings bleeds into the night. However, most of the players continue playing out of sheer ritual, even in the pitch darkness.
Baseball is a game that offers less glory to individual plays, which most filmmakers seemingly choose to ignore—Lund leans into this fully, emphasizing the dry moments that result from standing and waiting around the field. Most of the players are middle-aged, and despite a clear fondness for one another, seem not to know how to interact outside of joking and ribbing, which they do often to fill the time. This makes for a rapid comedy style that is fun to watch, though tinged with a certain longing for greater connection.
Eephus balances these high-energy game moments and dialogue with the intermittent mundanity of a baseball game, providing an up-and-down pacing structure that keeps things interesting. With nearly the entirety of the runtime taking place in a single location, the audience gets the impression that nothing exists beyond the field—and that may as well be that way. For the characters, the field is all they’ve ever known, and the movie ends before they have to leave it.
Ryan Yau: A lot of people consider baseball to be boring to watch. How did you make the film compelling without sacrificing the integrity of the sport?
Carson Lund: If I can dramatize it and show the poetics of it, the nuances of it, people will hopefully come around. But that’s not, of course, my goal: what I want is to capture this very particular ritual that baseball represents for people in the suburbs. If you play a game like this—any game—there’s a camaraderie that can develop and a certain identity that you foster that only happens on that field with those particular people.
Ryan Yau: Why did you choose to make a film about baseball?
Carson Lund: There has historically never been a clock in baseball, so it follows its own pace and it creates its own gradual, evolving drama. There is a kinship between baseball and good cinema. I really think every game has its own unique flow based on the people in it—they’re artists, with how they stretch and condense time. I chose baseball because it gives you that feeling that you are very much in the moment.
Ryan Yau: How did you bring the pacing of a baseball game into the structure of the film?
Carson Lund: Baseball is all about these long periods of stasis and waiting, and then something happens and it’s very quick, jolting, and significant, then it’s back to the waiting. I saw this as a corollary to just life, that we’re always waiting for something to happen—like Cannes, now we’re here and it’s big and dramatic, and then it shoots your life off in this trajectory, but then I’ll be back home and in my room again.
Michael Granados: I noticed the scope aspect ratio, which I don’t see first-time filmmakers use often. Did you always have this aspect ratio in mind?
Carson Lund: Because of the width of the baseball field, the width of a dugout, how far people are from one another, it wouldn’t make sense to do it any other way. I liked that there was this tension between the epic quality that’s afforded by the cinemascope and the mundane, low-key happenings on the field. It’s like the André Bazin school of thought, of watching time pass in a frame, and characters move around one another, not with a cut but with space, with the way that someone moves to another person or looks at another person. It’s not theatrical, it’s just wonderful use of space, so I really wanted to load these frames up with characters. They are one and the same when they’re together on this field, so we wanted to reflect that visually.
Ryan Yau: How did you go about capturing the look of baseball in the film?
Carson Lund: It’s a sport so steeped in Americana. I wanted to have these beautiful, simple uniforms, and a mix of different generations of the same team uniform. We got the blue team, we got the red team—iconic, simple, and set against the green grass, the blue sky, and the glorious fall leaves. I think it’s such a beautiful visual palette to play with. But the reason I wanted to do it in autumn is because autumn also has that lingering feeling of dread, because the winter’s coming in America. The suburbs are already an isolating place, and then the winter makes it even more isolating. Although it’s so beautiful, there’s this sense of transience and decay that I wanted to root the film in.
Ryan Yau: Many of the characters in the film are older with mostly stagnant lives. Was the changes in their lives something you wanted to explore?
Carson Lund: A lot of suburban people at that age believe their lives are set. It’s fiction that they tell themselves, that, well, this is it for me. I have this job, and I get this one day a week to have fun with people around me, and that’s it. I think that’s a really unfortunate outcome of late capitalist, suburban hellscape America, right? They have this opportunity to go do something else, because they love each other as teammates, and they don’t know how to. They’re stuck and repressed, and they don’t know how to move forward beyond just making jokes, the same jokes they’ve made forever. We’re trying to create a world in the film where the environment feels constricted, where the opportunities of this kind of activity are minimal, and that’s not their fault, but they are victims of it, and they’re trying to cope.
The interview was conducted by Ryan Yau and Michael Granados. Our reporters are on the ground in Cannes, France, to bring you exclusive content from the 77th Cannes Film Festival—explore our coverage here.
