{"id":620639,"date":"2024-05-16T10:30:00","date_gmt":"2024-05-16T07:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/cannes-hidden-gem-elegiac-eephus-captures-the-meditative-quality-of-baseball\/"},"modified":"2024-05-16T10:30:00","modified_gmt":"2024-05-16T07:30:00","slug":"cannes-hidden-gem-elegiac-eephus-captures-the-meditative-quality-of-baseball","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/cannes-hidden-gem-elegiac-eephus-captures-the-meditative-quality-of-baseball\/","title":{"rendered":"#Cannes Hidden Gem: Elegiac\u00a0\u2018Eephus\u2019\u00a0Captures the \u201cMeditative\u201d Quality of Baseball"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\n \u201cHalf the time I was directing, I also had a glove on my hand,\u201d says filmmaker\u00a0Carson Lund\u00a0of making his feature directorial debut with the Cannes title\u00a0Eephus<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\n The film, which is premiering in Directors\u2019 Fortnight and is being sold worldwide by Film Constellation, follows a men\u2019s recreational New England baseball team as they play their final game<\/a> on their longtime field before its planned demolition.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n From\u00a0Pride of the Yankees<\/em>\u00a0to\u00a0Bull Durham<\/em>\u00a0to\u00a0Moneyball<\/em>, baseball has a long and varied onscreen tradition. For his part, Lund wanted to take a different app<\/a>roach. \u201cNo baseball film, I feel, has ever really captured the rhythms of the game and what it feels like to actually play it,\u201d says the director. \u201cA lot of these films are ultimately about single characters, protagonists who are undergoing some sort of transformation and self-enlightenment over the course of a narrative. It\u2019s classic Hollywood structure that just happens to be on a baseball field.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n Taking inspiration from his childhood playing baseball in New Hampshire, his recreational league in Los Angeles, and his dad\u2019s recreational league in New England, Lund hoped to make a film that used \u201cthe game itself as a template.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n \u201cThere\u2019s something about that pace of baseball, this meditativeness, and then sudden action that goes by so quick you can barely process it,\u201d he says. \u201cThat feels like it\u2019s very appropriate for this story of aging men in a crisis moment.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n By design, the entirety of\u00a0Eephus<\/em>\u00a0(the title is the name of a low-speed pitch that is particularly difficult for batters and is considered one of the rarest throws in the sport), takes place at a single location \u2014 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 as opposed to newer and now more common aluminum ones, and that wouldn\u2019t be overtaken by recreational soccer leagues during their October 2022 shoot.<\/p>\n

\n \u201cI looked at probably hundreds of fields in New England and visited probably about 50 of them,\u201d says the filmmaker of the hunt. He found his pick in Douglas, Massachusetts, with a field that at one time hosted an exhibition game between the Red Sox and the\u00a0Joe DiMaggio-era Yankees in the 1950s.<\/p>\n

\n The casting process was done remotely, with Lund and his team wanting to cast as locally as possible. \u201cI love regional specificity, so a New England accent and a face that feels like it\u2019s from New England \u2014 a working-class New Englander \u2014 that\u2019s what this movie\u2019s all about,\u201d he says. The cast \u2014 which includes the former Red Sox lefty pitcher\u00a0Bill \u201cSpaceman\u201d Lee\u00a0\u2014 came in with varying degrees of athletic ability: \u201cWhat we got in the film is this wonderful variety of different skill levels, and you really get a sense this is a movie about a small suburban league.\u201d (For eagle-eared Red Sox fans in the Cannes audience, the longtime radio announcer for Boston\u2019s team,\u00a0Joe Castiglione, plays a role in the film.)<\/p>\n

\n As for the film\u2019s visuals, Lund looked less to sports dramas and more toward\u00a0John Ford\u2019s midcentury Westerns, employing master shots as opposed to quick cuts. Given that the film takes place over the course of a single game, and the filming location meant the production had lots of natural light, he and his cinematographer were particularly conscious of lighting. \u201cEvery part of the day we\u2019d be shooting different parts of the film based on where the sun was at so that we had a certain continuity,\u201d says Lund.<\/p>\n

\n Despite the setting, title, and action of the film, Lund notes that\u00a0Eephus<\/em>\u00a0doesn\u2019t require viewers to possess an extensive knowledge of America\u2019s pastime. \u201cI do want audiences to see it\u2019s not an intimidatingly baseball-centric film.\u201d He insists, \u201cThis is ultimately a humanist character study, a movie about a time and a place.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

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Source<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cHalf the time I was directing, I also had a glove on my hand,\u201d says filmmaker\u00a0Carson Lund\u00a0of making his feature directorial debut with the Cannes title\u00a0Eephus. The film, which is premiering in Directors\u2019 Fortnight and is being sold worldwide by Film Constellation, follows a men\u2019s recreational New England baseball team as they play their final…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":620640,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/www.hollywoodreporter.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/05\/Eephus2-H-2024.jpg?w=1024","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[28928,147475,124783],"class_list":["post-620639","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-social-mediaa","tag-cannes","tag-cannes-2024","tag-international"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/620639","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=620639"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/620639\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/620640"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=620639"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=620639"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=620639"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}