While on assignment writing a football story for the Los Angeles Times Down Under in Melbourne, Australia, I had the good fortune to catch up recently with noted Aussie director, Fred Schepisi.
With credits like The Russia House, Barbarosa, Empire Falls and Roxanne and busily editing his latest picture, The Secret River, the native of Victoria spent some time in his Melbourne high-rise to discuss his well-received fish-out-of-water sports comedy Mr. Baseball. The picture features Tom Selleck as a fading baseball player traded to a Japanese team and has trouble fitting into that culture.
-Talk about the origins of this project and how it came to you.
Fred Schepisi
It came out from the roots of that real knockabout comedy Major League. Similar principles as a broad comedy.
Mr. Baseball had run into a little trouble as it came at a time when Universal Studios was taken over by Matsushita, the Japanese conglomerate. Universal got politically worried that Mr. Baseball needed to be more sensitive to cultural nuances, more so than if it was an Australian-American film.
We came along, Ed Solomon and I went to Japan and did a lot of research. We came back and between us we kind of re-wrote it. But our film had much more of a cultural clash.
Another thing was that Tom Selleck had script approval. I couldn’t quite understand back then. So they brought in another writer named Kevin Wade. He ended up rewriting it as we were going along which is really unnerving. So in the end it became a little bit of both and something beyond the traditional coach/player clash. I liked my cultural look because it has more fun inherent in it.
I think it is a good film, but a little more conventional than we set out to make it.
-It does seem odd for an Australian director had you been a baseball fan?
Nope. And I don’t even like cricket very much (laughs). We often joke here (australia) if they make a film and don’t understand the game, you go ‘why are they doing it?’. I was aware of that pitfall because I think when you grow up with a game it is kind of like all these rules you have grown up with it and know it from the inside out. It was one of my concerns because I had not played baseball. I didn’t know it from the inside out.
So you did have some apprehensions?
Yes. Though I had seen quite a bit of it on tv spending time in America.
It was important that every body engaged in this film apart from me did understand baseball and then I immersed myself in it.
Tom Selleck of course is a bit of a baseball fanatic he likes working out with baseball clubs. I also had to understand the Japanese perspective of baseball.
I was told by a good source, that test cricketers in the early 70s used to play baseball as a winter sport like the Chapel Bros in Queensland-had you heard of that?
That is probably right. We’ve had incredible bowlers. Dennis Lillee. He learned after a while that for better results you can combine his talent with a bit of brain. He said he had a desire to go and do baseball. There were certain cricket players who would have been good in baseball. Both as pitchers and some with a good eye for hitting.
-You mentioned you and Ed in the writing aspect, talk about the writing as there were alot involved – Theo Pelletier (story) & John Junkerman (story) plus 3 with screenplay credits- Gary Ross (screenplay) and Monte Merrick with Kevin Wade who you said was brought it after you and Ed. What were the challenges that had to be overcome before the script was ready? Was there a lot of re-writing during the production? What caused that?
When I came in there was a script. But basically we moved quite a bit away from that. More rounded, more of the Japanese side. We did use some of it, but to be honest I can remember how much. But really Ed Solomon and I kind of rewrote it then David Wade came in and re-wrote it but he only went to a certain point because he had only three weeks and at the end of that contracted period, he stopped working. So we had to tie them all together.
So it is very strange a bit like that old Hollywood thing like get a draft, hire another writer that shows a serious lack of understanding about how writers work and producers usually work, producer and director must have a very clear vision of the picture that they are going for and get to that point. Well you can really work well but first you have to get a writer that really understands the material. And is passionate about it. Put themselves into it. Then you work together. But this business of getting different writers saying you need a ‘new voice’ or this writer is better at dialogue or that guy is better at action. But in fairness
By the time of the production, Ed was gone. It was really up to me to make the rest of it work.
-Tell us a little about the casting process and perhaps some other actors who were considered
Selleck was already engaged with the project when I came on. I believe Dennis Haysbert was also on. He played that voodoo man player in Major League.
-Talk about your working relationship with the star Tom Selleck, how did that collaboration mesh? Was he a big fan of baseball?
Laugh, pause politically correct response- He was extremely helpful getting the baseball thing right. Getting the American pride thing right. I think Tom has had a very big career in television. He never really struck it as large in movies so he was a bit nervous and sometimes the tension comes forward during the process but in general he was perfect for it.
-Ken Takakura, (Black Rain – 1989) I heard was called the ”Clint Eastwood of Japan”. He really was terrific I thought in your film. Talk about casting for that role and what it was like working with Ken.
This was Ken’s 200th film. He is like a rock star in Japan. He and his colleague had this saying ’I turn up every morning for work Schepisi takes me to the edge of the cliff, he says ‘jump’ and I jump’. (laughs)
He has a good understanding of baseball in Japan.
-You shot a lot of game action in Japan. How was that achieved logistically as well as getting down on film the action with a good sense of verisimilitude?
We planned everything out. We knew what all the structural points of the games were. Where the tension would be. You have to have that completely understood so inside you can concentrate on the characters and their interactions.
It is really like doing a character drama inside a particular format.
So we absolutely storyboarded everything because when we were shooting the game we literally had 3 hours, but we’d rehearse all day. Get all the game plays down. Work out all the camera angles as per the storyboard and that everyone knew what we were wanting to get done.
We were connected through Dentsu (advertising giant) and they organized 20, 000 people ( to be the crowd backdrop) All confirmed by phone which I thought was amazing.
Then a typhoon came. We had to cancel one night and we set up for the next night and had 15,000 people/. We went ahead then another storm that nearly reached typhoon levels came so at one point we had to cancel. If the wind got to a certain speed they cancelled the train. There was only one train that connected to the other stations. So I yelled at my line producer ‘get buses!’.
He ran off trying to get them without a clue as to how.
There was a big wind clock on the grounds and if it hit certain level that got people’s attention.
All the while we were shooting we had fan/extra competitions with giveaways that Ken played like a game show host to keep them entertained. Even I had to do it sometimes.
So we had to make an announcement that anyone needing to get that last train before the others were cancelled you need to leave now, but ‘we’d like you to stay but know you will be walking home to wherever you live in terrible conditions’
So half the people left. So from then on we shot a lot of dugout shots, between legs, using two bodies to shoot through moving the crowd around.
But the Japanese crowd were fantastic. Very orderly.
But if you want to see something amusing, have a look in the background I think toward the middle game in the film, you can see umbrellas blowing inside out.
We had 25 typhoons while we were shooting the film. Not during the baseball action all but overall. Someone chirped in we should’ve had a Shinto ceremony. After the 25th typhoon we DID have a Shinto ceremony.
The film was shot in Nagoya with a tiny bit in Tokyo.
-What were the biggest challenges for you on this project, was it the weather?
Well we didn’t expect it to be the weather. The original was to be shot in January when it was going to be snowing which would’ve been exceptionally difficult. The typhoons that hit us 25 times was something not predictable.
There was a cultural challenge learning different ways of working, bringing together the different kinds of crews together. Me understanding baseball. We worked that out rather quickly and it was fun.
I think the fact we had to shoot so much material within a 3 hour period was always going to be a big challenge. But the trick with that is we used 5 cameras, but then again you can only put so many cameras on certain things. I think we got a record of having 95 setups in the three hours on one of those nights.
Then we really were marshalling chess pieces based on our detailed storyboards, but it really was speed chess.
It would have been easier to do a baseball film years ago, but because television covers it so well what are you going to do in a movie apart from the drama to make it better.
So we’d do stuff like 4 people holding the camera and running the camera through the batter into the baseball glove. We were “being the ball’.
We tried different things like that.
-What were the initial reviews generally like?
The wonderful thing about comedy is you know if it is working or not..very quickly (laughs)
Audiences were laughing and some standing up and cheering from when some of the game action took place.
We had a bit more of the awkward cultural differences written in but didn’t make it. One of my favorite scenes is when Tom goes to the coach’s house and smoking and drinking and also the meal where they are slurping soup.
Tom was terrific, he had a good sense of comedic timing.
-What are you most proud of with Mr. Baseball?
Hard to say.
I tried to tell Universal make it more unconventional by increasing the fish-out-of-water element. We had more stuff along the lines of the soup slurping. Taking the Japanese traditions and messing with them.
We had a scene that the team went out for drinking as a group bonding and the little translator but like many Japanese he couldn’t handle hard liquor well so after a few bar hops we had him in on of those capsule hotels. So you are looking down a line of these small sleeping compartments. Halfway down you see Tom’s legs sticking out second joke is camera comes down turns around and sees the interpreter curled up climbing in after him. Unfortunately the studio didn’t want that filmed and that is a lot of what I wanted to do.
-Are there any sports stories that interest you as a film backdrop?
Don’t think I’d like to do motor racing I’d be too nervous. The hardest thing about that you have a camera on the driver and a camera out the front and back what do you do in film that makes it more exciting than the race? The only thing that makes it more exciting is –who is the person?
You mentioned earlier, Somebody Up There Likes Me, why is that film good? It is because you are completely engaged in that character.
