Earlier this week I spoke to Marq about his new film, THE DIAMOND KING, about the life and art of Dick Perez, who has created some of the most iconic baseball paintings ever. We spoke about the film, art, baseball and lot of other things. As with all of the talks we’ve had the conversations begin going in one direction and then wanders.
What follows is a good portion of our discussion. I trimmed it down so that it stayed more or less on point.
Before I let you dive into our discussion I want to again than Marq Evans for taking the time to talk and for making a wonderful film.
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| Dick Perez and Marq Evans |
STEVE: Hello, Marq.
MARQ: Hey Steve.
STEVE: You all set for the festival this weekend?
MARQ: Yeah, pretty much. It's the first movie where I've been personally involved with some of the deliverables. I made my own DCP, which I've never done before.
I'm trying to do something differently on this project that I think will be good for me, and hopefully good for the project too, but it's making me a little nervous doing it all myself.
STEVE: At least that way you'll be sure nothing gets screwed up.
MARQ: Well, yeah, I mean, I did go and test the DCP at my local theater, it played, it looked good, it sounded good, but it's just like, oh boy, there's a lot of extra stuff going on here, but it's all good.
STEVE: You had a couple of preview screenings already for the film. How did you screen those, if you were just making the DCP print now?
MARQ: Those were four work in progress screenings. The movie is a little bit different now. I think 50% of the music was done, the other music was still temp, and then recently, I cut out a couple minutes of the movie, which the version you saw. That is the version that will be out in the spring.
One of the screenings was at a big baseball trading card convention that gets 100,000 people that go there, so I partnered with them this past summer for a sneak peek. One was at SABR, which is the Society for American Baseball Research. They have their convention, so I did a sneak peek there in Minneapolis, and then we did one at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. Have you been there?
STEVE: I've never been to Cooperstown.
MARQ: I had never been, and I wanted to go my whole life, and so we shot, some of the movie there last year, and then we did a screening there in September. And then also, we just did one last month (ed: November 2024) at the Negro Leagues Baseball Team Theater in Kansas City. But those were all just basically Quick Time, playing it from a laptop. The Hall of Fame's got a great theater, but they were able to plug it into that.
STEVE: I would love to have gone to see it at some of those places, because I just would have liked to have seen the Q&As.
MARQ: Totally. They were all really great in their own way, and way different than a film festival. I'm sure there will be some baseball-loving people at Palm Springs that are going to come see it, but it's also probably just a lot of film lovers, documentary lovers, maybe some art people, whereas those screenings this summer, it was just baseball people.
It was a really good experience.
STEVE: If nothing else, you got a sense of it. I‘ve been told a lot of times with documentaries, the filmmakers don't always get a sense of how it plays for an audience, whereas with narrative films, I find that, at least with the people I've talked to, they'll screen the narratives a bit more for people than with documentaries.
MARQ And it wasn't even intended to be like as a preview screening It was intended just to take advantage of those crowds, especially with the convention and SABR, to kind of create awareness of it. And the things that I ended up cutting out of the film I noticed during the screenings, like, yeah, I should probably cut those things.
And so they ultimately ended up being kind of a test screening as well. But it was great. The audiences really loved it.
You know that was great to see. You know, I got the laughs where I was hoping. People laughed and people came away loving Dick Perez.
You know, ultimately that's when I was hoping for.
STEVE: I should have asked this at the start because I don't even know if I should be talking to you. What's your favorite baseball team?
MARQ: The Seattle Mariners.
STEVE: Okay, you're a Mariners fan. I can talk to you.
MARQ: That's probably not threatening to too many people because we've never even been to a World Series.
STEVE: I figured you were going to do one of the the LA ones. I was not expecting Seattle.
MARQ: I live Washington State. And you're a, you're a Mets guy.
STEVE: Yes.
MARQ: It's a good time to be a Mets fan. I mean, you know, they are looking solid. It'll be interesting to see how they continue.
STEVE: I’m a Mets fan because the family was originally Brooklyn Dodgers fans. They moved over. My father's aunt was a troublemaker and she would start brawls in Ebbets Field.
MARQ: Dick is in Brooklyn. He lives about a mile from where the old Ebbets Field was. It's an apartment complex now and it's huge. It's called Ebbets Field.
STEVE: How did you end up talking to Dick Perez?
MARQ: It all just started with an email.
My son got into baseball a couple years ago and he got into baseball card collecting. So we just pulled out my old cards and came across a bunch of the Diamond Kings that I had collected of some of my favorite players. And there was just that feeling of nostalgia that came over me with those cards.
And I got curious about the artists. I don't remember ever thinking about the artists of those cards when I was a kid collecting them. But that was my first curiosity of what's the story behind the artist Dick Perez.
So I looked him up and he's got an amazing website at DickPerez.com. But I just kind of got lost in a little bit because, you know, all of his art is on the website. So I realized he did way more than just these Diamond Kings.
He was the official artist of the Hall of Fame for 20 years. He's painted thousands of paintings, the whole history of baseball. And so right away I thought, well, maybe I could do a documentary that's part Dick Perez biography and part history of baseball through his work.
So that was the initial idea. And, that was before talking to him at all. That was just kind of thoughts on a weekend. And I emailed him. I found an email address for him. I emailed him.
CLAYDREAM was just coming out at the time. So this was June 2022. I was going to be in New York for the theatrical premiere of CLAYDREAM.
STEVE: Yeah, when I met you...
MARQ: Exactly. Right. That was it.
I stayed a couple extra days and ended up doing the interviews with Dick. But in the initial email, he was like, “hey, you know, this sounds cool. Let's talk.” So we had like an hour long phone conversation. We hit it off really well. And it was low pressure. I just said, why don't bring my camera and I'll stay for a couple of extra days. And if we enjoy it, then we'll keep going. And that was that. So he was just like, yeah, that sounds good. Let's do it. The idea was in June and in August, we started shooting.
Originally, I thought I would just interview Dick Perez, just do kind of the Errol Morris thing and just interview the subject. And I realized that I needed to expand that a little bit.
But the first couple of days I was just, going to interview him. I printed out a bunch of his prints. A bunch of his working prints. And we went through a bunch of that as well.
That's where it all started.
STEVE: How much, how much did you interview him?. I mean, you know, you've got him in a several locations where he's talking and going through art.
MARQ: Yes, we started the very first day. August 2022 would have been essentially two days, of interviews, which I think included him looking at the prints in his studio. That was two days.
And then three or four months later, I came back and did another interview, another day of interview at his place. We basically set up the same setup and had him wear the same clothes. So it's kind of like a take two of the master interview. And then the other thing kind of came later, like Cooperstown. I realized, well, that came from wanting to reunite him with Peggy Steele, his partner. And I thought Cooperstown would be a great place to do that. And so we did that there and made a day out of that as well, too. But the master interview stuff, that was over the course of about a year, but maybe four or five days.
“Picasso doesn't have one. Matisse doesn't have one.” I think he said that the first day. That came on the very first day of filming. And dang, dang, I just thought that was amazing. I loved it.
STEVE: How did you decide on the narration? I ask because it's one of the best narrated films that I've seen.
MARQ: Thank you for saying that. That's awesome. And again, I loved it, too.
I mean, I don't remember when or where or how the idea came up. But I do remember from the very, very beginning, I wanted to have an on-camera narrator. And I think it's something that I've been wanting to do for a little while.
I had the idea for projects that haven't got going yet or haven't been made yet. The first idea I remember for this came from, there's this true crime documentary that I've been trying to make for like five years based in Kodiak, Alaska. And just an amazing story that I really want to tell, but I just haven't been able to get it picked up.
THE DIAMOND KING stemmed from a lot of disappointment of projects like this one in Kodiak, Alaska, that haven't been picked up. And I had one about Stoic philosophy that we put together and just tried to go the more traditional way. It just hasn't gone anywhere. So I wanted to have a project that I could do without help, and I could do without another production company or having to raise too much money or any of that.
And that's really where THE DIAMOND KING started. But that was a little tangent there. This Kodiak, Alaska project is where I had the idea of an on-camera narrator where I thought that maybe I could create a character. And that particular true crime story has a lot of surrealism in it and there's psychics that are actually a part of the real life story. And I thought maybe I would create this character that was based off of my main character in another place, essentially. It would be an on-camera narrator, but eventually that character would have its own arc as well.
It was kind of the way that I conceived that. And it was partially based on the Wes Anderson movie MOONRISE KINGDOM. There's that documentary that takes place during that film and there's an on-camera documentary narrator in that movie. So that I think is kind of the seed of inspiration for it. It didn't happen with this Kodiak, Alaska or it hasn't happened yet, but I still like the idea of having an on-camera narrator. And so that's where it started.
I liked the idea. I thought about who's going to write it. I got connected to Joe Posnanski, whose writing I love. He did the Baseball 100. And he liked the idea. We decided to have these moments that are the history of baseball and we try to connect them as the film goes on. Joe wrote it over the course of a few months in between books, just a bunch of back and forth.
And then getting John Ortiz on board was due to one of my best friends Tracy Piippo. He and John were next door neighbors. And so I told him about this idea to have on camera narrator and I didn't have anybody in mind yet. He was like, well, you just have my buddy John do it. And I was like, oh yeah, that could be cool. So he introduced us and John and I hit it off and he loved the project. It turned out he was wanting to do something kind of like this.And he's a big baseball guy. And so it just worked perfect. And John was amazing.
We shot that in a day in L.A. And we did it at XYZ.
I love it. I mean, that John's performance was so good. I really loved it.
STEVE: It lifts the film up. Everybody seems to going away from on screen narration. But it works. And Ortiz is so good. He knits the whole film together. He brings the history together with the stories.
Forgive me for saying this, but I mean this as the highest compliment feels like a footnote film that belongs in Ken Burns' BASEBALL. I know It's kind of lazy to say that, to connect it to that, because the film stands on its own. But it’s the easiest way to I explain this to a general audience to many people Ken Burns is the pinnacle of documentary filmmaking.
But it stands on its own. It's a brilliant film.
MARQ: You know, it's funny, when I first got into documentary filmmaking, my tendency was to rail against the Ken Burns it's such a singular style, and it's like the Kleenex, you know, like everybody knows. I've always liked Ken Burns' movies, but I don't want to make movies like Ken Burns. But over the last five years especially, as I teach a lot of his stuff I see what a master of the craft he is in so many ways, and he makes it look so easy.
And so that is a high compliment. I probably wouldn't have taken it as a compliment ten years ago, but now I'm like, yeah, that's as good as it gets.
STEVE: I'm comparing that for other people, but the film stands on its own. It's not a Ken Burns film. In a weird way, it doesn't feel like one of your other films.
MARQ: Well, there's not a whole lot of conflict in there, is there?
STEVE: No, but even so you've done literally three different films, and if I put them down, if I showed your three films for audiences and cut out the credit, I don't think you could connect them up.
And that's an even higher compliment than the Ken Burns thing, because Ken Burns, if you put on a Ken Burns film, you know it's a Ken Burns film. And with your films, if you take, CLAYDREAM or THE GLAMOUR or this, they all stand on their own as completely different and unique films that are fantastic.
I mean, in all honesty, this is one of the reasons I love you as a filmmaker, is that you're doing things, and you’re going in unexpected ways, and you're giving us unexpected subjects, and each film is completely different, because you don't lean on what you've done before. It's like, okay, this is this subject. And that, as a filmmaker is rare. You're like perhaps three other filmmakers who are different every other time. None of your films seem like each other.
MARQ: Well, thank you, Steve, that's probably my favorite thing that anybody's ever said about my work. I really appreciate that. And, I love to hear it, because, you know, at times, you're like, you know, we all, every filmmaker, I'm sure, has to rip themselves off a lot, and I feel sometimes like, I am doing that, because you're leaning on your experiences, but I'm glad to know that the finished output doesn't come across that way.
STEVE: How much research into the history of the game did you have to do?
MARQ: I did a bit of research, and a lot of that came from Dick. He has an amazing book called The Immortal, and it's all of his art. It's got player stuff as well, so I leaned on that a lot because I'm making a movie about him, and with his work, so there was the research.
I learned so much about my favorite sport,. I love baseball, I've loved baseball my whole life. I grew up wanting to be a baseball player, and all that stuff. But I love it even more from making this movie, because of all of the stories, and stuff that I heard, and players that I wasn't even familiar with, and all the game players that I had no idea about. So there was a lot of research for sure, but it was probably more about, as it related to Dick Perez and his work.
And when it came to the narration talking to Joe Posnanski, who wrote a book called The Baseball 100. It's the history of baseball through its 100 greatest players 100 players but we learn about thousands of players, and you finish that book, and you learn about the whole history of baseball.
I kind of liked the idea that in a 90-minute movie, we’d learn about Dick Perez, but also leave viewers thinking “I learned a lot about the game of baseball too.: Beyond what happens on the field necessarily, and like, wins and losses, and stats, but like, the essence of the game. And so, so it's just a new appreciation, and a further appreciation of the game of baseball.
STEVE: That's what I love about the film is that I'm sitting there, I'm watching, and I'm thinking “I never knew that” I love that you're not getting the he same moments over and over again that you always hear about. It’s because of the artwork, so you hear the way the stories relate to the artwork and you're not getting things that you expect.
That's the thing about listening to Perez talk about his artwork, he's talking about, “I set this up, this painting like Matisse, whatever. And you're suddenly going “that's a great baseball picture” but then you're going like, “oh my God,” making other connections especially if you know the work of the other artist.
You're doing the similar thing with the history of baseball, where there's all these stories and stuff that are coming in that are deepening our appreciation for his art and what he's doing, and it's, it's just amazing.
MARQ: That's a big goal of the movie, just to show off as much of Dick's art as possible. And that was another thing with the on-camera area and the screen, is I realized it's one more way to not only tell stories of baseball, but to show off even more of Dick's work.
And then the other side of it became, became the animation with his work. I wanted the work to move, I wanted to do something with it, but obviously we didn't want to distract from the work, we wanted to try to elevate it. And the animator that I worked with, Dalan McNabola, brought so much life to the film and even more beauty.
STEVE: I'm thinking of the projections and the full screen images I was wondering how big is Dick’s artwork? Does he have a standard size that he works with?
MARQ: There's not a standard size. A lot of it is probably is smaller than you would imagine. His biggest pieces,like that Aaron's Judge that's in the movie, it's probably like 40 by 40. And then the pieces that are at the Citizen Bank Park in Philly, at the Bellevue Stadium. Those are on the bigger side, but like, you know, the Hall of Fame portraits that he did, and the Diamond Keeps portraits, I mean, those were all like, you know, 12 by 8 or something on the smaller side. But it really may range. He doesn't do anything massive.
STEVE: The reason I'm asking is as we're talking, I'm visualizing the film, and you see Perez with the paintings, and you see the paintings on the wall, but then the screen is filled with his art, or where Ortiz is standing there, and there's the projections on either side of him. And it's filling my head that there are these are massive paintings. But I know it’s an illusion.
MARQ: Yeah, exactly. And, we had to make decisions to crop a certain way to fit perfectly on those screens. Those screens make the work bigger than most of his paintings.
STEVE: That's always the thing. I'll go to the Met or Museum of Modern Art in New York, and you see some of the paintings that you've grown up with, and you get thrown off because you think, say, Persistence of Vision is just going to be this huge painting, and it's this little one, or the size of Starry Night is going to be some other size.
MARQ: Yeah, Starry Night's a good example. For me, a couple years ago, seeing Mona Lisa, I had no idea that it was such a small painting. In my mind it was this massive thing.
I saw Starry Night this summer for the first time at MOMA. And then, not only did making this film give me even more of an appreciation of baseball, but art. You know, I went through both MoMA and the Met this summer, two different trips, and seeing paintings and paintings of painters that Dick was inspired by, like seeing Sargent and some of these, that was really cool. And seeing the painting, Matisse, of the dancers that go around in the circle, that was the inspiration for Richie Ashburn painting. It made me look at all of that art there in a new way, which has been a lot of fun, too.
STEVE: Did you get to sit and talk to him about art beyond the baseball or his art?
MARQ: Mostly related to the artists that really inspired him or taught him. So you got John Singer Sargent.
You know, he's pretty much self-taught just by buying books and looking at these painters' work. So we talked about him a lot in that relation. And then just art, you know, his creative process.
He just turned 84 now, last week or two weeks ago. And his process is still the same. You know, he goes down, he wakes up at 5, 5.30, and he goes down and starts painting every day. You hear from writers, they write every day. And so I try to take a page out of that.
My next project I'm editing right now, and it's just, okay, every day. You know, it's every day. I wake up early and I go to work. That's what I do. I edit. And so it was really... I feel like I learned a lot from him just as an artist as well.
STEVE: Where are you going after Palm Springs with this?
MARQ: Nothing's really lined up right now. It's part of a totally different approach with this film where I was starting it with an idea of just interviewing one person because that was a way to keep the budget way down.
I'm going to self-release this film. I'm going to try to do everything.I'm going to try to do a lot of things independently. And a lot of things have been hard, without having as much of a team. And even just today, I emailed a publicist, kind of half that I know, kind of having second thoughts about doing all my own PR.
But I'm kind of ready to get the film out. I'm sure a festival run would benefit the film. But I also... I'm kind of just feeling like the film is ready to come out.We did those sneak peeks. We've done a pretty good job building an audience of baseball people that are excited about it.
I will probably consider a handful of festivals.And I've talked to a couple of them that I've been to before. But I don't think I'm going to wait to release it. I think we'll release it in the spring and I'll probably do it at least direct to audience and the TVOD. Probably as soon as like March or April and just doing those through my own, you know, little company.
I'm ready for it to be out. I'm excited for it to be out.
That's kind of where I'm at right now. We've got to finish the final mix still even if Palm Springs version is not the final sound mix because the composer couldn't get into the studio for the final stuff right away. So we've got to wait and then it's pretty much ready to release.
STEVE:It's not going to be done for the weekend, is it?
MARQ:Not the final mix. So basically, 99.99% of people would never know.
STEVE: It sounded good to me.
MARQ: We have to do the final mixes of the music and then the final mix of the film as well, too. And then we're good to go. And then it's like probably we've got an eight-week turnaround to release it from the moment we deliver everything. So that's my main focus more than additional festivals is getting it up and out.
STEVE: It's a baseball film, so spring training would be great. Opening day, even.
MARQ: Right before the season starts. Opening day, yeah. Although I don't want it to be everybody's watching baseball, they won't have time to watch the movie.
STEVE: But I would think you would rather have it during baseball season than not because in all probability if you were not releasing it yourself, somebody would tell you wait until baseball season.
MARQ: Tthat's exactly what I'm thinking.
STEVE: When you come to New York, let me know, we'll go to dinner. And bring your son because he was a blast when I met him.
MARQ That would be amazing. I'll definitely take you up on that.
