Director Lee Cipolla on the making of Rally Caps

The story with Rally Caps goes back to 2008, around the time the book was released and co-writer Stephen Cutler sent it to me in the mail. I had always wanted to make a baseball movie and was a huge fan of Sandlot and Angels in the Outfield, two Disney classics from the 90s. Kids and baseball, summer and family – I just always wanted to work in that space. While I felt that this story had a really fresh perspective, I thought that a baseball movie would take a lot of money and a big production company to back it. Making the movie felt like a pipe dream.

Fast-forward about a decade, when I got back in touch with Stephen. We tried to pitch the movie, but a big studio turned it down. Then 2020 came, and all of the screenplays and projects I had been working on stopped because of Covid. Like a lot of artists, I didn't know when things were going to open up or move again.

I took another look at Rally Caps and thought it would probably never get made. But I got inspired by a quote from director Jordan Peele: Write your favorite movie that you haven’t seen. It’s so simple but profound. A lot of times, we're trying to find something trendy or write things we think might impress people in the industry. But I really wanted to see this kind of family baseball movie and kept going.

The thing that always struck me about the story was the relationship between the main character, Jordy, and his friend, Lucas. Jordy is dealing with anxiety after a traumatic baseball injury. Lucas, who wears a cochlear implant, is a very confident kid. As a character, he’s one I hadn’t seen before and was pretty unique. With characters who are deaf or hard of hearing, I think that the trait has often been portrayed as their plight and an obstacle. With Lucas's character, he just happened to have a cochlear implant. It was like any other character trait – like having red hair or being tall. He’s also the mentor to our main character, not the other way around, which I thought was really interesting.

The first thing I was told was that this down-to-earth story was not going to be applicable to a wide audience without some contrived story line – like you can't just have a movie about people. But that's exactly what made it fresh to me and inspired me to get the project off the ground, even on a smaller budget. I liken Rally Caps to an indie film with this backdrop of summer, sports and kids. The story is also about things that could happen to real people.

This authenticity, I think, is very important in film. It takes me right out of a movie when I see an actor who is trying to portray something but clearly pretending. I do think there are certain traits where you should ideally cast people authentically. Here, it was important to have actors who knew firsthand about hearing loss. Colten Pride, who plays Lucas, has unilateral hearing loss and wears a cochlear implant. His sister Noelle, who plays a teammate, has bilateral hearing loss and got cochlear implant surgery when she was very young. And we were lucky enough to get their father, Curtis Pride – who’s deaf and used to play Major League Baseball – in a cameo role.

You know, in writing this story and making this movie, I learned to lean into what made each character unique. And I found that having the characters lean more into whatever challenges they were facing helped make them stronger characters – and maybe this applies to real life, too. I really thought about that and tried to personalize that as a creator and as a person. It’s something I took out of this experience that I think will stay with me.

At this point, I’m really looking forward to the film being out there and hopefully reaching people in different ways. The hope, too, is that the film will help normalize the technology used by real people. In the climactic scene, Lucas, the team’s catcher, uses the Phonak Roger On with the coach to talk about pitches and plays. The way we incorporated it makes it look cool, like a walkie-talkie, and truly adds to the story. So just as the scene normalizes the use of this technology, we hope it will carry over in culture and in the real world. The hope is that a child without hearing loss will watch this and think that it’s cool how someone with hearing loss can communicate. In that way, I think the film can help bring people together.