Hundreds Of Beavers director Mike Cheslik on reviving the slapstick genre in the frozen Midwestern wilderness

If you’ve had a chance to catch Hundreds Of Beavers during its recent roadshow tour, or at any of the many festivals where it’s played to enthusiastic audiences, you already know what a weird and wonderful film it is. If not, it’s kind of hard to explain. Think of it as a live-action Looney Tunes feature, with influences as wide-ranging as video games, martial arts films, and early silent comedies. Shot over 12 weeks in the frozen tundra of northern Wisconsin on a budget of around $150,000, it’s basically a story of man versus nature, in the form of life-size, suited mascots representing the local wildlife. There’s much more to it, but no brief summary could really do it justice. You just kind of have to see it for yourself.

The film is a product of the partnership between longtime friends Mike Cheslik and Ryland Brickson Cole Tews, who previously worked together on Lake Michigan Monster in 2018. They co-wrote the script for Hundreds Of Beavers (or technically the treatment, as there’s virtually no dialogue), with Cheslik taking on directing duties, as well as the editing and visual effects. Tews stars in the film as Jean Kayak, a down-on-his-luck applejack salesman turned fur trapper.

In a recent conversation with The A.V. Club, Cheslik talked about what went into making the film, the Midwestern sensibilities they brought to it, and what’s next for him.

Mike Cheslik: Yeah. It just keeps going. We’re just never going to be done. I mean, we’ve talked a lot about it. The premiere was in 2022 at Fantastic Fest. And we’re finally getting our actual commercial release whatever year it is now—2024?

AVC: Yeah, that’s two years you’ve been promoting this film, by my math.

MC: Two years. Yeah, I can’t believe it’s still going. But it’s been a slow build to get the word out, I guess. It’s been a real word-of-mouth movie.

AVC: Have you seen a difference in the reaction from audiences over time as word has gotten out? People must have a much better idea now of what they’re getting into when they go to a screening.

MC: It’s really taught me a lot about marketing. People will go into a movie with their expectations, and their expectations are set by certain reviews or by marketing. It changes the way they watch a film.

AVC: In your case, has it been a positive or negative change? Or a little bit of both?

MC: I’ve noticed we’re getting a lot more forgiveness for our video-game structured second act. Usually in a movie, the second act would be a truncated, you know, a montage of the hero getting better at the skill. But in our movie, there is no elliptical edit. You watch him play the whole video game. It’s like a LetsPlay. And obviously that’s not for everyone. I’m not defending it, but through some YouTubers and reviewers that have made the comparisons, I’ve noticed more forgiveness from the audience for our second act.

AVC: You mentioned video games as an influence, which is so interesting because your film combines these high-tech elements and special effects with an old-timey visual style. Can you talk about the ways you used technology to create something that feels so antique?

MC: You know, it’s really that grainy black-and-white filter and the blowing out of the snow and the dropping off of the blacks that gives you that look. That’s an early filmmaking decision that just helped us get through compositing faster. I like movies that look like that, but it’s also a pragmatic choice so that we would not be limited in the images that we wrote. We could be as imaginative as we wanted, within the parameters. And all the characters are, like, mascots, so we don’t have to hire a ton of actors. So accepting those limitations of the look and the mascots allowed us to then have any idea we wanted.

AVC: Since the story is told completely visually, mainly through sight gags, what was the writing process like? As you guys were coming up with the story, did you always have the visuals in mind? Or were there some things that came later as you were making it?

MC: The treatment was written, and then after that it was always a lot of drawings. I’m just pretty visual. And so as Ryland and I were writing it, it was me drawing little gags on notecards and placing them on our board. Just a basic three-act structure.

AVC: Was there anything that you came up with that you weren’t eventually able to accomplish?

MC: You know, there were two or three gags cut for time or clarity, or they weren’t good enough. Or they were, like, vestigial, like an appendix that didn’t connect to other gags in the movie. And so they were removed for that reason. But that’s only two or three gags. There was nothing that was removed because of ambition. Again, I think that because of the style we chose, we were able to include all of our craziest ideas.

AVC: Was there anything that came about through filming that you hadn’t thought of when you were writing it?

MC: Well, there’s a gag that’s also unconnected to a runner, that we didn’t put in the boards. This guy, Matt Hope, we shot on his property, and he’d been in the military for a while fixing tanks. And he just does a bunch of different jobs up there in northern Wisconsin. Just a smart guy with a real engineering mind but had, you know, kind of lived in the woods for a year. He came up with this great gag that I would have never thought of, because it’s kind of a wilderness survival gag of just drinking water from a stream and then looking to your right and somebody peeing just 20 feet upstream of you.

AVC: Oh right, that happens pretty early on in the film.

MC: Yeah, it’s the reveal of the mascot. It’s a pan left to the raccoon and it’s like urinating in the stream. And it’s something I would have never thought of. It’s just a nice little, like, wilderness survival bit that I wouldn’t have crossed my mind. We’re from Wisconsin, but we’re kind of like, from the city. We love the outdoors and camping and wilderness survival stories, but I just wouldn’t have thought of that gag on my own.

AVC: That’s interesting, because I wanted to ask you about the whole Midwestern-ness of it, and how that influences your filmmaking. Both this one and your previous film with Ryland, The Lake Michigan Monster, have a midwestern setting and feel to them. Does that go back to your own roots, growing up in Wisconsin?

MC: Yeah, I think Wisconsin is really funny. Like, people there have a great sense of humor. Most random Wisconsin bars you can walk into and 80 percent of the people in there are pretty, pretty darn funny. And my hope is that regional cinema can retain some flavor of that state and not just imitate whatever’s happening in New York and L.A. And this isn’t even a knock on New York and L.A., two places I’ve lived and enjoyed, but I just really like people from Wisconsin and their sensibility, [which] I grew up with. I just would hope that smaller pockets of filmmakers and artists would try to have their own regional voice instead of following the coasts.

AVC: It does feel like there’s a place now for these kinds of scrappy indie movies that are kind of anti-Hollywood, anti-studio system. This isn’t the kind of thing that a studio would ever do, and people seem hungry for that.

MC: Yeah, and it’s simultaneously in this American studio tradition of the slapstick genre. It’s totally a Hollywood tradition; it’s just been dormant. And I know that there’s a lot of, like, dads in the Midwest that still watch Three Stooges reruns and still think it’s hilarious. And those are the kind of dads I grew up around. And I thought, let’s make a whole huge indie movie for them. That’s a tough market to reach, because some of those guys have sworn off new movies, but, you know, the young people like it as well.

AVC: You’re right, this kind of comedy has been around a long time, but somehow it still feels fresh. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like this that blends the new and the old so well. Maybe that’s what’s driving the word of mouth for this.

MC: We’re getting a little bump from the fact that the genre’s been dormant. It would be like if no one made a horror movie for 30 years, and then one person made one horror film and everyone would be like, “Oh my God, I forgot you could do this. Like, cinema is back!”

AVC: So why do you think they stopped making slapstick movies?

MC: I don’t know why, they just forgot about this genre. I think it’s just that slapstick works better for like, in a labor economy where people’s jobs involve their bodies. Like in China, slapstick is still really popular because there’s just more jobs that involve using your body. I think in a service economy, the alligator pit becomes like an HR referral. But in the Midwest, a lot of Midwest comedy is based on making fun of somebody for doing something wrong or using a ladder wrong. That stuff’s really funny to me. And it doesn’t exactly show up in the, like, UCB, Groundlings school of verbal comedy.

AVC: There’s an element of danger in that kind of physical comedy, too. Was there anything particularly dangerous that you did for the film, or did you avoid it through the use of visual effects?

MC: The box thing was kind of risky. Ryland did go down a hill in the big box. That wasn’t really planned. That was just put the camera on him, see what he does. So there was some stuff that was tough. I don’t think if Tom Cruise was in this movie—well no, he’s a bad example [laughs]—but in a studio film, you wouldn’t have the expensive actor just go down the hill like that with a box.

AVC: It’s hard to tell when you watch the film how much of that is CGI and how much is practical, because you have a lot of visual effects in the movie and they blend together so well.

MC: That’s nice of you to say. I think you just try to make the location stuff look fake by blowing out the snow, and you try to let the fake stuff look as real as you possibly can, and it hopefully all meets in the middle. And if you’re switching techniques a lot, shot to shot, you’re benefiting from this sort of sleight of hand, where the audience just starts to accept the images. I really like Mighty Joe Young, the original movie. That uses like, you know, nine different styles of visual effects. And they’re all transparent to a modern viewer, but it shuffles between them so quickly that you still have the effect of believing the movie world because of the sleight of hand, of switching styles shot to shot. This still happens. You think of, like, Peter Jackson or Sam Raimi, you know, using both practical and CG. People don’t think they like CG, but I think a great CG shot is a CG shot between two practical shots. Right? Then you kind of forget what you’re looking at. You just accept the movie’s world.

AVC: You edited the film and did all those effects shots yourself, right? What was that process like?

MC: Yeah. My friend Jerry helped me on the log flume chase, but otherwise I did, like, 1500 effects shots. They were done over four years. Yeah, but that was also 12 weeks of shooting and then fundraising that whole time and boarding that whole time. And the entire movie was in fundraising and post and shooting at all times for four years simultaneously. It’s sort of the culmination of my life so far, especially because I didn’t direct the first movie we did, Lake Michigan Monster. So this is my directorial debut. It feels like the culmination of everything I’ve been working toward. And so that’s why it’s funny, too, some people have been saying, like, “Well, congrats on the start of your career.” And I just feel like, “The start? I’m ready to die now!” [Laughs]

AVC: But you’re still planning to make more films though, right? Are you looking to go bigger or do you want to stay in this indie space?

MC: We’re investigating that right now. Is it a hybrid? Is it indie? Is it just a Hollywood movie? What are the benefits? What are the pros and cons of all the options? We’re investigating that right now. And, I do think it’s always going to be funny, big, creative adventure movies that are entertaining. But the style won’t exactly be like this every time. I mean, people are asking about Beavers sequels, and I just think we’ve exhausted it. We left it all out on the field.