Hundreds of Beavers

Hi, I'm Connor Winterton of Borrowing Tape, and I'm here today with Mike Cheslik, the director and co-writer of the silent supernatural comedic epic film Hundreds of Beavers. Thank you for joining us today, Mike.

Thank you. Thank you for having me, Connor.

So my first question is, Hundreds of Beavers is such an original film infused with spades of humor and farce, really. What inspired your vision for it? And if you could tell me how many exact hundreds of beavers were used because I'm intrigued.

Well it's six beaver costumes and then duplicated many times in After Effects. Somebody on the internet should count the final beaver count for me of how many beavers appear in the film. I won't be doing it.

What are the influences? I think it's all this stuff that it's obvious; it's what it seems like. It's silent films and Looney Tunes and video games. And I didn't have to really do a research phase of that stuff because I think it's so baked in from a lifetime of consuming it that when we started Hundreds of Beavers, which we started just based on the fact that we're from Wisconsin, had friends comfortable with snow, had a tough leading man who could do the stunts, and I have some After Effects proficiency from my broadcast career. Those elements and restrictions or available things that we had with our small budget, the idea was really just picked based around those limitations or things we had access to. The inspirations of silent movies, cartoons, and video games, that's just how I've lived my life. And so I don't need to go back through it for it to just come out of me if I'm doing an image.

Yeah, exactly. That you've consumed that kind of stuff, and it manifests — doesn't it — into your vision? And I thought that when I was watching, I was like, Oh, this is great. This is like watching a cartoon. It's so funny. There are so many great moments, so many set pieces, and it's been described as a unique spectacle, a visionary work, which is experimental really in kind of form and style and world-building. So could you tell me a little bit more about how you went about conceptualizing and also kind of executing some of those elements, so like the filming process really?

Okay yeah,. As far as making a comedy that's ambitious, I've just sort of focused on movies. A lot of movies I admire that are comedies but have this huge visionary ambition, like It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World or Zazie dans le Métro or Playtime or obviously The General — and movies that are comedies, but they're just hugely ambitious, and they have their own visual style that they commit to. I wanted to make a movie that sort of fit alongside those as a slapstick epic. We didn't have a lot of money, it's a $150,000 movie, and the money came in as we were shooting. So the beaver thing is really just a way that we don't have to have a bunch of different actors on set. We can just have Ryland on set in the woods and then a rotating cast of beavers, and it makes the whole production a lot easier when just whoever's available at that time can come play a beaver or a raccoon, and you're not casting actors that need their own hair and makeup and all this stuff.

The mascot thing really just, as in a pragmatic way, allowed us to do our slapstick epic while having basically an easier scheduling problem of how to get our buddies to act in this stunt movie. It was very long. Well, it was 12 weeks of shooting, nine in the snow, over two winters, and 1,500 After Effects shots. So I don't know if I've answered the question, Connor, but those are some details about what we were up to, and yeah, it took four years overall.

Yeah I was going to say that I've read that it took four years overall and 12 weeks of shooting, and when I was watching it, I was like "Are they actually in the snow in the cold here because he must be freezing like the lead actor and stuff." So, thank you for explaining some of that. And I just wanted to ask if there were any like other particular challenges or surprises that arose during the kind of production process?

Just the difficulty of shoot, I mean, it was years of challenges, but in the shoot, it's just the difficulty of lugging your beaver costume into the woods, getting the van stuck, your two-wheel drive van stuck, and having to shovel it out every other day. Sometimes it's below zero, you gotta keep these mascot costumes from getting mold in them every night. You've got to lug your storyboards out in the woods and think like an animator when it's cold out. It's a tedious shoot, but it was fun to slowly collect the elements and try and get all these gags to work. We weren't laughing. We're just stoically executing the joke, and it was a joke we'd written two years prior in some cases. It's not cracking us up on set. We're just saying correct, joke, executed correctly, good, moving on. It's just like an engineering problem, these gags. It's not something that brings you any joy after the first four seconds of thinking of it.

Okay, yeah, it's interesting. I was going to ask as well how it was working with the cast and crew to ensure that your vision and this kind of unique spectacle was effectively realized on screen.

Well, a lot of buddies. So it's just people I've already had relationships with and people that I've just known a while. So there's a lot of our friends from growing up in Milwaukee. And we got an incredible amount of trust. Ryland and I and Quinn, the director of photography, got an incredible amount of trust from all the people who were helping us. And maybe that's because many of them weren't film industry people. So they just figured, I guess this is normal, and gave us their trust. But also, I think we earned some trust from doing edits of the day's shoot each night, always putting the footage from that day into the temporary versions of the effects shots and showing the team, "Hey, this is what that weird element we got. This is how it's going to actually look. "And so doing that, yeah, buys you some trust. And I was just surprised how game everyone was for years of making this thing. And I don't know yeah, for some reason, they trusted us. Hopefully, we can get into a situation every time where the whole team trusts the leadership. That would just be great if life could always be that way.

Well, I'm glad to hear it was like that, really, that there was that trust. Earlier, I asked you a question about influences, and you said a mismatch of things you've watched throughout your life, right, and consumed. Were there any particular filmmakers or directors that have influenced you as a general, but then perhaps more specifically, Hundreds of Beavers?

Two filmmakers that really, really mainly influenced me are Buster Keaton and Kurosawa because Akira Kurosawa — although I also like Kiyoshi — those two, they stage things just correctly. It's not a matter of, oh, what choice did he make staging? Could things be staged better? That's well-staged. This is another idea of how something could be staged. No, there's just the correct way. And it's the way that Keaton stages and the way that Kurosawa stages.

Great, well, thank you for that. So the film has won awards at festivals like FilmQuest, Fantasia Film Festival, and Phoenix Film Festival, which is a significant achievement. Well done.

Thank you.

How do you think these awards or accolades have contributed to the reception or understanding of your film? Because I know it's been a bit like a cult following as well.

Yes, the reaction, the audience was built slowly for this film over about a year and a half. And I think the awards at film festivals did help us to get the word out. By the end of the year and a half of the festival run, the laurels and awards did accumulate to a point where they were harder for people to ignore. And it was nice when it finally came time to do our own independent theatrical release, that we could cut a trailer that had a bunch of laurels on it. I know that some people feel that the laurel has diluted in meaning, but the award, I don't know, it still looks good if you can slap Winner 12 times on a trailer. So I think that's helped us just anything, it's a small movie. So, anything we can do to just legitimize it or to provide recommendations. The release process for us was basically a year and a half of accumulating proof that the movie is worth your time. And the awards were very helpful in doing that. Ultimately, you still have to make it available to a consumer, make money, and be a profitable business. And that's what we're trying to figure out because we want to make a lot of movies. So, it needs to be a real business. And I think the festivals helped us a lot on our way to an actual commercial release.

Great. Yeah, I think there's always going to be that kind of tension, isn't there, when you have a more experimental vision, hybrid genres, and then having to balance that with capitalism, the business, and having to make money and keep going really.

Oh, yeah, for me, I feel that my job of pleasing the audience aligns with the job of the business, which is finding a paying audience and having people that want to see what you're doing, and doing something people want is my goal as a creator anyway. A lot of people in the Midwest and smaller art scenes — they get fixated on this battle between art and commerce. But for me, my sensibilities may be naturally commercial, and I just focus on how can I please the audience, and that goal serves me hopefully both artistically and commercially.

That leads me to ask as well about kind of future projects, so what kind of broader themes or subject matters interest you as a filmmaker? What kind of styles do you think you'll make more films in — the style of Hundreds of Beavers or maybe a different kind of style?

I really admire Louis Malle switching styles between films and then totally executing one film in a style that lives and dies on that project. And I think that some animation studios behave that way as well, where a whole new look will be created for an animated film. And it sort of is born and dies on that one movie. My hope would be that we can find more funny styles like Hundreds of Beavers with an original sort of film grammar that is created for one movie that is fully realized in that movie. And then we'll move on to another kind of interesting comedy style. So, I want to push film grammar forward, but I also want to have a high joke rate.

That's interesting. Yeah, balance between film form, film grammar style, and perhaps how that would resonate with audiences as well. Great. One more question. I just wanted to speak perhaps a little bit more about the role of parody and pastiche in your films as well. Would you say they sit somewhere in between? Is there one you're going more, a parody of styles or pastiche?

Yeah, originally, we said this would be a spoof of The Revenant or a spoof of survival films. But I don't think that's what happened. Ultimately, I just like the genres that we're working in too much. And this is really actually just an entry in the slapstick genre rather than a spoof of. It's not a spoof of survival films, the way that Naked Gun is a spoof of cop films, or in the way that Scary Movie is a spoof of horror films. I think we just made an entry in the slapstick genre. And I don't think it's really a satire or a spoof.

Yeah, yeah, it's interesting you say spoof because that didn't come to mind, spoof when I was watching it. That's why I kind of devised this question around like parodied pastiche.

Oh, yeah. Sorry. I don't think it's even parody. I think we just made it we just combined genres that were genuinely trying to make an entry in. So I would say, yeah, It's a pastiche, and I don't see us as parodying anything. And earlier on, we had some jokes that were like parodying the self-seriousness of the wilderness survival genre because it's a very stoic straight genre that was ripe for an Airplane treatment, but we wound up just making a pastiche of things we actually love, instead of a satire.

Brilliant. Well, thank you for that, and thank you for meeting with us today as well. I really enjoyed just hearing more about this. Yeah, really unique, fantastic film. So, well done again on it because it's it's great and I really appreciated that pastiche, that hybridity, those mixing of styles. I thought it was such an achievement. So well done.

Thank you so much, Connor. I really appreciate it.