Into the Wilds With Hundreds of Beavers

Snowstick (Noun): Any physical comedy that takes place all in the snow.

That's the subgenre (or, arguably, sub-sub-subgenre) into which filmmaker Mike Cheslik his new film, Hundreds of Beavers. “How many of those films can you name?” he asks.

“There aren't many,” observes writer and star Ryland Brickson Cole Tews.

Cheslik muses for a moment, and even he can only come up with three: Two shorts by Abbott and Costello (“The Gold Rush” and “Hit the Ice”), and “’Donald's Snow Fight,’ the Donald Duck short with creative, snow-based gags”"

But even if there were a thousand snowstick films, Hundreds of Beavers would still be one of the best. The ludicrously funny story of down-on-his-luck applejack distiller Jean Kayak (Tews) who wages a one-man-war on the beavers who wrecked his life, it's a mixture of silent cinema wilderness adventure and absurdist comedy, all shot around Michigan in the dead of winter.

It's their attempt to finally dethrone “The Gold Rush” as the greatest snowstick comedy - because someone had to. Tews notes, “No one else was going to try to accomplish this, go to rural Michigan, rural Wisconsin, with four or five guys. The snow is too deep, it's too cold outside, and we thought, 'Well, we're the only guys that will try, and it will set us apart from everything else that's being produced.’”

Building on the festival success of their last movie, the sea-shanty-inspired creature feature Lake Michigan Monster, Hundreds of Beavers premiered in Austin at Fantastic Fest in 2022. It has become a cult favorite, with the filmmakers taking it on a roadshow tour and winning before its digital release on Amazon and Apple TV. Now it's returning to American cinemas, with the team planning a wider release soon. Not bad for a microbudget black-and-white silent comedy. “It's a pretty simple story about a guy going from zero to hero, and mascots falling down and getting hurt,” says Tews. “Who doesn't love that?”

In many ways, it's a lesson in taking what you have to hand and using them to make the movie only you can. Cheslik lists: “Ryland's really good at doing physical stuff and can't speak, I'm really good at Aftereffects, we live where it's cold, and our buddies are really comfortable in the cold. So we combined all our available resources.”

Austin Chronicle: One of the resources you have is a lead actor who is prepared to spend a lot of the shoot naked up a tree.

Mike Cheslik: And he wrote it, so all this stuff is things he agreed to. I think it's uninsurable to ask anyone but Tom Cruise to do crazy stunts, but if Ryland is writing this scene where he puts his foot in the snow and literally gets frostbite, that's his own fault.

AC: Were there any scenes where you went, 'Goddammit, I really wish I hadn't written this bit?'

Ryland Brickson Cole Tews: Oh, I regreted the whole shoot. But that's the thing. You couldn't have made this movie in the traditional sense. This wasn't a union movie. No one was getting paid - well, you were getting paid in beer and tobacco. It was very dangerous, and very cold, so it could only really be our buddies from elementary school, high school, college, who came together and went, 'Oh, shit, I'll go up for a weekend and put on a beaver costume. Sounds fun!'

MC: We had a real DP (Quinn Hester) and a real sound designer (Bobb Barrito), but then it's just a lot of buddies.

AC: It's like you made a Dogme 95 slapstick.

MC: In my opinion, we broke one or two of the Dogme 95 rules.

AC: They'd probably look askance at the beaver of costumes. I love that you didn't try to go super-convincing. It's clearly someone in a beaver suit, or a rabbit suit, or it's a glove puppet.

RBCT: Sometimes the guys would be in mascot outfits and say, 'Do you want me to act like a bunny?' and it's like, 'No, no, it's funnier if you are clearly some dude in a bunny costume.' And we found out early on, those beavers don't need to do much to be funny. Just a beaver standing in a field in a wide shot is inherently funny. It's inherently silly and stupid, and if they just fell down one in a while that just elevated the comedy.

MC: Even if you're not writing a good gag, you're just benefiting from the fundamental image of the movie, which is a guy in a beaver suit in the woods, being a little funny.

RBCT: And we'd have to remind ourselves. We were around these beavers all the time, so it wasn't funny to us anymore. So we had to remember, the audience has never seen these costumes before, never seen these animals. So to them, seeing them for the first time is like when we saw it for the first time and we thought it was hilarious. So we had to remember: you don't have to do much with these animals, and it will be funny.

AC: Where did you even get them from?

MC: It was just Google.com, 'Mascot outfit,' and then it wound up on mascotUSA.com, based in Beijing - you can get it too, probably - and then the only adjustment we made was, instead of one tooth we did two teeth for our iconic, trademark beaver look.

AC: Silly movies need to have really smart scripts, or they end up being just stupid, and Hundreds of Beavers has a very smart script. Jean's character development is like watching a Rube Goldberg machine being built. It's not just a series of unconnected gags: He does a dumb thing, he learns from it, and the pieces come together.

MC: It was note cards with different gag ideas and just moving them around on the table until they fit together in a satisfying way. The rule was simple: something hurts the hero, he learns from it, and then later he uses that physical principle to help himself. So everything that he considers a win is hard-earned.

RBCT: And then the comedy comes in because he's not correcting his mistakes in the traditional way. He's doing his own version of it. He tries to learn from the master fur trapper, who is very good at his job. Once he's gone out of the picture I have to do it the same way, but I'm not good at what I do so I try to come up with my own way of doing it, and that's the source of the comedy.

So that trapline thing, that plugs in perfectly because that's what fur trappers would do. They'd have a fur trap, they'd have a trapline, and they'd make adjustments, and then they'd come back the next day, make little adjustments. That also plugs in to the modern thing of an RPG video game: seeing the progression from zero to hero and getting better.

AC: Between this and Lake Michigan Monster, you're resurrecting these great, lost American narrative forms of the slapstick comedy and the wilderness adventure, which they churned out during the silent era. It's like cinema gets bored of a genre and forgets them.

MC: Yeah. Horror gets updated every year, but slapstick lies dormant, for some reason.

RBCT: Everyone always says, ‘Oh, I love those old silent Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton movies. Oh, they're so great. It's a shame that they don't make 'em anymore.' well, you can. There's no rule against making them, it's just that people don't. It's just assumed that there has to be this amazing 4K color with people talking in rooms. I think people are getting sick of that, so we just did the exact opposite.