This month, we sat down with Hundreds of Beavers director and co-writer Mike Cheslik and star and co-writer Ryland Tews. In our interview, find out how Cheslik and Tews created a wild romp of a comedy following the fight between an applejack salesman-turned-fur trapper and the eponymous hundreds of beavers.

The following interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Hyperreal Film Club (HFC): I really adore the film; every aspect of it came together so beautifully. It’s been getting rave reviews, both critically and commercially. Why do you think slapstick still speaks to audiences? Is it based in nostalgia, or does the form act as a universal language of film?

Mike Cheslik (MC): Yeah, I think it's worked forever. I think it will work forever, and we just forgot about it for a while. I think it's back; I think it's back for good. There was also just an audience that had more physical jobs in the early twentieth century in the States. Now, you know, that became more of a service-based economy and the alligator pit became verbal. People still have bodies that they use to try and do things and they fail. But physical comedy doesn't have to go away, and I think it'll always work. A Chaplin or a Keaton movie from a hundred years ago, still gets laughs with audiences, and isn't Buster Keaton, like a big TikTok star now?

HFC: I think so, he's making the rounds. I read somewhere that Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach took their kids to go watch a bunch of Keaton and Chaplin shorts and it was a bunch of you know, hipster, yuppie kind of parents taking their kids to seem cool and stuff. But the kids were just really into it. So, it's still amazing a hundred years later.

Ryland Tews (RT): All that stuff, it still translates, people still resonate with it. Like you said, it's a universal language. I mean, there's literally no dialogue in our movie or in those. Everyone around the globe can relate to physical comedy, and like you said, all ages, too.

We’ve done so many screenings now where older folks love it, because it's such a throwback and they didn't know that there'd ever be a movie like this ever again. Then, you got like 5- and 6-year olds who are cracking up in the audience. People are sending us messages like, “I brought my six-year-old to see Beavers the other night and for the last week he's been talking, beavers, beavers, beavers, all the time.” It’s just been something that people all over the world and all ages, creeds, nations just have gotten a kick out of.

HFC: I know it was a long shoot, I read somewhere it was around four years. How do you maintain a comedic tone through the entire shoot? How do you approach a set every day with a comedic tone?

MC: It's not funny on set, it's funny for five minutes, and then it's not funny for the next four years while you're executing it. You just have to remember that it was at one time funny to you, and hopefully that moment of comedy will happen again in the theater for the audience. But when you're on set it is not funny at all. Also, it was cold, so you're not having ideas. You’re just executing the gag you wrote 12 months prior.

RT: We shot in Northern Wisconsin, Northern Michigan. So, it was very cold, very deep snow. We always had a plan in place every day, these are the shots we're going to get. Mike would bring his big binder full of little note cards he had drawn. He would point to our director of photography Quinn Hester and say, “Make my cartoon. Frame my cartoon how I drew it.”

It was just a bunch of hitting marks, and Mike doing things in post-production to make it funny. But when you're out there shooting it there's no time for improvisation or anything. It was just executing a joke as precisely as possible, because, again, we didn't really have that much time either. It's so cold.

MC: We only had 12 weeks.

RT: Even then, you only have four or five guys on set, and you must lug all this equipment and stuff through the snow and the sun goes down at 4 p.m. You only have so much allotted time. So, you just have to be very efficient when you're doing it.

HFC: I saw that y'all were trekking through the Wisconsin wilderness carrying this stuff with about five people. With that, how much of the falls and gags were intentional? They're just actors in big beaver suits, how much can you really map out where they're supposed to hit? Was it all precise?

MC: There were a few gags that we called loose gags. Mostly the movie's precise with hitting marks, but there were a few moments where we had some rules about how they could interact, but basically, it played out in the wild the way it played out. We just tried to create a funny situation, but the majority of the gags are a little more animation where we're just hitting the marks.

RT: There are some shots here and there where beavers would inadvertently fall or something, and it's like, “Yeah, let's leave that. That's actually kind of funny.” It's mostly very precise and well thought out. But again, that also just presented a lot of challenges with the mascots themselves because they're so cumbersome and you can't see a damn thing out of those mascot heads. When Mike was saying to the mascot performers, “Okay, now you got to walk to this point and stop,” it's easier said than done. When you're walking with that head on, it’s like, “Where's my mark? Where am I walking?” It was a nightmare.

HFC: It’s impressive how surgical you were able to get with the marks and the physical comedy. How much of a narrative structure did you have going into it? Was it more so you had a thousand ideas you wanted to show in live action?

MC: We did have a thousand ideas. We drew them on little note cards, but then the note cards had to be moved around within the “Joseph Campbell Hero's Journey Structure.” It’s a very simple one where he gets thrusted in the wilderness, and he first learns to survive, then he learns to be a master fur trapper, then the beavers seek revenge.

Take that structure and then all the ideas get shuffled around for months at my place with notecards. There's this basic rule we had for the running jokes, which is: something hurts Ryland at first, and then that physical principle of the wilderness and the Looney Tunes physics gets used to his advantage later. We tried to make every runner fit into that, and then fit all those jokes into the normal hero's journey structure.

HFC: It almost lends itself to the video game aspect of it, right? I read somewhere that you were inspired by Super Mario Galaxy Two, but it's kind of like that in all video games. You fight a boss, and they do an attack, you learn the attack, and then you can know how to counter it later. It was that sort of same thing throughout the film.

MC: Yeah, in Super Mario Galaxy Two, each level has a new physical obstacle or rule that's kind of unique to that level. It gets heightened over three or four beats. This is sort of similar to sketch comedy, when you have the funny thing that happens in another otherwise normal universe that then gets heightened three or four times.

In our movie, in the second act, there's this trap line where instead of watching one physical idea heighten the four or five times, all in a row, Ryland does a whole loop of first beats, and then a second beats, and then a whole loop of third beats. Because when you're first trapping, you don't get to find out if your trap worked right away, you set all the traps, and then you go back around the loop and check all the traps. If they didn't work, you make adjustments, and so the second act of this movie is just a rigorous, endless, boring cycle of Ryland fixing his traps. You’re watching twelve little levels play out all at once, in a way where you don't get the next beat of that joke for like seven minutes.

RT: Yeah, it's the world's longest montage.

HFC: It's the grindy aspect of video games. Bob Barito did the sound for it—did that include score and sound effects? Because there is some great stuff, particularly when they're on the ice. How much of that aftereffect goes into that?

MC: Bob did nine months of work on the sound design. He's the shining star from our year at NYU. He did his best work, I think, on our projects. So, we're very grateful that he put his whole body into this project.

RT: Yeah, all original sounds were made by Bob just in his studio.

RT: In terms of the music, that was another buddy of ours, who also went to NYU, Chris Ryan, who did original scoring for nine different songs. Then we also dipped back into the Wolf Library, which is what we used for Michigan Monster as well. So, it was a combination of Wolf music, Chris Ryan, and then my dad did the opening song as well. So, it was a combination of the musical geniuses and Bob who really elevated the whole production.

MC: Yeah, and then Joanna Fang also from our same NYU years is now a very accomplished foley artist. So, we have Joanna Fang as the foley artist in the movie. It was a lot of heavy hitters on the sound. The sound is much better than the movie.

HFC: Well, they're symbiotic, right? I saw an Oscar clip of Steven Spielberg showing ET without John Williams's score, and it's just like the little bike pedaling, so sound is such an important part of the medium.

MC: If Bob or Chris Ryan die in a helicopter explosion, you won't hear from us ever again because our whole work is based on their presence.

HFC: Yeah, so we're all going to get someone to drive them everywhere. They're not getting in the air.

I have just one more question. This film really is kind of about a lot of things: The unshakeable human spirit. How challenges and obstacles promote personal growth. And, perhaps most importantly, the lengths you're willing to go to if you're horny enough. Do you think we are losing horniness as a motivation in movies?

MC: Yeah, I think that's the reason anyone becomes good at a job, because they’re really horny.

HFC: I lied, this is my last question. Was Olivia Graves a trained pole dancer?

*They both nod while taking sips of Miller Lites*

MC: She is.

HFC: Okay, okay, that's awesome. Because pole dancing is hard, it's, like, tremendously difficult to do.

RT: Yeah, and she's got like a half a million followers on YouTube. That's one of the things she specializes in is pole dancing. So, we knew we had to get that into the movie somewhere. And man, whenever that scene comes up, it kills. It's like an unexpected thing to have.

HFC: Yeah, it's perfect, like harkening back to that Simpsons, the screw the audience mentality. It's kind of just an unexpected thing to happen. Like, why would she be pole dancing in the middle of the Wisconsin wilderness?

I wanted to thank you guys for making the film, thank you for allowing everyone to see it, and thank you for joining me today.

RT: Really nice work, Eli.

MC: Thank you so much.

Hundreds of Beavers Interview