Chapo Trap House - Movie Mindset Bonus: Hundreds of Beavers with Director Mike Cheslik

Episode Date: May 27, 2024

We sit down with Mike Cheslik, the director of the new(ish) silent comedy action farce Hundreds of Beavers. We discuss his Wisconsin influences, ultra-DIY approach to filmmaking, making your film exactly as stupid as it needs to be, and the inherent humor of watching a guy in a mascot costume get wrecked on camera. There are still a few in-theater opportunities to catch Hundreds of Beavers: https://www.hundredsofbeavers.com/tickets/ And it’s also available for rental at home on Apple and Amazon.

Hello everybody. Today on this movie mindset bonus, we continue our hot streak of interviewing filmmakers who have made movies that we absolutely loved and are thrilled to evangelize. Today we have the privilege of talking to Mike Czeslek, the director of Hundreds of Beavers, a film that absolutely delivers on the promise of its title. Mike, thanks for being here. Thanks so much for having me. Thanks for pretending this is a real movie and that I'm a real filmmaker. Well, for our listeners, for those of you who maybe haven't seen this film, as best I can describe it, it is a black and white silent film set against the backdrop of a frozen American wilderness and the 19th century fur trade.

It is a movie that depicts a brute struggle for survival in which desire and pain coalesce to form a rich existential canvas. But more than anything, this film is about the unbridled joy that one can experience seeing people in mascot costumes get absolutely annihilated. So, Mike, thank you for being here and thank you for your film. And another little bonus for movie mindset listeners, we have a drone by Chris today, Hello, who is going to lead us to lead us off for this movie because Chris was the first one of us to see this movie in theaters in LA a couple months ago. And he has been a champion of this movie. So Chris, Chris, please lead us off. Okay. Hello, everybody.

So, I guess my first question comes from a perspective of a fellow Midwesterner. You know, I kind of place this film in the grand tradition of Midwest DIY filmmaking. It obviously made me think of some of my heroes, the Evil Dead crew from... Mark Portratt. I was thinking of the Evil Dead crew from Michigan. I was thinking of the Evil Dead crew from Michigan, but I was also thinking of the Mystery Science Theater crew from Minnesota.

Your previous film was specifically about Lake Michigan. Do you find, is there a central Wisconsin energy in your work? Well, you know, the Zuckers went to our rival high school. Not that anyone cared about this rivalry, but that was technically sure was supposedly the rival of Whitefish Bay High School. So that's where the Zuckers went. That's that I consider that all.

I claim all of that as a Wisconsin sensibility. Absolutely. I just think of a lot of dads watching syndicated three Stooges when I was growing up in the nineties and it was just still three Stooges on television. And so we were like, why is this genre laid dormant for 30 years? So we picked we made a film for those dads and then but like they've like sworn off movies

like there is no pipeline to get a new movie to them. So we just wound up with the like usual millennial hipster audience. Well, I have to ask on behalf of my girlfriend Catherine, who is from Wausau, Wisconsin, and we were just in Madison last weekend. Where in Wisconsin are you from? I'm from Milwaukee, so I'm a total like I am definitely city guy that like what if I was outdoorsy though? And like was it the Wisconsin connection that led you to do a movie set, you know, like I said about the movie about the fur trade? Yeah, because it's like our regional version of the, you know, Bugs Bunny

scenario with like the French fur trappers. And then trapping is just funnier than hunting. You have to set up a stupid trap and it's and then you come back three days later and your trap failed and you don't really understand why. It's just a tedious, funny trade to build a movie around. I actually have a question. Have you ever watched Alone? I have not. What's Alone? OK. It's a show about survival in the northern wilderness where there's a lot of trapping and a lot of guys

meticulously setting up those like T shaped hook traps and then coming back three days later hoping for a rabbit and not seeing one and then being like I'm going to die in the wilderness. This is the most depressing moment of my life. We did not watch Alone. I watched America's Funniest Home videos and I played Zelda. That was my research. Yeah, I'm going to die in the wilderness. This is the most depressing moment of my life. We did not watch alone. I watched America's funniest home videos and I played Zelda. That was my research.

Yeah, I was I was going to bring up there is there's a lot of like cartoon influence, obviously, and like three stooges you mentioned. But there's also like a lot of video game influence and logic, I think. Like the mini map, the increasingly like trading in more and more pelts for new tools at the market. Yeah, I get very frustrated when I'm watching a movie and there is no inventory consistency. I like James Bond where they tell you exactly what gadgets he has and then he uses those gadgets.

I think, yeah, I hate in James Bond when they don't tell you what the pound is worth that being made with what the pound to beaver conversion is. I hate in James Bond when he takes out a pen to sign something, just a normal pen. And I'm just thinking, why didn't they set up this pen? Mike, so we another filmmaker we interviewed this season was the Romanian filmmaker Radu Jude. And at the end of the interview, he talked about his love of silent film and about how it sort of conjures like a certain purity of image.

When I was seeing your movie, I thought of just the purity of the gag. And like, is it like what is it about like doing doing humor doing comedy where you just like there's no dialogue. So you strip it down to its most essential, like the setup, a subversion of expectation and then a man being grievously injured. Like was that a challenge or do you find like working in comedy without dialogue? Like is that liberating in a way? Yeah, I think my brain kind of works that way.

Like writing dialogue is very difficult for me, but coming up with like visual gags is just fun. I'm not saying we came up with these quickly, like we're writing for like two months and coming up with one gag every four hours. So I'm not saying we're like gifted at it, but we just spent a lot of time on it. And yeah, I love that like pure comedy crystal of a gag, like, like Seven Chances, the Buster Keaton movie

is like less popular now, but it's just like, it's like a perfectly constructed movie. And yeah, like that first, you know, 15 years of film or the, you know, the teens in the 20s, when it's like, this is something that only works in this medium. And then, you know, later film becomes plays. But like that that early period of like the purity of the visual gag, of course, I'm like obsessed with that.

And it's just we're lucky that it's a genre that's been untouched for a little while and everyone loves. So we got to come in and like pretend we thought of it, even though obviously everything is fucking stolen. I mean, I was sort of half joking that this movie presents sort of an existential canvas, but it has the same quality of like Wile E. Coyote and Roadrunner is that there's something inherently funny both about like grievous bodily harm and disaster and humiliation. But it's also this idea of like, trying over and over again to achieve something that you never really

do. And like, but you do like also go video game influence in that of just like the grind of just like, continuing to try to do something and having it like blow up in your face every time. Yeah, I think there should be like a Sisyphus movie where it's it's three hours long. But at the end, he actually like pulls it off and the audience would just cheer like a heist. The part that reminded me most of Sisyphus is when he's like rolling down the hill in the box and he keeps falling back into the box. It's like a reverse Sisyphus almost. You can only write that joke if you're co-writing it with the guy that has agreed to get in the box.

Well, yeah, you bring up your co-star, the star of the film and your co-writer on this. One thing I noticed is like this guy, this guy Ryland is shredded. He is, he is Jack and like was that an asset doing this incredibly physical style of performance? Oh, yeah, we just we rode around what we had and it was my brawn and his brains. My After Effects, just me at After Effects for 12 hours a day for four years doing stupid After Effects comps that are only salvageable because we covered them in black and white and green. Meanwhile, he's at the gym that whole time. And so together we each make one half of one good filmmaker.

How did you and Ryland start collaborating? I know he was in your last movie. Can you talk a little bit about like your relationship, like making these movies? Yeah, we're buddies from growing up in Wisconsin from high school. We started making videos together in high school. Our first gig was our principal hired us to do like the parents night video and we just did all gags. But I think he paid us a little bit of money. So that was our first job.

And then Ryland and I stayed in touch while we were at different colleges. And then he did a, we, oh man, we made a show. We tried to sell a show and I wasted a lot of time thinking I was on the verge of selling our like cartoon adult swim show. And while that was failing, Ryland just picked up a camera and started making Lake Michigan Monster, our first feature that he directed. And then I did all the editing and effects for that. That got sold to a company or that distributor was a company called Arrow out of the UK. They're like the, I would say the criterion of bad genre films. And yeah, I love Arrow. Yeah, me too.

And so that was great. And then they like, so we technically profited on our first film because it was a seven grand film. It's having seen that movie. I mean, I'm going to talk about this for be beavers. The fact that you got that for $7000 is insane to me. It is so much bigger than that amount of money would imply to me. This I mean, this, you know, they got this after effects software now, Chris. I'm going to get into it, man. There's the physicality of the lead performance, the fur trapper, but most of the performances in this movie

are done by people wearing mascot costumes. All of the animals in this movie are just people in a rabbit costume, a wolf costume, and then of course, many, many beaver costumes. And I said before we started recording, I laugh literally every time that there is a beaver on screen in this movie. The joke never got old to me. But what was it like directing performances from a cast of people who were their faces were covered in giant foam heads.

Just screaming like, don't act, don't do anything. Like, they'd come in with all these ideas about how an animal behaves. And I just say, please do no research. Please do not look up what animals do. Just stand there. I think I'm like Robert Brisson in that way. I just told them, stop doing anything. It's funnier if the movie sucks a little. Oh, I think probably one of the funniest gags in the movie is at the very end, when the Indian fur trapper jumps on the back of his horse,ags in the movie is at the very end when the Indian fur trapper jumps on the back of his horse and then the guys just fall down. So some stuff is like precise animation gags and other stuff is like put him in the box,

send him down the hill, see what happens. And that was like Lou Rico, that actor, like I don't know, he must have weighed like 270 at that time and he's just all his weight is on Ryland's back. Ryland takes one step through the snow and he falls. I was like, all right, we got it. That was a good failure. Trash take, moving on. You mentioned Buster Keaton and the three stooges. There's also a lot of Looney Tunes influence, I think, or Looney Tunes-esque gags. I'm wondering who are your guys Looney Tunes-wise? Who are your favorites?

I'm going to disappoint you. I can't go through the Looney Tunes directors and name what shorts they did. Oh, I mean the characters. Oh, perfect. I like the rabbit character, this Harvey Leed rabbit character. That guy's cool. That guy's going places He's got something they should make a film about him at Warner Brothers And then release it yes

No, I didn't have to go I didn't go back through any of the cartoons or anything like Preparing the movie with Rylan like I think that stuff's just in your brain like you don't need to go back and look at video games or cartoons because you just decades of filling your mind with that. Speaking of the video game influence, I mean, like what were the games that you played as a kid or now that were just sort of rattling around your imagination when you were writing and filming this? Well, it's like a combination obviously of like, just like general game mechanics, but I love Zelda. So that's why the shopkeepers in there We aped the like over a time shopkeeper theme in our original score

And then I don't know with games I'm not like an expert on games But I love indie games that pick a lo-fi style and then make an entire good game with like two people I've always really admired that and I think movies need a little more of that attitude, like picking instead of trying to imitate a AAA graphic style, like doing a pixel art game. People will call you a hipster, but you need to like pick a look that you can actually achieve a full piece with. And yeah, I think like with movies, I wonder why indie filmmakers

are like having 30 person crews and like trying to imitate a Hollywood look like you should just accept that you're like this like punk little movie and make your whole Look and and like build it around that like the reason we have mascots is just because I don't have to like schedule Actors to come in at particular times It can just be whatever buddy is on hand can just put on the suit and play the beaver in that shot So like we can see this whole project and look around our resources the way that an indie game does so like I just like the kind of indie game attitude and Was hoping to kind of emulate that in the like just the structure of the whole production, but yeah for games

I mean you can spot it as you watch it. It's just survival games and metroidvanias I love the the log chase and then the climax of this movie struck me as like an excellent video game sequence Oh, did you guys play Mario? Did you play Mario Party growing up? Yeah Yes, so the thing where there's throwing up. I mean I was playing it like in college There's like three characters on the log in Mario Party or whatever and your buddy jumps too early and you can just see Luigi just get rocked on it because everyone else makes the jump. I love that visual joke. So I think that's in the movie in the log chase.

Yeah. Chris, like you had some questions about like the actual making of this movie because you talked about like, you know, being inspired by like kind of shoestring DIY like indies sensibility. But like, like, like Chris, you have any questions about like how were you actually pulled it off? Okay, yeah.

So look, I'm a film school guy. I've spent some time behind the lens of a DSLR. I've logged my thousand hours in After Effects. I mean, I could get very granular, but I guess I'd like to start kind of like globally and just ask, how the fuck did you pull this off? So much time. Like, how did you do this? Just so much time. Like, how did you do this?

There's so much time. Uh, it just got a little, could you maybe like walk us through some of your like workflows for putting this together? Yeah, it's all premiere. It's all Adobe. And then I, I did a, I first, the first thing in the timeline is the animatic, uh, with music from the DeWolf stock library, like lined up generally to what the scenes are going to be.

And I did the whole animatic and storyboard pro. generally to what the scenes are gonna be. And I did the whole animatic and storyboard pro. And then after the animatic, it was Adobe the whole way. So as we're getting elements of shots, I'm just laying them on top of the animatic. So there was no editing, like picking shots, it's just one insert after another. And just dumping it right on top of the animatic

and making a little temp garbage mat version of the effect in Premiere and then dynamic linking into After Effects, severing the dynamic link, and then keeping the entire movie in about three After Effects projects. And then I think I hit 1500 VFX shots, all After Effects. And the compositing isn't that good if you turn off the little old timey filter, like put some blur and grain and black and white on everything. You know, that's like not even imitating silent film. That's just to hide the bad compositing. Well, I mean the, the style and the effect work together in perfect harmony in that. I mean,

did you like kind of figure out how that was, how to do that in Lake Michigan monster? Cause it's like Michigan monster made, or like builds a lot of the filmic tone effects that you would then perfect in this. Oh, yeah. Ryland would, you know, he was directing, so he would send me this footage that was just garbage. And I was like, I got to cover this in something. And we ended up hiding that whole movie behind her. And we'd be like, oh, we're influenced by a guy Madden, actually. That's why it looks like that.

Was Lake Michigan Monster intended as a color when he started filming it? No, I mean, I'm kind of, I'm stretching the truth a little. We realized early on that we got to put this thing in movie world if it's literally a video on a Nikon. Yeah. So then I guess my next question is like, how, how much were you actually filming outside for this versus like, cause in my imagination, it's just you and Rylan driving each other crazy in like a tiny basement green screen studio. Oh, dude, even the green screen stuff, we're

still outside in the snow because it's just like a green tarp on someone's car, like in a parking lot. Because if you're doing daylight, don't rent a studio. Like you just need daylight. You just need a green tarp and then like the keys are awful. But like, again, it's covered in that look. If I had to do like a 4k color movie, I would have to really rethink a lot of my approach. Then another very technical question. How'd you get consistency on the snow? Cause I imagine anytime you walk anywhere, you're totally trashing

whatever you shot before. Oh yeah. You just move the whole crew every take. Seriously? Sometimes. I mean, I'm scrubbing out a lot of stuff and then just kind of blowing out the footprints, just blowing out all the white. I mean, we try to make the location stuff look fake and the fake stuff look as real

as possible so it all meets in the middle. Part of that is removing a snow detail so that if we need some shot that's just white on a white void with no snow, that that kind of fits in next to the actual location stuff by just not giving the audience a look at a lot of the snow texture, just enough snow texture to prove that we were up there in the upper peninsula of Michigan, but no more than that. Well, so you were talking about how this is all built on animatics.

I guess I was wondering, this obviously seems very meticulously planned out and especially the middle segment where, you know, where he's following building the problem solving segment where everything just fits together. But was there, there an element to this where you kind of figuring out how much you could do as you were doing it? And was there any level of like improvising as you went along to figuring out

what could be in the final film? Yeah, you know, we didn't really leave any ideas behind and there's actually a good thing with a collaboration with Ryland where he doesn't know Everything about after effects so he would pitch things that I felt were impossible But then I would have to kind of figure out a way to do Because he thought the idea was funny and I would pitch things that were physically impossible for him And he would have to figure out a way to do it. So our ignorance about each other's fields I think was a benefit. And then we were just limited to this principle of it's this guy and animal costumes and snow. So like every idea has to involve those elements. But you know, once you accept that it can be as big of an idea as we want. And if you pick this kind of South

Parky simple looking stuff, like South Park is not limited in the writing because they picked a style where any image can be achieved in that simple style. And so we picked a simple style where we wouldn't have to throw away any ideas. And if there's going to be a beaver space program, we can do it. Yeah. Then is there any like technique or effect in that, that you're particularly proud of, like how you pulled it off, or especially it's like something that's like, or something viewers might think proud of, like how you pulled it off, or especially something viewers might think is surprising, like how you got it, especially like a lo-fi method

for getting something complex. Oh, some of it is shutter stock images. I mean, that's the funniest thing is that sometimes you're going out and shooting an element and it takes all day, and other times you're going on shutter stock and just searching log, and then, then you duplicate that log

and then you make the character very small next to the wall of logs and people say, wow, look at the scale of this film. You're like, you know what scale is? Scale is a very tiny subject next to a bunch of duplicated log shutter stock. That costs $10 and people say, what an enormous film. This is an aside, but this reminds me of one of my favorite

Stan Lee anecdotes is that when he was first going to Hollywood, of all his properties, the thing that he pitched the hardest in like the late 70s was Ant-Man, because he inherently understood the cinematic value of getting a guy really tiny, like all you have to do is build like a big cup and then have a guy stand next to it. And that's cinema, baby. You know.

Yeah, there's some some tricks are like so stupid, but just satisfying. And it's hilarious to see people online being like, how do they do it? And I'm just like, you just saw a dude, you just saw. Mike, I want to turn to the humor of the movie and like I said, like just how elementally satisfying it is to have like the setup, but like it's always like, you know, a guy's going to get hurt, but it's just like, it's not in the way you ever think a guy is going to get hurt. And the sort of the beautiful subversion of expectation. And I found myself watching this movie outside the video game elements, like if you could put this movie in like a time machine and screen

it in like 1924. I think all of these guys would lay I think it would crack I think they'd be tearing up the movie theater at seeing this movie in the 1920s. But like, so much cute comedy today seems very much tied to like a specific moment. And as a result, this sort of disposable. So like, doing such like a sort of throwback comedy style, like what do you find like so satisfying about the humor of like the silent era? I just think it's like, as a first time like feature filmmaker, just picking subject matter that is so rock solid. And it's just like man versus snow, man versus animal, just picking the most fundamental basic building block, Not even like, cause that necessarily interests you the most just because like,

let's just get good at our craft and let's have Rylan and I just start with an element with like things we know that work. And that's, uh, hunting to survive and be good at your job. Good enough at your job to get married. Like this is like so basic. Uh, and that's kind of the reason you pick these themes. And then, yeah, hopefully it works for 100 years. Some of this graphical user interface might be unusual to people from before World War II.

But yeah, we hope that we can collect residuals on this for 4,000 years. Did I answer your question? What else? You're talking about setup and subversion of gags like you think someone's going to get hurt one way and they get hurt another way. I don't I don't know that we did that except with the wolf icicle joke. Oh, I love that one. But you mentioned you mentioned Buster Keaton. Like I'm like what

other what other I mean, like the influences like people would love picking them out. Like we already talked about Looney Tunes and Buster Keaton, but are there any of these three Stooges? But like, were there any other things that were like rattling around your head making this or that you were watching while making this that like found its way on screen? Oh, yeah. Like if you watch the Lubitsch film, The Wildcat from the 20s, you'll be so disappointed in me.

You'll just be like, oh, they just stole the look of this movie. I thought it was original. Anything else like that? I don't know. I mean, I actually, I've just said like motivated by really ambitious small movies like Love Exposure or like The Forbidden Room, the Guy Madden movie words or like the Don Hartsfield movies where it's like someone picked a weird look and then achieved this giant piece of cinema in their look despite being like three guys on the silent film influences., this is a quote unquote silent movie in that there's no dialogue, but there is a ton of sound in this movie.

I assume knowing your influences that you know going in that you needed this, but was that also kind of a process of discovery for you guys of figuring out exactly how much you needed and where to deploy things to get the effect necessary and keep the tone and engagement correct? Yeah. That entire second act of him doing the loop, the whole vision for that is that there would be a series of funny music stopping and starting jokes. And it's funny when music suddenly cuts out or when music suddenly starts. And that we were just going to do that 59 times in a loop in the second act with the same 12 pieces of music rotating.

So that was an early decision. And then Bob Barrett, Oh, the sound designer is brilliant. And he, um, he'd started doing the like signature sounds, like the repeating sound effects that kind of tie the runners together. He started on those before shooting. So I had those while I was like doing the animatic, cause't want to use the Hanna-Barbera sound effects you're so used to. The bongo run sound.

Yeah, that was an early decision. No bongo running. If anyone was going to start running in this film, they would immediately have their footing and that was a contractual condition. They would immediately just go, yeah. They would stall in place for like five to 10 seconds. We would go, I would go back and cut that out of all those Flintstones. I just think, you know, this is wasted time. We could be selling more Ovaltine if he just caught his footing right away.

We could be selling more Winstons. Yeah, we'd have four extra seconds on every block. One of my favorite like sound cues like that is the map whenever it goes back to the little mini map when he's, you know, he's doing his back and forth, his rounds on the trapline and the little joyful theme that plays on the map. Yeah, that's a whistle from the opening song. Ryland's dad actually recorded, wrote, sang and arranged that song. So Ryland's dad, he paints houses, but he's secretly a great

musician with just a bunch of tapes from the 70s in his closet that are all great. And you're like, Wayne, why don't you release your music? And he's like, ah, that's all right, I don't have to. Well, now it's out there. Yeah, I mean, I noticed the continuity in the original music, again, from like Michigan Monster. And watching that after this, you can be like,

oh yeah, it's the same sound as the songs from the beginning of this movie. And that opening sequence I think is so brilliant because it really kind of just keys you into everything the movie is going to be right away. I feel like that's another video game thing is like kind of having to right off the bat train the viewer of being like,

this is the visual language, this is the grammar, this is what you're gonna get in this. We're gonna give you a lot of it right up front and then situate you in the world of the movie. Because these people that don't like your style, they're going to give you a bad review. You need to kick them out early so they don't letterbox it. Another great thing about this movie, any movie that drops the opening credits like

a third of the way into it and then the title of the movie two thirds of the way into it, that's your cook of the fire. That was very love exposure. Yeah, that was awesome. You drop the opening credits after the tutorial level is accomplished and he levels up to the raccoon outfit. I think we're you know, we're all supposed to pretend to not like love exposure anymore, but it's obviously great.

And obviously the fact that the the title comes in an hour in. Yeah. Oh, man. Love exposure is funny because like most like romcoms are, you know, there's like one lie that, you know, has to like get worked through and the end of the second act. Love exposure like builds a love story with like three lies. And it takes six 60 minutes to set

it all up. And then the title comes in and then it's three more hours of untangling all that. My favorite use of sound in the movie is like the scene that comes closest to having a dialogue is the unbelievably funny scene in which the main character is put on trial and the climax in the Beaver Dam was great but like the Beaver lawyer who's doing his well now I'm just a simple country Beaver lawyer but like it's all just done with the intonation of like, and then bringing out the exhibits. Oh God.

It was so good. Like spoken words. So on the movie we have an actual, our buddy Jay is actually a was a public defender in Minnesota and actually was the UM Duluth mascot. So he's the most qualified person for that role and we did not cast him. We cast him. We cast Jerry. My buddy Jerry did the voices for both lawyers and then the physical performance

for both lawyers. And yeah, it's Animal Crossing John Grisham. I love the defense attorney giving the thumbs up and then dripping instantly. One of my favorite gags. Yeah. People love the public defender Beaver. be I just any moment where the beaver and John kayak are like Sudden out like allies for two seconds is funny to me. I Was a like I mentioned I was just in Wisconsin last weekend we were there for the UW Madison Commencement the graduation my girlfriend's brother just graduated But my favorite part of the whole weekend was when they brought out Bucky the Badger on stage. And I was like, there he is! It's the guy! It's Bucky! It's the Badger!

And then he starts doing the jump around. Everyone's loving it. But I want to go back to you. You said, like, you and Rylan were friends in high school. And you mentioned, like, watching, like, The Three Stooges, like, your friend's dad is watching The Three Stooges. And I'm wondering, like, in high school, did you have like a movie experience either like individually or together, like a comedy or otherwise that like kind of blew your mind and like, I don't know, set you on this path to like do all this like wacky like cartoons

and movies and things like that? I mean, everybody loves Indiana Jones. So I won't go on and on about it, but like the gag driven nature of the Indiana Jones action scenes was a huge influence. The fact that like, even though those are like, I don't know, even though that's like an adventure movie, it has like gag writing in every set piece action scene.

And there's always like, you know what I like about Steven Spielberg is, you know how many Nazis are on the bike behind Indiana Jones. You know that it's three. And if he takes out one of those guys, now it's two. And if he takes out one of those guys, now it's one. And I just like that engineering mind of a, of a Steven Spielberg action scene. Uh, and like, hoped to do something like that. And then, yeah, just checking out Buster Keaton from the library.

I feel like the, the tank sequence in last crusade feels very hundreds of beavers where he's like, he gets a satchel caught on the, the, the tank, uh, cannon and is grinding into the wall and is trapped on the conveyor belt of the treads. You know, I guess I could use of a pen in your loadout inventory. That was a good use of a pen in the last crusade. The pen is mightier than the sword. Yeah, they do. They're like, what college do they both go to?

They do their little song and it's everyone's least favorite least understood part of that movie. I like when he does the umbrella and takes down the Nazi fighter plane with all the seagulls on the beach And he goes I remember my Charlemagne. The rocks of the world and the birds of the sky. That is actually like in my top ten favorite movies And I always have to pretend it's not if I'm in a cool film circle. But like Last Crusade or Raiders of the Last Show. It's the best one.

Definitely. Yeah, I just like comedy action like buddy movies. And so it's like people talking about real films and I'm always just pretending that my favorites aren't like Shanghai Nights and Last Crusade. Last Crusade is also very funny. There's something magical about watching Indiana Jones realize that him and his dad have fucked the same Nazi while they're tied together. A theme later explored in the Fablemen's.

She talks in her sleep. Oh man. So yeah, last crusade should have ended there. I heard they made other ones, but we don't have to give more. Now we're turning into like nerd blogs that just talk about big IP all the time. Yeah, we should talk about Don Hertzfeld. I guess an early thing I remember is being at like the Milwaukee Film Fest in like 2006. And then the first minute of that Don Hertzfeld feature played, Everything

Will Be OK. And I don't maybe that sense of humor is like people are used to it now, but like that that first minute like blew my mind when I was 16 and like they just showed the first thing. Have you guys seen this movie? Everything Will Be OK. Don Hertzfeld.

I actually haven't. I have not. I've not seen it either. I have not. But the all the shorts were in heavy rotation in my film school era, the spoon, the banana, all of those classic ones. Here, I'll just put it on, and then we'll all listen to it together, and then you guys can tell me what you think on the show.

I just bring it up because he's like, it's a one-man animated feature, so it kind of gives you permission to like, I guess we don't need a ton of money. We could just like make a whole movie. Well, when in your development, I guess you talked about it as Ryland was building Lake Michigan monster. Was it obvious after that, like that you can do a full feature of this

scale and that you should do it? Or was there any like, it's a hard decision for your collective of like, okay, I guess we're going to do a feature film now. Yeah. The first time like taking that leap, it is intimidating. And then what you got to do when you're starting a feature is you just got to mark 90 on the timeline, just put a little black slug at 90, and then just start filling up the timeline as you approach 90. It didn't have like a nice script with a real structure.

We just kept putting junk in it until we hit that 90 minute or whatever. And then that's the David Lynch method of you write an idea on an index card and when you have 70 index cards, you got a movie. You just need it. We're just filling time. It's not that we have some important story to tell. We're really treating it like TV broadcasters. We're spending time. We're spending time together. We're spending time together. Yeah. Yes, Will, I'll call on you. Yes. Oh, shit, I forgot what I was going to say. Fuck.

Someone else go. There's a part where the beavers create or where he creates a cross. Is he Catholic and is he a metaphor for the Pope and does he shit in the woods? The beavers are all Catholic, yeah. Usually I would make a Protestant movie, but these are the French and it's the North. So we made a Catholic movie. I would have assumed. Yeah. That the, uh, the old trapper and have certainly the, uh, the vendor, uh, French Catholic, the merchant French Catholic, Ryland, uh, Jean. Well,

I guess he's French. He also is Catholic. I was assuming that, you know, the Lutheran and you can, yeah, I just liked that it was French because I thought, well, it's like a Jacques Tati film. Like we're in that tradition of and we had just been to French Canada. We had been in Montreal for the for Fantasia and that was our favorite festival. So we were like, we got to we got to make something for the cabochon. No, I remember what I was going to say. And it's pretty much about the character of the character and setting of like

fur trapping and the fur trade. When has and I talked to Theda Hamill and John early about Howard Hawks movies, one of the things we talked about was like, what are your favorite like stock comedy characters that are of like an earlier vintage like for instance, the the old bat, the town, the drunkard. And in this case, the fur trap, the sort of like the frontier concern it sort of like a guy in the woods. Like you mentioned something inherently funny about the fur trade. But what is it about like the kind of stock 19th century prospector style character that you find so funny?

That Walter Brennan character is hilarious. I love that. I don't know the other actors that kind of did it, but the shawty that stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, God. The old bat is a great one because there used to be so many good old bat characters played by like Marjorie Maine and or the woman that was like the straight man for the Marx brothers. And that that character is so funny. Wealthy Dowager. Yeah, I forgot about it till right now. So you're right. We got to I think if you bring it back, people are going to be mad at you, but they'll secretly like it.

It could be your next movie could be called one one Beaver and it's a well, it's about a well an old bat. So I'm doing it. One of my favorite archetypes like that. I don't know. I like the coward. I like Don. Yes. I just think Don Nodson, just any situation is funny. There's a Don Nodson movie called The Love God where Don Nodson plays a playboy. And you don't even have to execute that movie correctly.

You're just laughing at the title and poster the whole for 90 minutes. All right. That's the guy who sees something scary and can't verbalize it. That's a good coward. Arcturus. That's I think our whole next movie is just going to be Lucas extended. Lucas Dello stuttering set pieces like Ryan Gosling did one of the nice guys that was great. And it had been dormant for 90 years and he kills it. Yeah, just and then no lines either.

Just like, look, we're committing to this has to be a two minute sequence of you stammering at a guy in a bed sheet in a wide shot. Go. How long can you tell this? And Ryan Gosling is a talented enough actor that he is like, you know, this is the this is the art. This is the real this is the work stammering for two minutes at the bed sheet.

But there are also some things, as you mentioned earlier, inherently funny about the history of the fur trade in America, because, I don't know, before the big discovery of, I don't know, oil or whatever, beaver pelts were like the, that was the commodity in the new world, in North America. And the real history of it is not hundreds of beavers. It was billions of beavers that they killed in the great north parts of this country. And it just like, I don't know, like just like the insane holocaust of furry animals is also inherently funny. You're making me laugh right now. You're bringing me laugh right now. You're bringing me joy right now. Another classic cartoon effect in this movie is that every time he catches a body, the

mascot eyes immediately go to X's. A great way of portraying violence without any actual violence. We also need shittier ragdolling in movies like ragdolling has to be. It has to look so funny. The scene where he's like the sort of bar room brawl at the end, where he's just throwing guys against the wall and it just turns into a dummy. And it just seeing it collide with the wall and then crumple is so funny. Hollywood doesn't understand when to give up.

They need to like, oh, we're going to build a dummy character that's a replication of Ryan Gosling for our bedsheet stammering set piece. They shouldn't try so hard. Don't hire a real guy. Hire your brother. And, you know, you can pay him the real rate, but like do a bad job with the dummy and make the cut a little imprecise. They keep spending too much money on comedies.

They should do it shittier. I actually, yeah, I had a question about this like in my, you know, technical rundown, cause I kind of wanted to ask about like digital versus practical effects in this and like how you made the decision of what you would invest in being real versus what you would pick up and post to like maintain the tone going off this discussion. I do think that there's an addendum to this, something that we talk about on the show all the time, uh, the loss of like squib work and you know, kind of my theory is like you don't need every shot to be a squib. You need one glory shot of a guy getting decimated with squibs and then the rest can be digital blood effects.

But if you sold it once, you can like cheat other times. So yeah, I'd like to get your take on the practical versus digital. I think that it's like the best CG shot is a CG shot that's like between two practical shots. Like Lord of the Rings is a great example where like there's CG stuff in there, but it's between like a real orc that they actually bred and and like a model that somebody built. And so when you sneak CG in between those two elements and they all kind of match and there's a there's just a sleight of hand.

It's just like, you just have to be good, Chris. There's no answer about all computers or practical. You just got to make it good. And I think part of part of making it good is the sleight of hand of jumping between effects and like, although I will say, you know, total recall, it's all real squibs. And that is probably as good as it gets. I mean, probably like the single most joyous moment in cinema to me is in Robocop where the Ed 209 just unloads on that poor executive.

And the way Verhoeven just keeps cutting back to his body, being riddled with bullets like well past the point where like you're like, OK, I get it. Now I'm disgusted. Now it's hilarious. Like when you're a kid and they tell you that movies are rated R for violence, like that's what you imagine is going on in our movies. Yeah. I mean, I don't know on the violence. And I know Chris had a was interested in this as well. But like, what was the process of like stunt coordination like on this movie? Were you just like, were you just abusing Rylan through

a bullhorn going again, again? Yeah, that was most of it. But the fight at the end is actually a fight choreographer. That was my buddy, John Trey, who is brilliant. And he did he directed a Chinese version of video game high school in China. And then he did our, yeah, he like choreographed and he kind of blocked that whole fight. So the fight is, there's a reason the fight is like better than the rest of the movie. So anyway, I had a great time working with John. So I think moving forward, we're just going to, every movie is going to have like five John Trave fight scenes in it.

What was the question? Am I answering the question? I mean, you're thinking like how you do, you know, you, you said a lot of like the stuff is just shutter stock images, just stuff like him shuffling himself up trees and stuff. Is that just him like doing the classic Batman thing where you're filming it sideways and then writing it in post? Oh, it's so much stupider than that. It's so much stupider than that. It's him on his front lawn with like a green tarp hanging over one C stand and he's standing up in profile and he

just lifts his leg up and then he lifts his arm up and then I'm just rotoscoping out the leg he's standing on. Sometimes you're just out of time, Chris. There's like just out of time. You just got to move. See, this is exactly like having the small knowledge of like how After Effects works that I do. This is the kind of stuff that was just blowing my mind on this. Cause I, I, if you know a little bit about After Effects, you can kind of gather that how stupid everything must be that how you, you did everything, but it still looks so genius put together. I mean, the, the real, I guess the real, the real like accomplishment at least I see is just like keeping that tone locked in the entire time and making everything,

no matter how like janky and the, it must've been in the production like fit together in a cohesive hole. You know? Yeah. It's just, you got to keep your eye out for any shot that's starting to look too good. You got to stamp that out Keep your eye out for any shot that looks too bad and then try to improve it and then just focus on having strong shapes in the image and But you know bad up close

I mean people are always like especially after like Lake Michigan monster people would be like I love how you made it look bad on Purpose and I would just say like I love how you made it look bad on purpose. And I would just say, like, I tried my very best. Well, I one of my favorite little effects touches was the blinking eyes of the of the beaver jury in the courtroom scene. And I at first I was like, oh, my God, did they get like mascot costumes with blinking eyes and just not use them until just now? Tracking the eyeball, adding a little fur lid to it, spending 20 minutes total and then not worrying if it looks bad.

Yeah, they had to look sleepy. So I was like, we're just we're going to solve this in post. It was like the ultimate fix it in post movie. So you got you and your your your your star and collaborator, Ryland, Lake Michigan Monster. Now hundreds of Beavers is running going to. Is he going to be the breakout star of this movie? Is he going to go Hollywood? Is he going to is he is he already gotten too big for

because of his Beavers stardom? Yeah, he's fired, dude. It's done. It's done with us. I don't want to be thought of as somebody that's like loyal to his hometown or his friends. I am looking to trade up. I am in Hollywood now trying to meet my new collaborators, trying to meet John Cena,

trying to get rid of any Wisconsin accent that's hanging on. I just, I want to be Mr. LA. I mean, honest follow up question. Who out there do you think could pull off this kind of, these kinds of performances? Who's actually like working in the industry right now? Master Ken, the YouTube star. That's the end of the list. Who is master Ken? I'm not familiar with master Ken. I don't know. He just like, he does like comedy martial arts videos. Who's somebody that's like physical?

I don't know. Like this. It's funny that like Keanu Reeves and Tom Cruise are like the guys that will actually put in the time to like train and do a fight and do their own stunts. But those guys are 90s stars. It's two. It's what year is it? It's 2024.

There's like where is the next star that's going to like step up and just be like, I'm Mr. Like physical comedy guy. I'm Mrs. Action girl. Like who, who's going to like be that new, like where are they? I mean, even like a Johnny Knoxville, who's like a half a generation younger than them is like, I can't, if I do one more stunt, I'm going to die of brain injury. Yeah. He's 91. He's 91 years old. I don't know. I think it's just like people aren't there hasn't been physical comedy for a while because like, I don't know. It's like the alligator pit is like a is like verbal now. Like I think it's like when there's more like

working class, like people that have jobs with their bodies, physical comedy is more popular because it's about screwing up with your body. And when you're like a service economy, the alligator pit is like an HR referral. It's an email. The email is the woodpecker that comes and drills your skull every time you do a wolf whistle. That's an email fucking up your day. Like the things that Steve Carell says in the office are like those are like stunts for our society. Well, Mike, I think we should get you out of here with this one. Like obviously on this show, like we talk about movies that we really love. You've already mentioned some of your influence, like Guy Madden and Don Herzfeld. But like we've been we've been saying we've been singing the praises of your movie.

But like what's what's a movie you've seen recently or just one that's on your mind that like you want you'd like to share that you've just been thinking about oh god that's the hardest question the world literally like name this is like the bit of like name one woman on the street and yeah like you're actually i actually can't do it okay how about this if you could recommend to our listener like what would be a good movie to pair with this one like to make a double feature when they after they must go see hundreds of beavers after listening to our listeners, like, what would be a good movie to pair with this one? Like, to make a double feature when they, after they must go see Hundreds of Beavers after listening to this interview. But like, to pair it to make a double feature, what would you give them?

I would like your listening audience to watch. It's a mad, mad, mad, mad world next to our film so that they come out of the double feature saying, you know, Hundreds of Beavers is not too long. My grandfather always claimed to have been an extra in that movie. There's no way of knowing. I think that movie, we imitated their poster, their Jack Davis poster with our poster artist because I was like, maybe if we cite historical precedent, people won't be mad that our movie is so long. My mom was an extra in the original Ghostbusters, or at least that's what she told me.

At summer camp, I would tell people that my mom was in Ghostbusters, and they'd be like, oh, wow, your mom is Sigourney Weaver. I was like, nope. They were like, oh, is Janine the secretary? I was like, nope, just a woman on Central Park West at the end of that movie. There's still no way of verifying. It might not even be that impressive. There's still no way of verifying. It might not even be that impressive.

There's no way of knowing. I'm in Casablanca if we're just saying stuff. I have one more technical question before we get out. I might plug it earlier. I mean, if you want to offline about the plugins and stuff, I could talk about talk about this. Let's online about the plugins. Let's do an hour. Let's lift them off.

Yeah, tell me. Trap code particulate. 64 minutes. Oh yeah, I fucked around with that. Yeah, of course. You a video co-pilot fan? No, I keep it vanilla. You gotta not get all these plugins.

I'm kind of kidding. You don't want to get involved in all these things. Well, seriously, how'd you learn After Effects? Is this all like YouTube tutorials? You know, you learn new things on YouTube. I think at school I started fiddling around with it and didn't get good until I, what you got to do is take a job you're unqualified for, put yourself in that position where then you're scrambling to learn After Effects

by a certain day that you said you'd deliver something and that's how you learned. And then once you have the workflow down, you're yeah, you're just YouTube-ing things. And then I was, you know, doing broadcast After Effects for years. Like I worked at Fox Sports. I did like Colin Cowherd for like three years where I was doing like graphics for his like daytime talk show where it would be like, what if Colin Kaepernick was an octopus? And I would like, all right, I would, I would like make, I would do a little graphic of that in 30 minutes.

That was like going live. So that trained me to be fast, not good, but speed turned out to be helpful for beavers. And then I don't know, I was doing like, I've done a lot of like wall street journal graphics, like where are the nukes in the South China sea? Like, uh, that doesn't have to be, you know, a Spiderman effects shot. It's just like a simple graphic that conveys information quickly with shapes. Uh, and then my final technical question is in the movie and making it, what is the most amount of Beaver costumes, Beavers that you actually had on a single, in a single camera frame at a single time making it.

In the fight, there's a point where there's six on screen where Jean-Claude gets out of the rope and they all react like a bunch of high school kids reacted to like a three pointer or something. That's the only time when there's like six beavers in the shot. Well considering how many beavers that you do see in the shot it gives you a sense of the scale of the effects work. Yeah usually it's like three beavers

duplicated but I don't know. I mean, this isn't interesting, is it? I hope this was valuable. Thank you for treating this like a real movie. Look, I set this up purely so I could ask you all these questions about like how many viewers were on screen on the in one a camera frame at a time. Well, we have like we have no marketing budget. So this means a lot to me because it's been like a word of mouth movie.

And we did our own theatrical release with no distributor and we're doing like our own like merch and we're going to try and put together our own blu ray. So we have had like very little industry help. And so this kind of thing is, I don't know, it's really, it's it's it's we need it. And I don't know, thanks for supporting our little small business or small movie company. There are industry movies and then there are in the streets movies and hundreds of people is a super the people it's in the streets. And if I could just like to pitch this movie, like she tried to see this movie with a group of people because this is a movie that begs

to have like, like the big the gags will let like air just amplified with even just one other person watching with you. It is a real joy. And I would just like saying have like, the gags are just amplified with even just one other person watching with you. It is a real joy. And I would just like to say, Mike, Mike Cheslik, thank you for your beaver picture. Yeah, no, you're welcome. And remember to watch it sober, you degenerates. Mike Cheslik, the movie is Hundreds of Beavers. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. We'd earn it each rash near this little house, If you're thirsty and wondering why, Not a friend from the camps would bear pain in hand, And a song in their hearts by a jar.

May I praise up here, Applejack, The legend is wonder'd how true, That color is gold, no matter how feeling bold, I'll be a contune At the jack-o'-lanterns, yeah