Muscling In
‘Hundreds of Beavers’ and writer-star Ryland Tews prove there’s still room for movies that aren’t content.
Ryland Tews
In Mike Cheslik’s category-defying Hundreds of Beavers, a 19th century applejack bootlegger-turned-fur trapper Jean Kayak (Ryland Brickson Cole Tews) masters the art of snagging beaver (get your mind out of the gutter), partly for pride – forest fauna are little assholes in Kayak’s world – and partly to win the hand of his beloved, The Furrier. He has to impress her father The Merchant and fulfil his demand for, yes, hundreds of beavers – or at the very least hundreds (okay, dozens) of dudes in beaver costumes. A dam and a woodpecker a crucial to Jean’s quest. It’s a simple enough premise, but Beavers is built on an intricate house of cinematic cards and influences, the likes of which have not been seen in years that weren’t a derivative mess. Oh, and it’s silent. It’s hard to overstate just how tight, almost Rube Goldberg-ian the script is, and how smart it reveals itself to be when all is said and done. Talk about a giant mic drop.
“That’s kind of you to say. We’re actually really dumb,” cracks Tews, the star, co-writer (kind of, more in a bit) and producer of the still-emerging 2022 (!) cult hit, referring to he and his partner in crime/high school chum Cheslik. Tews is chatting via Zoom from Korea, where the film’s on the programme at the Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival (BIFAN) as part of its quest for world domination. “We just rip off a bunch of movies; we take a lot of inspiration. If you take 100 inspirations and mix them all together, you get Hundreds of Beavers basically.” Tews isn’t kidding, but he is understating. Beavers is loaded with an endless string of gags that call back everything from Buster Keaton to Looney Tunes, Aardman’s Shaun the Sheep (Tews does a great impression of The Farmer) to the 1972 trapper drama Jeremiah Johnson, probably most famous now for that Robert Redford gif.
But the film also gives off big The Evil Dead energy, Sam Raimi’s notoriously scrappy low budget debut starring Bruce Campbell that helped juice the American indie scene in the 1980s. Beavers’ DIY vibe and gleeful tone make it easy to imagine Tews as the Campbell to Cheslik’s Raimi.
“Oh, yeah. They’re always an inspiration. I think Evil Dead II had a big impact on Mike and I growing up,” says Tews, a Wisconsin native, and so an honorary Michiganer – Raimi’s home state. “We love the way that Raimi shoots and we love the way Campbell is the bumbling hero. They’re really good at towing that line between legitimately spooky horror and great moments of physical comedy. That’s really hard to do without going too much either way, and do so well. Campbell is a great physical comedian, he’s a great looking guy, and in Army of Darkness he’s just a damn action hero.” This is said with justifiable reverence.
The film nerds out there will have heard about the Hundreds of Beavers phenomenon by now, but for the uninitiated the US$150,000 comedy epic has been blazing a trail among nerds, festival-goers and furries (more on that in a bit too) for its DGAF creativity. Shot in gloriously stark black and white (by Quinn Hester) and dialogue-free with the exception of Jean’s grunts and “Ho-hos!”, the script is a Swiss watch in its construction, where every joke from Act I pays off, where every visual gag lands (dogs playing poker never gets old). It demands repeat viewing because no one is catching everything on the first go. It can also be read as a story about a young man maturing into adulthood, and Tews’ full-bodied, narrative performance is a wonder.
The idea came from Cheslik’s urge to recreate the magic of Tews’ 2018 feature directorial debut Lake Michigan Monster (below, left, co-written by Cheslik) and to get back to the animal mascot costumes that Tews calls “an international language. There’s inherent humour in a dude in a furry suit falling down,” he quips. The duo plugged away on a script for a few days each week for several months to wrangle the running gags and bring the story full circle, and eventually they birthed the behemoth that is Beavers. Come shooting time, however, “There was no script per se. It was just all storyboarded … It was like a piecing together this elaborate puzzle. And Mike and I, we like to make movies with a lot of dialogue. This was a challenge, but it's called a movie, not a talkie.” The original goal was for a much more modest film. “By the time we got to the third act of the movie it was barely under of control.”
Tews, Cheslik, a few film pros and a bunch of friends and family hit the Wisconsin and Michigan woods for 12 weeks during the winters of 2019 and 2020 and emerged into a very different – and still shifting – film market than when they concocted the idea. In a new world order that seems divided into US$200 million IP “content” (as it’s grossly called now) and everything else that traditionally relies on theatrical exposure, how do indie filmmakers get the word out?
“Let’s be honest. We’re filmmakers. We want to make good movies, but we’re also in the business of making money,” states Tews. “And we thought the only way to do that was to keep the movie ourselves.” So Tews and Cheslik hired a booker (they went with the wizard known as Jessica Rozner) and rolled the dice. “It took a while to convince film festivals to even programme us. A lot were unsure their festival goers would be intrigued by something that’s an hour and 45 minutes, black and white, with no dialogue.” After premiering at Austin’s Fantastic Fest in 2022, word-of-mouth built (festivals in Mexico, Finland, Belgium, Taiwan and Japan, as a few, followed) all the way to an international sales agent. As Tews sees it, Beavers’ success proves there’s still space for “everything else”. That’s good for theatres and it’s good for independent filmmakers.
“I believe there’s still a hunger for certain movies to be played in theatres, and if you eventise it I think people will get off their couches and go out. When we went to festivals we’d always bring beaver costumes and I would wrestle beavers WWE style during the Q&A, and Mike would basically do five minutes of stand up at the intros. So it turned into this sort of Rocky Horror Picture Show thing. I think that really helps to get people in theatres and get the word-of-mouth going.” Tews pauses for a second. “Of course, you have to make a decent movie to begin with.”
Tews and Cheslik won’t rule out working with the likes of Netflix or taking a chance at getting Zaslaved by Warner or Disney, but it’s hard to imagine the “duh-duunng” leading into their next film. Tews describes it as a horror-comedy with lots of action. “And vampires. It’s basically going to be Rush Hour with vampires.”
Hundreds of Beavers is available on Amazon, Apple, VOD, it’s loitering in cinemas in the US and Canada, opens soon in the UK and Australia, and continues on the festival circuit; it opens in Japan in 2025. In industry jargon, this is a film with “legs”. “As long as people continue to get infected with beaver fever, we're happy to move into theatres. And it’s been nice too, because like you said, it’s available to stream and rent but people like dressing up in beaver costumes and going out to the theatre to see it on the big screen. Because the best way to see the movie is with a crowd full of drunks,” he deadpans. And yes, the film has indeed been a hit with furries, a pretty misunderstood community that’s maybe a little bit sensitive after being done dirty by CSI. Furries have embraced Hundreds of Beavers, with the exception of a Silicon Valley furry convention that cancelled at the last minute. “I don’t think they ever really gave an explanation why but I think it’s because of what happens to all of the beavers,” finishes Tews. “It doesn’t matter where our fans come from. If they have beaver fever, they're all right by us. And if it weren’t for furries I assume half our box office wouldn’t even exist. So thank you.” — DEK
Where we were
Online • Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival, July 4-14, 2024
Hong Kong • July 6, 2024