Ryland: Yes, first time in Germany and so far we haven’t experienced much, unfortunately, but we have a free day tomorrow and we’re still going to be in Berlin, so we’re going to get out and explore a little bit. We might get into some mischief, so hopefully there’s some great story that comes out of our adventures tomorrow. And maybe a future film, who knows.

Well, I’ll say that I think the biggest experience through our movies, both Hundreds of Beavers and Lake Michigan Monster, is the fact that Wisconsin has a very big drinking culture, and so there’s a lot of drinking influences in the movies. I play a drunk in both films – I just think it’s just sort of ingrained in me and my friends, so we inevitably just make our characters heavy drinkers.

It started as a very small idea with sled chases and ball fights; And it sort of slowly grew out of proportion into the epic winter monstrosity you see today. But yeah, as far as influences, just drinking in the cold, yeah.

Yeah, it was mostly just like friends. We had some actual film professionals who worked on the movie for sure, but as far as the people who were working and doing the majority of the shooting in the cold, a lot of it was just friends who we knew would be able to dress up in a beaver costume and be willing to get cold with us and who are used to lugging heavy equipment and props and costumes into the woods. We just got guys who weren’t complainers, who just had a good attitude, who could do a lot of physical labor. And that’s kind of how we got the crew. And then from that, you start shooting and everything moves slower. I mean, because it is so cold and the snow is so deep, everything is like slow motion. And I think it helped the fact that we did a good job on Lake Michigan Monster, and we kind of built that trust with them to be like, hey, we kind of know what we’re doing. If you just listen to what we say, I assure you that this movie will make sense. It’ll work out. And they had full trust in us, and because they worked their butts off, it came to fruition.

The beaver costumes in particular, we actually got off a website. It was something like shopusa.com, based in China, and we just bought some beaver costumes from them that we thought looked pretty funny, and then we made a couple tweaks here and there to give them two teeth. Actually my mom and the director, Mike Cheslik’s wife, Ani, had to take bodyboards, surfboards basically, and then they had to wrap them in brown fabric and velcroed and glued them onto the back of the beaver to make them beavers.

Well, I just hope that AI doesn’t replace human creativity because I think the whole point of art is, it’s a human expression.

And of course, AI, it does come up with some wild, crazy ideas in terms of images and stuff. And it can really get your imagination going to what’s possible. But at the end of the day, it still just needs to be humans doing the thing. You know, to me anyways, there’s no point in creating art if we’re having robots do it.

Well, just in terms of budgetary restraints, I would say we’re definitely trying to get a bigger budget for the next movie because we just want to scale up accordingly. The next movie we make, we don’t want to make it a $50 million movie, but it would be nice to scale it up accordingly where we get a little bit bigger budget, just so we have a little bit bigger crew and we’re able to pay people a little bit better next time. But we still want to keep it relatively small. I mean, even if we’re able to get a budget that’s half a million dollars or one million dollars, that’s still pretty small, even in the indie film world. But if we are able to do that then we can scale up accordingly and still make a big giant fun movie within our means, without having to rely on a studio. Because if you start to rely too much on the studios, they might strip you off your creative freedom and we don’t want that. It’s about the kind of movies that we’ve always made with our creative voice.

Yeah, absolutely. I think having a smaller budget definitely makes you think outside the box in new, fun, creative ways. And again, part of the reason why Beavers looks the way it does is because we didn’t have the means to make it look like Spider-Man or Avatar. So we tried to go in the exact opposite direction and try to make it stand out by having this sort of grainy black and white style with cheap effects. At first we didn’t know how people were going to relate to that but thankfully people have really gravitated towards it and maybe it is because it is so lo-fi and very human made and it doesn’t rely on a bunch of CGI and stuff like that.

It definitely takes a longer time. Beaver’s took almost four years to make. And thankfully, we had investors who just gave us a little bit of money and they just kind of left us alone and let us make the kind of movie we wanted to make, and that was really helpful. Thankfully for us they believed in us and we had a plan and we just sort of lucked out that people gravitated towards. We‘re just super thankful for all of our fans. It’s been amazing the kind of ride it’s having and that people continue to come out and see it in the cinema.

Well, thank you so much, really appreciate it.