Adam Green: Frozen

You know, we spoke to some Army Rangers about it, trying to shoot holes in the thing, and they said that’s actually the worst thing you could do. First of all, just trying to undress up there? Trying to even get your clothes off when you’re in a seated position like that? You could try it, but even if you did get them off the exposure to the elements would mean you wouldn’t make it. Even if you did get to the bottom, you’re then talking about at least a twenty to forty minute walk until you find anybody. Any people who are left up there with no clothes on aren’t going to make it, either. They said that’s the last thing they would try to do. These were military people, and they said their first choice would be to jump, although you have to jump a certain way. You’re going to break your bones, but you have to just hope that you don’t break them so badly that you can’t then drag yourself down the hill. That’s what Dan says in the movie, “Even if I hurt myself, I might still be able to make it down to the bottom.” But if you fall in a way that results in a compound fracture of both your legs, that’s kind of out.
The other option is to climb the cables, but in reality if you know anything about those cables you wouldn’t even try climbing them, because they are so sharp – they have to be, so that these metallic things can fit through the rungs and not come apart. They look like rope, but they’re really metal. MythBusters actually did an episode on this once, where they asked how you would get off a chair lift, and they tried climbing it and sliding on it with a jacket and it was impossible – it slices right through it. In the movie there’s a little bit of suspension of disbelief there, because Lynch actually does make it to the next chair, and in real life he probably wouldn’t have. It would have cut into his hands and he would’ve fallen and died, but nobody wants to see that ending!

[laughs] He was! So was my friend Dave Parker, who directed The Hills Run Red, and also my friend Dan Walker. I’m just really bad with names when I’m writing, and I’ll stick in my friends’ names all the time with the intention that sometime before we actually shoot I’ll go through it and come up with other names, but this time it was like, eh, why not? For the handful of people who get it, it’s kind of a funny joke when you hear those names go by, but the average person watching it obviously has no idea about that connection.

I kind of just came up with the situation, because it’s a big fear of mine as someone who used to ski. The mountains I skied at, these places in Boston, they’re only open Friday through Sunday, and they’re really kind of crappy mountains compared to, like, what we have here in Park City. They don’t really get a lot of business and you kind of feel like you’re going on a carnival ride. There’s always that dude who’s just standing there smoking a cigarette as he’s sending you up. When we were scouting mountains we would ask them “Could this happen here?” and they would get very angry and defensive and say “Not at our mountain, we take precautions, we do this, we do that.” But if you persisted with could it, then they would say, “Well, it could, because there’s such a thing as human error.” You could have a guy who just isn’t doing his job right. I mean, how many times have you read stories about airline pilots that were drunk? How much trust do we put in strangers that they’re not going to do something that would kill us, you know? If you search online for stories of people being trapped, there are hundreds of stories every year. In fact, right here in Utah, one of the ski mountain people who came to our screening this afternoon said a kid recently fell fifty feet off of one of them – he just slipped off. While we were shooting Frozen a gondola fell in British Columbia, killing about seven people. There was also a group of cross-country skiers in British Columbia that went off the beaten path, got lost, and wolves ate this guy’s wife. So, all of the things in the film could happen, though they’re not very likely. “Likely” is people getting stuck in an elevator. Movies should always be worst-case scenario. I think because the concept and the trailer seem to be getting under people’s skin, there’s a knee-jerk reaction on the part of some to say “Well, this is ridiculous, it could never happen.” The fact of the matter is, it could.

Well, there were four different production companies that wanted to make Frozen, but the only one willing to let me do it this way was Peter Block’s company, A Bigger Boat. He understood that if you’re going to make a survival thriller, it has to be real. You just can’t expect the audience to be scared if they know they’re looking at a soundstage. So that was the first thing. The bond company that had to insure the film was not happy about this at all, because we didn’t even have a single covered set in the original script. The compromise made was for me to move some of the dialogue into the lodge and have at least one scene that was on a covered set, so in case there was a blizzard or something we’d at least have something to shoot that day. The other compromise was that the producers and I agreed to defer our pay, so that if we went to the contingency, it was our own money. So, that made the bond company happy, and the last thing we shot was that stupid lodge scene that they demanded we have as a safety. We finished on time, on budget, and never went into the contingency. But there were blizzards and hailstorms all through the movie, and we just shot through it. I lucked out, actually, because the weather actually cooperated. In the script it’s like ‘a big storm starts’ and then it happened when we shot.

Not at all. I like Open Water, and I take that as a compliment. This definitely is a kind of Open Water, worst-case scenario, what-would-you-do movie. Some directors get pissy about that kind of thing, they always want to think that their movie is the most original thing ever and no one’s ever done anything like it. Well, no one’s ever done Frozen before -- no one’s ever done a ski-lift horror movie -- but at the same time, just like with every movie, you get some degree of it being “like” this or that. With Hatchet, my God, everyone was like, this is a rip-off of Friday the 13th! Well, no, it was actually a rip-off of Fright Night and An American Werewolf in London, but people were too stupid to realize that. They just saw woods and Kane Hodder. With this, nobody’s really called it a rip-off of Open Water, but I have heard the comparisons. Where I see it as being different, aside from the obvious things, is that Frozen is a very hopeful movie and it’s really a character movie, a performance movie, whereas Open Water, to me, was a gimmick of real people and real sharks. Once they were left behind, the whole time you’re just waiting to watch them die. And then, in the end, they die. I liked the movie, and I think sharks are everyone’s worst nightmare, but I do feel like Frozen is that concept taken to a whole other intellectual level. I think there’s a lot more going on in Frozen than they had going on in Open Water.

Oh, yeah. Everyone who came in to audition, the whole first five minutes of it was me explaining what this was, and many of them walked out right then. Some said “Oh, my agent told me only a portion of this would be practical and the rest would be soundstage.” And I was like, “No, none of that, and also, you can’t come down. That chair only moves forward, so if you decide to come down, that’s an hour out of our shooting day, so you can’t go to the bathroom and you can’t eat.” Thankfully, the people I had were down for it, and even embraced it. It’s a great opportunity for an actor – ninety minutes of your face and the whole movie hinges on your performance. There’s no horror gags, no action sequences, it’s all about you. Because of that, we actually ended up getting the cream of the crop of young Hollywood coming in to audition for this. It got competitive. Some people wanted to be in this movie badly. I’m sure that by night three our actors were kind of regretting it a little bit, but they never once complained and they never broke their stride or gave up, and now they’re seeing the rewards of that. To have every show at Sundance be sold out? To have a screening where someone faints? We had a screening this morning where two people vomited. The reviews have also been tremendous. It’s all been worth it. The fact that we’re getting a theatrical release in this day and age – that’s not easy for an independent movie, so we’re very fortunate, and I’m really grateful for all of it.

Her audition piece was the "starving dog" story. And no, she needed no coaching with the tears, she's that good. In fact, Emma was the very first person to audition for Frozen, for any role! I was so sold that I didn't even want to waste time seeing anyone else, but of course the powers that be made me do my due diligence. So, four weeks and a hundred actresses later, Emma Bell got the part. How's that for a Hollywood rarity?

Yeah, that was two-fold. One, it gives Lynch something to focus on and remain hopeful for. He has his line about how if he ever gets off that chair he’s going to just call her up and ask her to marry him. And of course it was there to explain away the cell-phone thing without resorting to “Oh no, we can’t get a signal!” Most skiers that we spoke to said that whether or not they really bring their cell phone with them depends on the mountain. But with most ski mountains you don’t get any reception while you’re up there, so most skiers – because phones these days are expensive iPhones and BlackBerrys – they’ll put them in the locker and go do a couple of runs, and then come back and check their messages. They generally don’t ski with them when there’s a chance they’ll get broken. In fact, one of our actors had gone snowboarding about a month before we shot and he destroyed his iPhone. So, in my opinion that scene was a smarter way to get around the whole “Why don’t they just call somebody?” thing. If one of them had pulled out a cell-phone up there and then it said ‘no service’ you’d be like, oh God, this is terrible. I don’t know if you noticed, but we also got around the whole 555 thing by actually buying that phone number. We didn’t include the area code, but if people go and figure out that Boston area code and call that number, they’ll actually get that actress, Rileah Vanderbilt, saying “Hi, you’ve reached Shannon, leave a message.”

Hatchet 2 will prove beyond a reasonable doubt that I'll go as far as I want with gore, with no regard for the MPAA and their bullshit. Nowadays, with the coveted unrated DVD release, no matter how much the MPAA castrates and abuses indie films, our vision still gets out there eventually. With Frozen, excessive gore would have ruined the film. It had no place in it and this was just not that kind of movie. Much like with Jaws, my biggest inspiration in Frozen, it was what you don’t see that really scares you. Hatchet may have been super gory and violent, but Frozen is a million times more terrifying and, quite frankly, a much better film. With Hatchet we had cheers, laughs, and applause. With Frozenwe're having fainting and puking from the tension.

It’s going better than we ever hoped. It's gonna blow people away. We have the time and resources that we never had when we made the first one, plus the story is so much darker and bigger. Way more kills, way more gore. We used fifty-five gallons of blood on the first and have already gone through a hundred and twenty on this one. It’s a better story, and has more suspense than the first. It's still a Hatchet movie and has humor and the same Adam Green tone of being fun and entertaining rather than morbid and depraved, but goddamn did we pull off some crazy shit that will blow your mind. Dark Sky is plotting many more films, much more theatrical support, and they are all having a blast working with us and becoming part of my Ariescope family. Victor Takes Manhattan? Hmmm, that's a great idea! No, so long as they let me steer I will try and do Victor and his fans justice. That's why I directed the sequel. I refuse to let someone make a shitty Hatchet movie after all the fighting we’ve done to get here.

Paranormal Activity was a huge victory for all indie genre filmmakers, but it hasn't really changed the playing field at all. If anything, it's now made things frustrating because now every studio wants their own "Paranormal Activity" and every meeting you go on has producers asking "Why spend money on a film when Paranormal Activity didn't and made a ton?" Much like with The Blair Witch Project, we'll see a few years of knock-offs that don't work and then it will go away. But goddamn, did I love Paranormal Activity. I was lucky to see it at home, years ago, and it scared the shit out of me. Best way to have seen it!

I can't get specific, because to be totally honest, I'm flattered and honored that the big studios doing these remakes even know who I am or call me in to meet on their projects. I don’t want to burn bridges by making fun of what I've turned down. But that being said, I've turned down a lot or used the "I'm unavailable, sorry!" excuse for all of them. I am not anti-remake, but when they give you parameters that make it so that you don't even have a chance at doing it right, why take the job? For example, it's like being called in for a remake of Hatchet and having them tell you not to use Victor Crowley in it. Fuck that. I feel bad for some of the directors who've received such backlash from the fans for their remakes -- if you knew what they were put through by the studio you would feel bad, too. Thankfully, I've had great success with my original projects to date and I now have my own production company, Ariescope Pictures, so I do what I want and what I'm inspired to do. I don't need to take jobs for the money and if and when I accept a studio project it's going to be something I really am excited about and something I want to do. I'm discussing a few now, so we'll see what the next few years bring.

Frozen opens in select cities on February 5, 2010