EXCL: The Perils of Making Frozen

Adam Green’s first interview since shooting

If Hatchet, Adam Green’s horror-comedy, was an endurance run – a challenge to pull off a slasher film and shove it to the forefront of a crowded genre Hollywood film market plagued by sequels and remakes – then the making of Frozen could be labeled a fight for survival. Quite literally.

Cognizant of news headlines telling of skiers buried by avalanches in Utah, Green and his crew, including director of photography Will Barratt, still set off for the state’s snowy environs where he would direct his latest feature. The experience would prove to be the most arduous task Green has ever faced. The film’s concept is simple: Three skiers – actors Kevin Zegers (Dawn of the Dead), Shawn Ashmore (The Ruins) and Emma Bell (Dollhouse) – on holiday become stranded on a chairlift dangling high above the ground. But to achieve the level of authenticity he felt Frozen needed, it had to be done practically even if it meant shooting through two blizzards.

Green and Barratt offered ShockTillYouDrop.com the first crack at talking to them since returning from their grueling production schedule. The pair agrees it’s still too early to give away plot specifics, however, they have plenty of stories to share from the set.

ShockTillYouDrop.com: First thing’s first. There’s more to this story than meets the eye, right?

Adam Green: The movie revolves around three skiers who wind up in a really bad situation, the movie is a sort of a “What would you do?” that could really happen. It’s not, for 90 minutes, three people sitting in a chair debating what they should do. They can’t jump, it’s too high. They can’t climb, it’s too dangerous. They make attempts to get off the chair pretty quickly and that’s when the movie takes off. There are a lot of twists and surprises we don’t want to spoil early on.

Shock: Are the blood-thirsty fans of Hatchet going to be disappointed by the absence of gore?

Green: The blood and carnage, if you want to call it that, is all realistic whereas Hatchet was very fanciful and fun and over-the-top. The whole movie is real, you’re not going to see anything here where people will say “C’mon it wouldn’t be like that.” When you do see someone potentially get hurt or die, or awful things happen, it’s pretty real. There is gore. We shot a lot of gore, so there could potentially be different versions of the film later on.

Shock: Let’s get into the technical specifics. You’ve got three actors high up. How did you get the coverage you needed?

Will Barratt: We wanted to try and create the feeling for the viewer that you’re up there on the lift with the kids. We had a couple of ways to do that. We built this really extensive rig that was clamped right in front of the chair that the actors were in. We rigged two cameras to it and basically rode up the lift and shot them as they went. It’s 100% practical. We were right there when the actors were in the chair lift.

Green: There were ways we were going to be able to do it but because of the weight restrictions it wasn’t safe. We thought we would be able to shoot from the chair in front of them, but that was too far away. Essentially, we hung this metal bucket and we were going to have two camera operators shooting but the camera crew didn’t want to go in because it wasn’t safe. Will and I actually had to harness ourselves into the wire and hang in the bucket and shoot that way. I do have a fear of heights and I don’t like sitting in a rickety chair that’s hanging on by one little clamp. So for me, especially, I had to do it because they were not going to do it. So what was I going to do? Not to mention, the average audience member doesn’t realize, changing your lens or slating your camera to sync the sound…you don’t have extra hands to do all of that when you’re hanging from a harness from a wire.

Barratt: We’d be literally leaning over to have the actors slate for us and lean all the way back to change the slate. If we needed to change the lens, we were hanging over the ski area to change it. There was no easy way to do it.

Green: Where they got stuck, it was 50 feet in the air. We had a 50-foot Technocrane that would swing around them. It was cool to shoot because the actors were really on their own island. They couldn’t hear the crew except for what was on a walkie-talkie that Shawn had in his jacket and I could talk to them that way. But they were very separated from us and in the moment. Logistically, it’s a huge issue because the chairs don’t move backwards so if we needed to move them back because of the lights, there’s nothing we can do unless we sent them up to the peak and around again which is 45 minutes.

Shock: And how did you get all of this equipment up there?

Barratt: I can’t stress how practical we were. We really were on the side of a ski mountain about a half a mile from the lodge and the parking lot. Maybe more. Everything that came from the street had to be dragged half a mile up a ski mountain to get there. We’re talking 80-foot Condor [lights] – 35,000 pounds dragged up the hill. There were Snow Cats backing up and going forward pulling this stuff up to where we were. Production designer Bryan McBrien really spearheaded all of that stuff going up there. He built a sled out of a flatbed trailer where he welded skis onto the bottom of the flatbed trailer to haul the equipment up. Even the Technocrane had to be dragged up. We were driving the process trailer one day and it locked up its brakes, they weren’t able to stop and we almost went off a cliff. I was trying to point out where I was going to jump and land. That was some scary shit.

Green: The cold weather was a problem, but we had a heat wave for a couple of days. The snow melted and we lost seven feet of snow. There were these cranes that were leaning on their sides. We had to shovel snow to get them level again so we could shoot.

Barratt: Snow Cats had to plow snow up against the techno crane to keep it from sliding down the hill.

Green: This was when we weren’t shooting at nights, we were shooting during the day. Then we got hit with a second blizzard of 38 inches in six hours. Every movie is hard and there are always challenges, but this was ridiculous. Looking back, I don’t know if I would have the courage to do it again. I thought someone else would direct this when I wrote it thinking “This guy is f**ked.” When this jumped into our other projects and went first, I wasn’t excited to go, I was really scared because I didn’t think it was going to work. I can’t stress this enough, audiences today are way too smart to fall for a soundstage and green screen. They know, so for a movie that’s going to great lengths to be realistic film, the second people can sense it’s on a stage and not real you lost them. So it was important to me that we shot this practical, as difficult and as insane as that was. We got calls from other crews asking if it was true what we were doing, how we got insured…it’s never going to work, it’s going to go over budget. But we finished on time and on budget. I heard from other directors who don’t understand why we would do this practically and said “It couldn’t have been that cold. There must have been a warming tent.” But there was no way to do that because we’re shooting with a camera that’s 50 feet in the air swinging around full 360 shots so anything that was remotely near the set you would have seen. There was a warming tent but it was back at base camp. The actors, once they were in the chair, they were there all night.

Barratt: It was a 20 minute snowmobile ride just to go to the bathroom.

One of the reasons I wanted to do this with Peter Block is because he was from the same school I was in finding actors and not sitting here trying to find someone from a CW show because they have whatever appeal they have. We hired dramatic actors like Kevin Zegers who was amazing in Transamerica and Shawn Ashmore, who is still a rising star. People who were willing to come in and read and earned it. People who were willing to go through this because there’s no place to go and warm up when you’re 50 feet in the air. You can read it in their faces. They’re really doing it and they’re in jeopardy.

Shock: When we had spoken earlier, you mentioned a creepy tale related to the mountain you shot on.

Green: When I went to scout the location and find the spot where the chair actually gets stopped. I was with Cory Neal and one of the women from the mountain. The whole time I’m thinking, “Could I jump from here? Yeah I could, I might break my leg, but I could do it.” But there’s one spot where there’s just no way. So I said, “This is the spot.” And suddenly the chair lift just stopped, so we’re all laughing about it. It was kind of creepy. The woman had a walkie and she called down to the base of the mountain to ask what was going on. Some technical thing. We were stopped about ten minutes but it was the longest ten minutes ever. No safety bar on the chairs at the time and we were just white knuckling it the whole time. At the end of the shoot, Kane Hodder, who was the stunt coordinator came up to me and introduced me to one of the mechanics and someone else who works at the mountain. They told us the story of someone who either the year before, I don’t know if they worked at the mountain or skied there, had gone there. They climbed the ladder on one of the polls up to one of the chairs at night then shot himself in the chest in the very spot we shot the movie. They found his body bloated and frozen up there. The chair we were in was number 75, the year I was born, but the actual chair number he shot himself in was 92, but they pulled up the chair and there’s an actual bullet hold in it. Through editing we’ve been scouring the shots, listening to the audio to see if there’s another voice or anything. it was really creepy. I wish I could have written that.

You’ll find all of the photos above in hi-res right here.

Source: Ryan Rotten, Managing Editor

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