February 12, 2012

Adam Green Reaches New Heights With Frozen

by Jennifer M. Wood | Published February 9, 2010

The premise is deceptively simple: Three college students spend the day skiing, only to be forgotten on the ski lift at closing time—with five days before the resort opens back up for business. Suspended 50 feet above the air in freezing conditions, the three must find a way to get out of their chair and off the mountain.

Like Open Water before it, much of Frozen‘s horror is of the “this could happen to you” variety. Fresh off its Sundance premiere and in theaters now, the film’s busy writer-director, Adam Green, took a few minutes to speak with MM about Frozen‘s origins and the challenges of shooting a survival film in real locations.

Jennifer Wood (MM): The idea of being stranded just minutes or feet away from general civilization, but not being able to reach it seems to be something that’s of interest to you both in Hatchet and Frozen. Where does that come from?

Adam Green (AG): With Frozen, it’s much more of a “this could really happen” type scenario. As somebody who used to ski at these rinky mountains that were only open Friday through Sunday, it would always go through my head when it would be Sunday night, going up that last run and the chair would stop for no reason; any skier knows that feeling. The problem is that they don’t come on the loudspeaker and say, “This is why the chair is stopped. It will start again in a few minutes.” They just leave you there. So, as soon as I came up with the idea, I felt pretty confident that most everybody could relate to it. Even if you weren’t a skier, you could easily get into it. And I think there’s not a lot of these stories because they’re not easy to do. Most people would be inclined to shoot it on a soundstage or a green screen, and that’s why the movies wouldn’t work. You can’t show the audience a survival movie without really going through the survival aspect of it.

MM: I know you were adamant that the film be as realistic as possible. You shot it in the cold, on a mountain, with the actors really suspended in air. What was the biggest challenge you faced in making that decision to do it?

AG: Well, every day had its own set of challenges. But interestingly enough, the hardest thing out of everything was to shoot the scenes when the chair was actually moving and the actors were speaking on it, because how do you shoot that? Originally, I figured you put a hostess tray [camera mount] on one side of the chair and you shoot in the chair in front of them, [shooting] back at them. But you can’t hang anything on the chair.

MM: Because of the weight?

AG: Yeah. And you can’t shoot the whole movie from the chair in front of them, because it would get pretty boring. So we built this kind of contraption that we could hang in front of their chair with two harnesses in it, so that two different camera operators could dangle from the cable and shoot back at the actors. When the camera department saw it, they quickly said, “No way, they’re not going in it.” I called over a maintenance person from the mountain, and said, ‘This is safe, right?’ His answers were always like, “I don’t see why it should fall,” or, “It shouldn’t fall.” And ultimately…

MM: ...that’s not going to work on an insurance form.

AG: In fact, they made us sign waivers saying that we couldn’t sue them if we did that. So, the director of photography and myself shot the scenes ourselves. And I’m scared of heights, which is why I wrote the movie in the first place. It was really, really scary. That was probably the biggest challenge that we didn’t see coming. You come pretty prepared for the cold and the snow and working with the wolves and stuff like that. We really did our homework, but that one—nothing could really compare to that.

MM: How did you choose the camera and equipment, knowing that it too would need to hold up in these conditions? Not just suspending them, but the weather, too.