Interview Part 1: Director Adam Green Talks Frozen, Influences, and Remakes
Frozen director Adam Green
Interview conducted by Britt Hayes – January 2010
Adam Green is a fantastic director who has brought us brutal films like Spiral and Hatchet. His latest film, Frozen, is an intense survival-horror drama that premiered at Harry Knowles’ (Aint it Cool News) annual Butt-Numb-a-Thon at the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin. I wrote a glowing review back in December, and positively jumped at the chance to interview Adam. Since this interview was so long (and so awesome), we split it into two parts.
Ladies and gents, I give you part 1 of my interview with Adam Fuckin’ Green:
Brutal as Hell: So I saw Frozen at Butt-Numb-a-Thon in Austin, back in December.
Adam: Awesome!
Brutal as Hell: Yes, and I really loved it! What I wanted to ask about is the trailer. I saw it and it seems to give away a lot of the more shocking moments of the film. Would you agree, and did you cut the trailer yourself?
Adam: No, when you’re at this level you don’t ever get to cut the trailer yourself, unfortunately. And that’s one of the good things about really little independent movies is that you do everything yourself. But there was a whole big company that did everything, and I don’t really get much of a say in that type of stuff.
But I mean, I know it’s sort of – it really only spoils things if you’ve seen the movie. If you haven’t seen the movie yet, it doesn’t really spoil it. When you think about the fact that like, the subject matter, and people know that the log line is “three people get trapped on a chair”, if you were to try to not show that somebody’s going to try to jump, that somebody’s going to try to climb, and what’s beneath them – why would you go see the movie? So, I think they’re doing their job right in terms of making a trailer that shows the excitement, but if you haven’t seen the movie yet, and I don’t think you can tell people exactly what happens or how it ends from the trailer, so…it’s stuff like that. Like, the fact that you can see a couple glimpses of wolves in the trailer, I didn’t like that.
Brutal as Hell: Yeah, I agree.
Adam: But when you first see it, and you had no idea that it was coming, like, everything’s happening so fast that I think the average person – ’cause we’ve already tried this with the trailer and the people seeing it – it was still a surprise when the wolves came. With the way the movie unfolds, you’re not thinking about that, when it happens it still kind of catches you off guard. So it’s, yeah it’s one of those things.
Pretty much every movie I’ve worked on, no matter what the trailer is, I always feel like it gave away too much. For Hatchet, the third trailer had nothing in it at all, just a little girl’s voice talking, and reviews and things, and we didn’t show anything from the movie. Which, I had control over that one. I don’t know if that was necessarily the right thing to do, ’cause you’ve gotta remember the average person who watches this stuff, you need to sell them in those two minutes on why this is worth their money to go see, so most people don’t care about it being spoiled. They would rather be spoiled; in fact, my editor was telling me that when he worked for Disney, they did this sort of test where audiences would rather hear the best jokes from the movie and see the big set pieces because when they go see the movie, it’s cool to see it again because they’re all in on it. It’s a weird thing, like for me, as somebody who makes movies, I’d rather know as little as possible, whereas the average consumer – they wanna know everything and don’t even care about it. I also still think that with Frozen, it’s not really just those things that happen that make it good, it’s more the drama as it unfolds and the performances. Which there is no way to really capture that in the trailer, so I still think that’s what’s really gonna impress people when they see it. Not, “oh well, I know he jumped.” If you hear what the log line is, and you don’t think someone’s gonna try to jump, like you’re…I mean…
Brutal as Hell: Yeah, you’d be nuts. When I watched the film, it gave me kind of a Cabin Fever/Open Water vibe. It’s not like those films, plot-wise, at all. But it seems to elicit that same sort of strong audience reaction. I don’t know if you actually stuck around through the whole BNAT screening…but people were…
Adam: Yeah, I saw most of the screening. I left towards the last fifteen or twenty minutes, when I heard that somebody had fainted and stuff.
Brutal as Hell: Ha, oh yeah.
Adam: I wanted to make sure everything was cool, so yeah, I did sit through most of it, and it was, yeah, it was great listening to people. The interesting thing about Butt-Numb-a-Thon, though, is that the majority of the people in that audience had no idea that the movie was gonna play, and even furthermore, had no idea what it was about. And Harry (Knowles, of Aint it Cool News) didn’t say anything when he brought me up about what it was about, I didn’t say what it was about, and then they showed two comedic trailers before it.
Brutal as Hell: Yeah, they did (Ski Bum and Hot Dog: The Movie).
Adam: So for the first 30 minutes, people were laughing way more than I ever expected. People were laughing.
‘Cause it’s not really supposed to be funny, it’s just real life sort of banter. And then when the chair got stuck and the lights went out, the panic that went through the audience was amazing! And that, like, that’s probably…’cause even at Sundance, as much as I’m going to be watching it in Park City with a bunch of skiers, which is gonna be great, seeing it with people who didn’t know what was coming, you can never beat that. And when he jumps (in the movie), and people start freaking out, and there’s all kinds of moments that elicited such a strong reaction, it was fantastic.
Especially, you know, I wrote it and people asked “What’s your next movie?” Well, it’s about three skiers who get stranded on a chair lift. There wasn’t one person who said “That sounds awesome”. They were all like, “That’s going to be the most boring movie ever! How are you going to make a movie with 90 minutes of people sitting on a chair and saying ‘I’m cold!’” “Well, I kind of have some good ideas for it.” “No, no! It’ll never work, it’ll never work! And if you don’t have like, a TV star from the CW in there, and if you don’t have this and you don’t have that…” “Umm, I think it’s going to be okay!” So that was really validating to hear the audience, ’cause I think that was probably, I wasn’t there for Kick-Ass, but it sounded like Frozen was one of the most, like, audience-reaction movies. So that was great.
Brutal as Hell: It really was. I think Frozen and Kick-Ass were the ones that got the strongest audience reactions out of everything…I mean, the trailers that they show inbetween usually get people pretty riled up. And the other thing is, being there for so long, and you’re so tired, and for me, I had a hangover, so I was really tired.
Adam: Ugh!
Brutal as Hell: So having something like that playing that really gets you awake is phenomenal. I have to say, I do this thing when I’m scared during a movie, where I put my t-shirt half over my face, like I’m a t-shirt ninja, so for most of Frozen, my t-shirt was half over my face and I was just screaming “Oh my God, Oh my God” over and over.
Adam: (Laughs) That’s awesome!
Brutal as Hell: What were some of your influences for this film?
Adam: Umm, there were three real influences in terms of movies that I actually took the time to sit down and watch and study with my crew. The first one was Hitchcock’s Lifeboat, and the second one was Rope. Basically because, what I think Hitchcock was the master of is taking a confined situation, like Lifeboat, and making it not a movie that is only about the situation. And that’s what I was trying to stress to everybody that…okay, yeah they’re stuck, and they’re cold, and these things are going to happen, but if that’s all we have going for us, who cares? It’s almost a torture movie at that point. ‘Cause it’s like, okay, so I watched the movie, and these people suffered and suffered and then…what? And that’s what I didn’t want to do, and I think the characters have such strong arcs in terms of who they are at the beginning, who they are at the end, and there’s so many emotional scenes, with the dialogue and the performances, and that’s really what I wanted to study.
The third film was Jaws. I know a lot of people dig the Open Water thing because of the whole “could possibly happen/people stranded” situation, but Open Water was never something that we actually talked about or looked at or anything. And that’s no slam against Open Water, I like Open Water. When I saw it, it was very effective. But then Open Water was kind of a gimmick movie, where it was “Real people! Real sharks!” and that was enough, but what I didn’t like about Open Water was that once they were stranded, the movie was over for me because there was no hope, there was no anything. It was just waiting and watching for them to die, and after a while it just felt like a torture film.
So, again, loved Open Water, I think it’s great, I’m not saying anything bad about it, but when people are like, “So, is this like Open Water?” No! But Jaws, and the fact that it was three characters in a small area. All the scenes in Jaws that take place inside the boat, reading about how Spielberg didn’t block anything, he didn’t shot lift anything…they would go there and they would find the scene, and then he would shoot it. We did a lot of that with the chair, ’cause it was the same thing. If you notice, the next time you see the movie, every different scene is shot completely differently when they’re on the chair, and that’s what keeps the movie from feeling stagnant. It keeps evolving as it goes. And I think Spielberg did that amazingly with Jaws, so that was something that was sort of an aspiration for us ’cause obviously nobody’s ever gonna touch that movie. But we were striving to emulate a little bit of what they did.
Brutal as Hell: How did you get this idea for three people stuck on a ski lift?
Adam: The idea…It’s really funny, it’s going to sound like it was a big deal, but it actually came to me in like, less than four seconds. What happened was, the morning news here in LA whenever they show it, it’s always the same, “It’s 70 and sunny!” every single day, so you never actually look at the weather reports, you look past it at whatever scene they have up that they’re putting the graphics over, so it’s “Right now we’re looking at the Santa Monica pier! We’re looking at…this place that’s on fire! We’re looking at” whatever, and it was that morning, it was Big Bear ski mountain, and it was 7 in the morning, so obviously the chairs weren’t moving, and I’m just staring at these chairs that are stopped, and I started thinking, well, I used to ski when I was younger, but not at nice places like this. Where I grew up skiing, were these low-rent, kind of shitty mountains that, aside from the month of December and Christmas week, a lot of ‘em were only open on the weekends because they couldn’t have the business stay open during the week. Nobody went, and I used to ski there, and I was always thinking to myself, what if it was like, a Sunday night, and you got stuck on the chair, and for some reason they forgot, and I know they have safety precautions, but it’s still human error to a large degree – you’re putting your life in somebody else’s hands, are they going to do their job?
What if they don’t? What if…there was a storm coming and they were in a rush to get off the mountain, and you have a guy there that doesn’t really care about his job, or whatever. And in that four seconds that I looked at the weather report, the whole thing unfolded in my head. And it’s funny because I think the night before I was saying to myself that I had no idea what I’m gonna write next, and like, you never know what it’s gonna be. You can never force yourself and say, “My next thing’s gonna be about gay vampires,” because that’s big right now, but it doesn’t work like that. So I went into Ariescope, my production company, and as soon as I walked in I’m like, “Guys! What do you think about this?” and I laid it out. Instantly, everybody was like “Let’s do it!” The one thing that we were wrong about was that we said, “Oh my God! Three people on a chair, this is gonna be the easiest shoot ever! We’ll do it really low budget. We’ll just use our own equipment. No crew, no anything, no outside involvement, and then we’ll sell it, and even if it’s not good and it only goes straight to video, we’ll make so much money by selling it at the ski stores!” and all this other shit. Then I wrote it, and we realized we’re gonna need millions and millions of dollars, ’cause this is like, no one’s ever done this shit before. This is so hard! And it became one of the most epic challenges that we’ll probably ever undertake. Just the physical stamina to survive that shoot was ridiculous.
Brutal as Hell: I imagine so. I just wanted to say real quick before I get to my next question that I’m really glad you got a limited theatrical release. I pointed out in my review that there are some similarities between Frozen and Grace…
Adam: It’s a decent release to start, and supposedly, if we perform, they will go as wide as they can go. But because it’s Anchor Bay, people shouldn’t expect to see national TV commercials on NBC and billboards on every corner, and you know it’s not that. We are still in the same situation where, like, we need to get the word out everywhere and to everybody that we can because if we don’t do well that first week, that’s probably going to be it, and all the cards are against us because we don’t have the marketing campaign like a major studio does.
So it’s all based on word of mouth, and people just rallying and getting their friends to go see it. Which, you know, after…this is my…fourth film doing it this way, and it’s exhausting, and at some point you’re always like “Really? Come on! The reviews are so great, the idea’s so good, you know the people in the cast, we got ‘em to Sundance, really? Really? You’re not gonna…” “Well no, ’cause we got this other movie with Ashton Kutcher,” or whatever the fuck…Really?!?! So yeah, it’s definitely getting old, but I know that there’s a lot of new people at Anchor Bay that weren’t there for Grace or for Hatchet or for Spiral, and they are really excited about it, and looking at their plan, it does make sense.
And, you know, I hope it works, but the tough thing is, and the fans hate it when I say this, but I’m right: the problem with the genre right now is that the fans love remakes. And they’re always like “That’s bullshit! I don’t love ‘em!” It’s so true!
Brutal as Hell: It is!
Adam: The only things that they will spend money on are remakes. They’ll bitch about it for three years after it, and they’ll write a thing dedicated to why this one is the worst thing ever, they raped their childhood franchise and blah blah blah, but they will see it, they’ll buy the DVD. They’ll see it twice just so they can go on more message boards and talk about how much it sucks, but then you got like, Drag Me to Hell, where the fuck were the fans? Or like, Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon, you know, I don’t wanna say my own movies ’cause it sounds like that’s what I’m trying to say…fuck my movies! Don’t go see my movies! I’m talking about like, other great independent movies that came out, or not independent movies like Drag Me to Hell – just original things, where were they?!!?
So, with Hatchet, we made a lot of noise. That was a very successful movie, and it did make people kind of readjust, like “Wow, you know maybe there is still a market for original stuff.” But with Frozen, you know, I’m like, my life and the life of the film is in the hands of the movie-going public in the United States, and are you just going to sit there and wait for the next Wolfman, and what else is after that? The Crazies and then Nightmare on Elm Street, or are you going to go see this? And who knows what’s gonna happen, but it’s scary.
Brutal as Hell: Speaking of Wolfman…I know you prefer the use of practical effects, and you mentioned at BNAT that you didn’t use any green screens or CGI in Frozen. I think the use of practical effects is something that is lacking in filmmaking, especially in horror right now. With Wolfman, which you just mentioned, and what they did to Rick Baker, there’s just no love for practical effects anymore. Can you tell me a little bit about how you filmed Frozen and how the actors handled the conditions they were put in?
Adam: Well, kind of from the get-go, when we were talking about it, it’s a survival-drama, and it’s a terror film. It’s 
a terror film because it’s terrifying, and it’s meant to elicit a “what would you do?” type thing; whereas, with a lot of movies you can kind of have that protection of, okay this is completely fantasy, this would never happen, but with Frozen, the chances of Frozen happening – not very good, but it could. And what would you do if you were in the situation? Because of that, the first few companies that sort of came at me when the script went out that wanted to make it, wanted to make it on a bigger scale than what I ended up doing it for.
But it was cast-contingent, where they needed to go to all these TV actors and people that I had no interest in working with, or they wanted most of the movie to be shot on a sound stage or against a green screen because for bonding the film with the insurance company, it’s easier. It’s easier on the crew, you’re gonna work shorter days, all those reasons. But you can’t take a survival movie and try to find the easiest way to shoot it and expect the audience to still be into it. Had that movie been on a sound stage, you would’ve known, and I don’t care…you’ll have people who have actually run sound stages, actually I’m standing on a sound stage right now for Hatchet 2, and they’ll tell you “No, no one ever knows the difference!” But for this particular movie, you would’ve known.
And even a green screen, I don’t care how great people think their effects are, you know when you’re looking at effects. Like, you know, and there’s been a laziness that’s sort of taken over Hollywood where, because it’s so easy and cheap to do that stuff now, they keep lying to themselves, and saying “And the audience doesn’t even know!” They do! This movie especially, where the movie is about a location and a situation, this was the only way to do it.
As soon as word went out that they’re making this movie, everybody wanted to be in it because, as an actor, what better movie than one that’s 90 minutes of your face? And it’s all you. It’s not about anything but your performance. And then the actors in Hollywood found out that the director’s a psychopath and he’s gonna do it for real, and there’s no sound stage and no green screen, and you really have to be up there. Literally 75% of Hollywood went running for the hills. They’re all like, “Fuck that!” So, you’d think…but that’s the problem with young Hollywood today is that they’re much more interested in being on TMZ and having a lot of Twitter followers and famous, than actually acting.
But because of this, some great people stepped up to the plate. The auditions were phenomenal that we saw. Like, really really strong actors that could carry a movie on their performance, sitting down the whole time. It was tough, but one of the best stories is that Emma Bell who plays Parker was the first person to walk in and audition for the movie. Not just for that character, but for the movie in….total. And as soon as she left I went to the casting director and the producers and I said, “Okay, I’m good.” And they were like, “You can’t..you can’t hire the first person to walk through this door! Come on!” I’ve done this a lot of times now, and I know when I know. It’s tough ’cause sometimes, if the person’s not right, and you don’t even know why. You can’t, like….they did a great job, they’re a great actor, they’re totally right, but there’s just…there’s something you don’t feel. And with her (Emma Bell), I felt it.
Of course, we had to do our due diligence and go through four or five weeks of auditions, but she set the bar right off the bat, and nobody else could touch her. So that’s a really good story, especially ’cause she’s largely an unknown. I think in Frozen her credit says “And Introducing Emma Bell”.
Brutal as Hell: Yes, it does.
Adam: That’s doubly exciting for me because I think that she is going to be HUGE someday and to be the one that found her is awesome. And Kevin Zegers I was already friendly with from a few years back, and I know that he takes the acting seriously, even though he’s a very pretty man, he really cares about the acting, and I knew he wouldn’t bail on me.
That was a big fear for us – everyone’s “Rah-rah!” but then what do you do three weeks later when you’re in day five of shooting and all of a sudden the actors are like, “Know what? We’ve had enough. We need to come down.” There’s no way down. Those chairs don’t move backwards. The only way down is to go all the way up to the peak and around again, which takes like, 45 minutes. But they were rock solid, they never complained. They used it, and they were extremely proud of the film, which you don’t see often. These actors are just, they’re willing to go to bat, and do whatever they can to promote it, ’cause they know how good they are in it, and that’s kind of rare, unfortunately.
Well that’s it for part 1 of my interview with Adam Green. Frozen is getting a limited release on February 5th, and you can check out the official site for information on theaters. Stay tuned for part 2 of my interview with Adam, where we’ll discuss Hatchet 2, Spielberg, and romantic comedy!
