Ahoy, squirts! Quint here with the director of FROZEN, Mr. Adam Green, who is currently in the middle of shooting the follow-up to his love letter to ‘80s slashers HATCHET. I very much enjoyed his new film, a bold step out of the tongue-in-cheek camp and into character driven suspense and got the chance to discuss the making of the movie with Mr. Green, who decided against using soundstages and greenscreens and instead shot in the real frigid cold, 50 feet off the ground as his trio of actors (Kevin Zegers, Emma Bell and Shawn Ashmore) are trapped on a ski lift, desperately trying to find a way out of their predicament before the weather, starvation, dehydration or worse causes their death. It’s a cool chat that covers not only Frozen, but also some tidbits on the currently in production HATCHET 2. Enjoy!
Quint: I saw the flick at Butt-Numb-A-Thon and really dug it man. I think you have really knocked that one out of the park.
Adam Green: Thank you very much.
Quint: Did you stay for the whole thing?
Adam Green: We had to head back to the airport at like 6am, so I left right before KICK-ASS, so I missed KICK-ASS and AVATAR… So I got to see a couple of things, but unfortunately, the heavy hitters that I really wanted to catch, I had to miss.
Quint: That sucks, but at least you got some of the experience. I can’t imagine how nerve wracking it must have been watching one of your movies with that audience.
Adam Green: Yeah, that was my thing; nobody knows it’s going to play, a lot of the people don’t even know what it is or what it’s about. It’s not like Harry says what it is or what it’s about and then they played two funny trailers before it, so for the first 30 minutes everybody was just kind of laughing. Then the chair got stuck and the panic that you could feel rushed through the audience was just amazing. It was cool. That’s probably the only time in my life that I will be able to watch it with people who have no idea what’s coming, after Sundance everybody will know.
Quint: I think you are still going to be getting that kind of human reaction to the big moments, like the scene with Emma [Bell] with the pole, you know? There will be some things I’m sure Anchor Bay will put in the trailer, like the wolves...
Adam Green: They did put the wolves in the trailer.
Quint: There you go.
Adam Green: Yeah, and I was not into that, but that’s what they wanted to do, so the wolves are in the trailer. But one of the greatest things with a BNAT audience was when that happened, you keep thinking “This can’t possibly get any worse for these guys” and then it really gets so much worse. They are out there now and in the trailer, but the cool thing is in the trailer, you don’t really know how much.
Quint: That’s good. Let’s go back to the writing of the movie. It’s a fairly simple one-sentence plot description, but I think the heart of the film and the reason why it works is because we actually really like Emma, Shawn (Ashmore), and Kevin (Zegers) and like those characters. What I really particularly liked about these guys is they don’t really fit into any sort of horror formula or cliché and so I guess the question is all about that and your coming up with those characters.
Adam Green: Well, I think where I have seen movies fail, even other stuff that I have written that I never showed anybody, where I thought it failed, was that you can’t just take the idea and the set pieces and assume that now you have a movie. People need a lot more than that and with this I had the premise from the get go of sort of coming up with the idea with all of the horrible things that are going to happen to them, that all came pretty easily except for the research that had to go into it, because you have to be able to back the stuff up in a realistic survival movie. You can’t take too many liberties, but then when it came time for the characters, the first draft of it was very close to this. One of the things that the producers really pushed me to do was to make the dialogue much more personal and normally the producers try to take that out of it, like “You are too close to it… You have too much of yourself…” They kept pushing me and the stories that they tell, like the ex girlfriend who is dating the guy that was making fun of him, how Lynch and Dan met each other, that’s all my life and so there was just different aspects of me in each of those characters and thankfully people are really responding like you did and saying “I really like them.” It would suck if people were like “Dude, this guy sucks. He’s such an asshole.” It’s like “Oh, no!” It was a risky movie on every level. It was risky, because when you tell people the setup, instinctively they say “Great short film, no way are you going to pull that off for 90 minutes. How are you going to keep the tension going?” It was risky, because it was such a personal script and then it was risky, because nobody thought we would actually be able to shoot it or finish it when I said “It has to be done practically. I won’t use a soundstage. I won’t use a green screen.” Places didn’t want to insure the film; crew didn’t want to work on it… It was miserable and thank God it seems like its really paying off.
Quint: If you had an extra half a million in the budget for CGI breath, it wouldn’t of had the same effect. It’s funny… the production company is Bigger Boat and the logo was great… obviously coming from me as a JAWS fan, but it’s the same effect. Not to compare you with Spielberg, but in so much that JAWS has that great feeling of actually being there on the water. It was miserable to pull off, but it shows through in the final product. If you had just done a green screen, if you had cheated a lot, then the audience would have been clued in on that and I think that probably would also have kept them from connecting with the characters in the situation.
Adam Green: Yeah, I don’t think you can watch a survival film on a soundstage or a greenscreen, no matter how good the actors can try to make it seem like they are really uncomfortable for something like bitter cold like this and the stiffness of their bodies and the panic that they went through… Emma Bell had never been skiing in her life, so she was legitimately terrified. Interesting enough, the breath… There are certain scenes where they look like dragons, this breath is just coming out and then there are scenes where there’s no breath. When we would show people and they would come in the editing suite and we would show them clips, they would be like “It couldn’t have been that cold, you don’t see their breath.” To the contrary, in real life, the earlier that we would shoot in the evening, their breath was coming out in full force, but by midnight their body temperatures had dropped so far as if they were freezing to death, so there’s no breath at that point. It’s funny when you watch the movie, you can tell what point in the night we shot each scene, because if there are tons of breath it was early and if there’s no breath it was like five in the morning.
Quint: We’ve got to talk about how you got the trio of actors and how that worked. Did you audition or did you write kind of knowing who you were going to cast?
Adam Green: We auditioned and this was one of the greatest audition experiences that I will ever have, because once word was out in town that I was making my next movie and it was on a chair lift in the dead of winter overnight and it was all practical and we were shooting through storms and the whole thing, half of the Hollywood young actors went running for the hills. It’s sad, but most of the young generation of actors are into it because they want to be famous and want to be in US WEEKLY and they want twitter followers, they want to look pretty and go to premieres, but fucking really act and do a performance piece? Fuck that, they don’t want to do that, so instantly that made the caliber of actors we were seeing much better than what you would usually get, so everybody who came in knew what it was. They realized that this was a huge chance, because it’s a movie that is going to rely on their acting and it was tremendous all of the people that came in how good they were, but Emma Bell is the best story out of it, because she was the very first person to come in and audition, not just for that part, just for the movie in general and when she walked out, I looked at the casting director and the producers and said “I’m good.” They said “You can’t hire the first person to walk in the door” and I said “Yeah, I want her.” Of course we still had to go through another four to five weeks and see everybody that the agents wanted to submit and Emma got the part and that’s probably never happened before. It’s great, especially because this is kind of like her first big thing and I’m really excited to be part of that in her career.
Quint: And it’s a tough role, too, because that character could be very unlikable if she didn’t play it with sincerity.
Adam Green: She was all over that from the get go. She’s like “I cry so much. I’m so vulnerable,” but she realized it had to be that way, because she doesn’t really know how to ski yet and she’s kind of there as the tagalong and she would be terrified, but I think we kind of weaved that line very well of stopping her from becoming annoying or “just shut up.” Another interesting thing just about the acting is I gave each actor a completely different direction and back story than I gave the other one and they weren’t allowed to discuss it with each other. For instance, Kevin’s character, the back story for him was that he’s now realized he’s one way when he’s with his girlfriend, but a different person when he’s with his friend, so this is the day that he’s going to try to finally integrate the two and it’s not working and he’s probably going to break up with her. For Emma, I said “You have been waiting so long to be integrated with his friends, this probably means that he’s the one and you guys are going to get married,” so when you watch the movie if you see it a second time, there’s really subtle shit going on between the two of them where the way he is speaking to her, she’s really hurt and confused by it sometimes and they are trying to figure each other out, but something that happened that we didn’t expect to happen is when he jumps, when he looked at her, it just happened you saw him fall in love with her and realize “No, I love you” and he jumped. That wasn’t the way we were planning on doing it.
Quint: That’s a really interesting way of having them work together and I think that that definitely adds to what we see on the screen.
Adam Green: It was a once in a lifetime opportunity. I can tell you that I can’t exactly bring that type of directing style to HATCHET 2, you know what I mean? (laughs) For this, it was great!
Quint: Let’s talk a little bit about Shawn, too, because his character is another one that… he is the jealous third wheel. He has to be likable and relatable, but he also gets pretty mean, like the scene where he yells at Emma. If you had gotten the chemistry wrong in that part. If you had cast that part wrong then I think all three of them would have tumbled and the movie with them.
Adam Green: One of the cool things about Shawn was that he and Kevin have actually been best friends for almost 20 years, so in real life Kevin was actually one of the people who suggested that we bring Shawn in to audition and you can’t beat them. Their chemistry is so real on screen, you really do believe that these guys have been friends for that long, because they have been. The scene that you were just referring to when Shaun and Emma get into the fight, to me that’s the peak of the film. That’s my favorite scene in the movie. I just love it, more so than the scary parts and the tension parts. To me, that’s when the movie is at its highest moment.
Quint: They pull it off. I just can’t tell you, as a horror fan… Sitting here as I’m doing this interview I have DAWN OF THE DEAD and THE THING and JAWS one sheets surrounding me and just as a horror fan that was the big pleasant surprise, because you know I like HATCHET a lot and I think it’s a lot of fun, but it’s a radically different type of movie and so…
Adam Green: Something I think I’ve sort of found is movies like SPIRAL and FROZEN have started to make some people appreciate HATCHET more, because they are starting to get how intentional is was. When you see that and you hadn’t seen any of my other work yet, people are like “This is either really smart or this guy is just a fucking idiot” and so most people thankfully got that that’s the way it was supposed to be, but now that I have been able to do other things and show like “No man, I really do know how to make a movie” I think that it’s helped HATCHET find a new audience, which is great.
Quint: Dude, I grew up on slashers… the JASON movies, MY BLOODY VALENTINE… all of that stuff was part of my daily routine. I think anybody who is a fan of 80’s slashers probably got what HATCHET was, at least that would be my assumption.
Adam Green: That’s all it was, literally looking at this decade of horror and being like “Okay, we are going to be remembered for remakes and torture and PG-13 stuff and like what happened to what I grew up on?” I just made what I wanted to see again and we had no idea it was going to capture such an audience and become the hit that it did and it’s tremendous that we are on the eve of the sequel now and who would have thought?
Quint: You’ve got one of my good friends in the movie, Mr. AJ Bowen.
Adam Green: Oh yeah dude! I love AJ. He was so great in THE SIGNAL and even in HOUSE OF THE DEVIL his part was small, but it’s one of the most memorable things about that movie and I can’t believe that more people aren’t hiring this guy yet, so I was really happy to get him.
Quint: I love that dude. Is his part fairly big Hatchet 2? Or are we going to get more of HOUSE OF THE DEVIL?
Adam Green: It’s bigger than HOUSE OF THE DEVIL, but it’s a HATCHET movie, so nobody can live too long. I don’t want to ruin anything, but this is like… I think in the first one there was like eight or seven on screen deaths. This one’s got sixteen or something, so people just get straight up fucked up really fucking fast. I’m trying to make… The first one was like my love letter to the genre that I grew up on and this one is really me trying to make what the fans of the first one want and that’s been the great thing with the powers that be, they are not forcing me to try to find a broader audience or cater to the people who didn’t like certain things about the first one. If you liked the first one, you are going to get that times ten. If you didn’t like the first one, eat a dick.
Quint: (laughs) Are you going to put that on a poster?
Adam Green: That would be a great slogan. “If you didn’t like the first one, eat a dick.” (laughs)
Quint: So do you have anything else lined up for after that? Are you working on anything or do you have anything you are eyeballing?
Adam Green: There’s a romantic comedy that I have that Chris Columbus is actually attached to produce, but this has been going on for a year and a half now and there just hasn’t been the right time to do it. Originally I thought I was actually making that next and then I wrote FROZEN and so many people wanted it and then that got pushed to the front. Then with HATCHET 2, I had passed on making HATCHET 2 several times, I just didn’t want to do it and now there’s been enough time and I have done other things, now I’m so excited to do it, but between promoting FROZEN worldwide for the next six to eight months and then HATCHET 2 and all of that… I’m actually getting married this summer and I would really like a week off, because I haven’t taken a vacation since 1998, so I’m really, really tired right now and I really just want to stop, especially after FROZEN. When I was done with that, I was like “This is the most brutal shoot anyone has ever done, I’m going to go home for a month and just sit on the couch,” but instead I went right into editing, because I couldn’t wait, so hopefully I get a little bit of a break, but there’s a couple big studio sized things that are circling that I’m considering. I’ve got to be careful what I take as my first studio thing, because doing things through my own production company independently, I’m very fortunate that I can make the movies I want, but it would be nice to finally have something that has a budget and a real supported release and not these releases that my films have had where if you read Ain’t It Cool News you know about it, but if not you are kinda shit out of luck, so I’m considering it, but unfortunately a lot of the stuff that I get called in for are remakes that I don’t believe in and I just can’t do it.
Quint: So, you definitely aren’t from the school of “Well if somebody is going to fuck it up, it better be somebody who will at least try to make a good movie” then?
Adam Green: To some extent, I would do that if there were a chance. I’m trying to think of the politically correct way to phrase this without pissing off a certain studio… Okay something that’s already been remade for instance, as an example, like FRIDAY THE 13TH. When you get a call, if they were like “Okay, we are going to remake FRIDAY THE 13TH, but no Jason…” You can’t even go to the school of “Someone’s going to fuck it up,” you just know that you are in for it. Obviously, they didn’t do that with FRIDAY THE 13TH, but I’m just saying some of these upcoming ones, it’s shocking what their parameters are, because they admit to you on the phone call or in the meeting “We just want he title, because the fans will support the titles” and I keep saying this at every appearance I do, every public speaking thing, every convention, they only make these remakes because it’s what the fans support and the fans are the first to bitch and complain about it, but they are also the first to get in line, to see it twice, to buy the DVD and that’s why the genre is in the shitter right now and that’s why we only get remakes from the studios. The only original horror, and obviously there are a few exceptions, but most of it is independently made and the independent movies and in this time period and climate, you don’t get wide theatrical releases for the most part. Thankfully PARANORMAL ACTIVITY defied those odds in a huge way, which was a big victory for all of us.
Quint: The studios aren’t about the long term, just because the execs switch out so quickly that they really don’t give a fuck about the long term, but you would think that somebody somewhere would realize that “Hey, if we just put a tiny bit of effort into this and we make a movie that the fans want to see, not just a movie that has a title that the fans like, that that means more than just one or two films. Look what happened with the CHAINSAW remakes, how that fizzled out after two movies where I don’t know… Those were actually probably not the most offensive of the remake ideas, but you know what I’m saying.
Adam Green: The first one I loved. I liked the remake of DAWN OF THE DEAD, John Carpenter’s THE THING is one of my favorite movies… Everyone thinks I’m anti-remake. I’m not at all. Some of the ones that are coming up are actually ones that I would of really been interested in until I spoke to the executives in charge and realized it’s not worth it. Thankfully I don’t need the money anymore. I can really pick and choose what I want to do and I just don’t want to be the guy that fucked up AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON. I would kill myself. To me, that was actually the inspiration for HATCHET. A lot of people instantly go to the FRIDAY THE 13TH thing, because of the slasher formula, but there are full shots from AMERICAN WEREWOLF that I lifted and the banter between the two friends walking off into the distance and talking about getting laid, literally shot for shot. That and FRIGHT NIGHT were the ones… they were super entertaining. It wasn’t about trying to disturb, it was just a good time, but because there was a slasher in the woods everyone is like “FRIDAY THE 13TH!” When you actually look at a FRIDAY THE 13TH movie, there’s really not that many similarities. Speaking of that, one of the most interesting things about the screenings of FROZEN we have done have been the massive debate. Usually afterwards it’s pretty squashed, but beforehand when people are like “This is bullshit, because I could get out of that situation in two seconds.” Everyone is suddenly Spider Man or Indiana Jones. “What I would do is take my clothes and I would slide down the thing” and none of it’s possible, so what we’ve been joking about internally and… it’s actually becoming less of a joke, but to do an actual reality show where you take scenes from movies that everybody thinks they could get out of and “If you can get out of it, you get 100,000 dollars. If you hurt yourself or whatever, you don’t” and the whole time you are going through it and crying, because you want to go home, we post all of those message board things that you said about how easy it would be. When you talk to Ashmore, ask him how easy it would have been to get off there, fifty feet in the air, the cable is razor sharp and forget the cold and that you can’t actually really move at all, but everybody is like “I’d just climb down that thing. I’d jump there’d be no problem” and obviously you see the movie and they try all of that and it doesn’t quite work out for them. It’s been really fun to kind of anonymously stand there with a hat and my sunglasses on just listening to everybody. Everybody is an action hero and how easily… and they have done it and gotten out of it before with no problem! Another one is that this would never happen. Now this is based on the ski mountains where I grew up I Boston, many of them were so small and would only stay open on the weekend and that was really where the idea stemmed from, but when we were scouting different mountains I would always ask the security, the ski patrol, “Could this happen?” Their first answer was always “Absolutely not at our mountain.” Then I’d say, “but could it?” They would begrudgingly say, “Well, what happens in your script? Yeah, it could” Then they would say, but at their mountain they are much safer and they do all of this and they do that. One of them, the mountain we just shot at, just put new safety precautions into place, because of the script and from what I’ve heard, the ski mountains at Park City are very upset that Sundance is showing it, because they are scared of it. That’s great, but I think that they are wrong, because you look at… Again, I’m not comparing myself to JAWS, but a movie about a shark in the water, everyone thought no one would go swimming again and tourism at Martha’s Vineyard went up 400%, because of that movie. I don’t think it’s going to keep people off of the slopes, but it would be cool if in a few years whenever you are on a chair lift and it stops, you kind of start laughing and looking at your friends saying “You remember that movie” and everyone says “Don’t talk about it.” That would be pretty cool.
Quint: Cool. All right, well I think that’s all about I got. I just have a request on the next movie, since Spooky Dan got a shout out in FROZEN, you need to name somebody Quint.
Adam Green: Hopefully the remake of JAWS is next and you automatically get that.
Quint: But there wont be any shark in it though. That’s the thing…
Adam Green: No shark… Well, a CG shark.
Quint: Might as well not be any shark then.
Adam Green: (laughs) Seriously, thank you for all of the support you guys continually give me, because it’s really all I have and I would be nothing without it, so thank you.
Quint: It's easy when you keep make movies that us horror nerds like.
Adam Green: I’ll keep trying my best, I promise.
Quint: All right, later on.
I give Green a lot of credit for his character work as a writer and as a director. That was a smart trick he played on the actors, giving them each different stories and not cluing the other in. Plus, he probably literally froze his balls off making this movie. That’s dedication. Look for my chat with actor Shawn Ashmore, no stranger to ice balls, to hit very shortly! -Quint quint@aintitcool.com Follow Me On Twitter
