Sinister Seven: Adam Green
Being left on a bench isn’t much of a premise for a movie, unless that bench is a ski lift chair high above the ground, it’s freezing cold outside, there are hungry animals lurking below and no one will be around to find you for five days. Then it’s the kind of situation that’ll make you soil your ski-pants. Oh, wait, that happens too in Frozen, Adam Green’s new movie about three friends who get left behind on a ski-lift, dangling 80 feet up, due to human error. They face an incoming storm, personal arguments, injury and a pack of wolves. Green (above, on the right) talks about the difficulties making the movie, working with one of his horror heroes and what’s going on with Hatchet 2, the sequel to his retro-styled 2006 slasher movie.
1) There’s a quote comparing Frozen to Jaws, but it’s really much more like Open Water, in terms of people getting left behind to fend for themselves in the elements. Is there a certain situation from your past that sparked the idea for this plot?
When I was growing up I used to ski at these low-rent mountains around Boston. Anyone who’s an avid skier, skis at real mountains; these places were only open on Friday through Sunday because they didn’t have the business to sustain being open during the week. When you went on the chairlift it felt like being on the Ferris wheel at the travelling carnival, where there’d just be this dude smoking a cigarette, throwing you on a chair and sending you up.
The chairlift concept, for anybody who skis, is fairly frightening because everybody knows what happens when it suddenly stops for no reason. It seems like what they should do is say. “OK, everybody, someone fell off at the top” or “We have high winds, we’ll start again momentarily,” but you don’t know why it stopped and when it’s gonna start again. So, I put all that stuff together and thought, “What if it was Sunday night at one of those mountains that I always skied at, that isn’t gonna be open again for five days, and what if just through human error somebody didn’t do his job right and didn’t check to make sure the lift was cleared, and then what would you do?” Then, between fear of heights, fear of freezing to death, fear of isolation, fear of being trapped with somebody you don’t really know all that well, the story just started to write itself.
2) Heights, the weather, the cold, working with animals – you didn’t make it easy on yourself. What was the hardest part of shooting Frozen?
The cold was hard but we were prepared for it. I think the hardest part of shooting it was how do you shoot the actors when they’re speaking on the lift and the lift is actually moving? Once the chair was stuck, we were on a 50-foot crane and could get the camera up to them. But when the chair was moving… Putting a tray on the chair with them, shooting from the chair in front of them or the chair behind them – none of those ideas worked because if you put a tray on the chair with three of them on it, the chair would fall; if we shot it from the chair in front of them, it would be boring as hell. So what we had to do, basically, was hang this cherry picker bucket off the cable in front of them. And then we had two harnesses dangling off the cable for two different cameras to shoot – one getting the coverage of the actors and one getting a three-shot of the chair.
Once our camera crew saw what we built, they refused to go in it, the mountain made us sign all these waivers saying that if we died it wasn’t their fault. I ended up having to shoot it myself because everyone else was too scared to go up, and I’m scared of heights — that’s why I wrote this fucking thing! I’m dangling in front of [the actors] and just to slate the shot I had to get swinging in my harness to hand the slate off to Kevin Zegers, who would slate it for the camera, then I would have to get swinging again to grab it, put it on my belt and start rollin’. It’ll go by for the audience and look effortless, but it was actually the hardest thing to shoot.
3) What was it like having a pack of wolves as co-stars?
The wolves were trained by Paul “Sled” Reynolds, who did Dances with Wolves, Chronicles of Narnia – he’s the wolf guy. And the thing with wolves is that you can never really train a wolf. They’re always gonna be unpredictable, and they mainly operate based on hunger, so if the wolf is hungry and you have food for it, it will kind of listen to you and do what you want. But we had to be very, very safe around the wolves. The crew had to be 400 yards away whenever the wolves were loose; there were all these rules: you can’t look ‘em in the eye, you can’t go near ‘em. I’m an animal lover, so as soon as he brought them out, I wanted to go get pictures with them, wanted to go pet them, but no.
For the scene where Kevin was on the ground and the wolves were surrounding him, I designed the shot so that the camera would be on a track, we’d have one wolf wipe the foreground of the lens, he would be on a chain, and another wolf would cross behind him on a chain. But then Sled said, “These wolves haven’t eaten in four days, they’re not gonna give a shit about Kevin Zegers, they’re gonna want the food that we have on the outside of the electric fence, so we can let them all go in there with him and they won’t even pay attention to him. I was adamant about not doing this, but Kevin wanted to do it. We went for it, and sure enough they did exactly what Sled said they would do, they didn’t go near Kevin, they were running around him. But suddenly, Shadow, which was the black wolf, suddenly turned and went after Kevin. All he wanted was Kevin’s hat, but he walked right up to his face and started sniffing his hat and growling, and Sled’s yelling, “Nobody move! Don’t breathe! Freeze! Freeze!” and they got the wolf off of him, You see in the movie, for about three seconds you see this big black wolf walking up to Kevin Zeger’s face, but then we had to cut because all these trainers jumped into the shot. Kevin didn’t get hurt and we got the shot, it was pretty amazing.
4) Right now you’re in the middle of shooting Hatchet 2. In what direction are you taking the sequel. For starters, you’ve now got a female lead, played by none other than Danielle Harris.
Danielle is actually playing the same role that Tamara Feldman was playing [in Hatchet]. The movie starts on the same shot that the other one ended on, which is very rewarding because when I ended the first one the way I did, it was with a sequel in mind that we would pick up where we left off, like the original Halloween 2. When we made the decision that we were going to be replacing Tamara, we thought, “Well, do we change the whole story now?” because it’s always weird when you have a new actress playing a pre-established character. But the story was too good and I wasn’t going to change what I had planned on for twenty years because something wasn’t working out with an actress that nobody really cares about. So I called up Danielle and she was totally excited to do it, and so far the fans are even more excited because now they get Danielle Harris.
The movie itself is a lot darker than the first one and way more violent than the first one. In the first one I think we killed seven people on screen, in this one we killed sixteen. Everything’s bigger about it; we had so much more to play with. We had more time. It just feels huge, is the best way to put it, whereas the first one was an independent movie made by a bunch of people who didn’t really know what they were doing. This will bury the first one, which is usually not the case.
5) You’ve also got the guy who made Child’s Play and Fright Night in the cast, Tom Holland. How’d that happen?
For the past few years there have been these Masters of Horror dinners, where guys like Carpenter, Craven, Tom Holland, Dario Argento has been to some of them, and Tobe Hooper, and for whatever reason I got the from these guys that they’d like me to join. So I’ve been going to all these dinners and I’ve gotten to be very friendly with all these guys that I look up to in crazy ways, and Tom Holland is probably the guy I’ve become closest with. I love him as a human being, but, also, Fright Night was one of biggest inspirations behind Hatchet – it was Fright Night and American Werewolf in London. A lot of people that don’t know much about horror go to the Friday the 13th place because it’s a slasher film, but if you look at the tone and the jokes and the style and how it was done, there are complete scenes lifted from American Werewolf, complete lines of dialogue, moments that are completely Fright Night.
When I was getting ready to write this character in Hatchet 2 and he and his wife came over for dinner, I brought it up to him. Tom hadn’t acted in about 25 years and was thrilled to act again and be part of it. He did such a good job – every day everyone was amazed with him. He was by far the oldest one in the cast and he just hung in there and gave everything he had.
It’s just fucking cool to have the guy who created Chucky, who made Child’s Play, made Fright Night, be part of the Hatchet legacy now. Every day I was geeking out. The first day I had to give him directions I was terrified. I never had that problem with Robert Englund, Tony Todd and Kane Hodder because they’re actors and I’m the director, and as much as I’m a fan, I can shut it off. But to walk up to Tom Holland and tell him how I wanted something to go was really weird. But he just an actor, he never once pulled the director thing on me. He was just happy to be there.
6) Who does he play in the film?
Tom is playing Danielle’s uncle. In the movie, early on, her character, Marybeth, learns that there’s more to the story of Victor Crowley than she’s been told — Why he’s the way he is. Is he a ghost? Is he real? Where does it all come from? What does it have to do with her? — she goes back into the swamp with a bunch of hunters who are being paid to bring back the head of Victor Crowley, and she brings her uncle along as a sort of safety precaution. And also because Reverend Zombie, played by Tony Todd, convinces her that she needs to bring her uncle with her. That’s how Tom Holland ends up in this.
7) Hatchet is a straight up slasher movie, Spiral is a dark drama, Frozen is really more of a thriller and your upcoming film God Only Knows is a romantic comedy. Are particularly careful about picking projects that give you a well-rounded filmography? Do you worried about become stuck in the genre as just a “horror guy”?
I’m very proud to be a horror guy. One of the things that I say a lot is that you don’t hear about romantic comedy conventions, you don’t hear about fans lining up to meet Hugh Grant at a con where he’s going to sign for them. Horror is very special, the fans are like nothing else, they’re extremely loyal. I only get to do this because of these fans that put me, and I am so grateful for it, I would never turn my back on the genre.
However, I’m not only a horror guy. People that have seen my early shorts know that I’m a comedian and that’s what I like to do. What I respect about my fans is that they switch gears with me. Spiral is that it’s nothing like Hatchet, and they went along for the ride and enjoyed it, they didn’t hate me for it. Frozen – again, nothing like Spiral or Hatchet – we did screenings of it and there were people in the audience in their “Hatchet Army” T-shirts crying, screaming, laughing.
When I do God Only Knows eventually, I hope they go out for that too. The cool thing is that I don’t forget where I came from — there are plenty of horror references in this romantic comedy. I can’t say that there are that many romantic comedies that keep winking at the horror fans.
