Taglines: No one knows you’re up there.
Childhood friends Dan Walker (Kevin Zegers) and Joe Lynch (Shawn Ashmore) along with Dan’s girlfriend Parker O’Neill (Emma Bell) spend a Sunday afternoon at a New England ski resort on Mount Holliston. They are eager to take one last run down the mountain before they go home; however, the ski resort decides to close early because a storm is moving in.
The friends convince the ski lift attendant to let them on one last time. Before the group gets all the way to the top, the attendant is called into the boss’s office and is replaced by a co-worker. As he leaves, he tells the co-worker that there are only three skiers left. Another set of three skiers comes down the mountain. When he sees them, he shuts down the ski lift, stranding the three central characters in their ski lift chair far above the ground.
Parker knows the ski slopes have closed for the week. Dan feels he has no choice but to jump from the ski lift chair and get help, as they will not survive up there in the bitter cold until Friday. Dan jumps off the lift and suffers a compound fracture in both legs. Soon, his screams and the scent of blood attract a wolf. Joe, now fearing for Dan’s safety, decides to try and get to the ground by traversing the cable. However, as wolves close in on Dan, he returns to the chair and holds Parker as Dan is torn apart by the wolves.
Frozen is an American thriller written and directed by Adam Green and starring Emma Bell, Shawn Ashmore and Kevin Zegers. The film premiered at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival. It was released in North American theaters on February 5, 2010, with distribution from Anchor Bay Films.
While playing at Sundance, the film caused quite a stir with numerous faintings reported from audience members that could not handle the tension of the film. One such fainting happened at the Tower Theater in Salt Lake City. Frozen also opened the Glasgow FrightFest. On February 5, the film had multiple screens in areas in Boston, New York, Los Angeles, Salt Lake City, Dallas, Denver, Philadelphia, Minneapolis and Chicago. The film premiered on February 5, 2010 with the entire cast and crew at Mann Chinese 6 on Hollywood Blvd. Frozen was released in Malaysia on June 24, 2010.
Director’s Statement
Trapped in the wilderness. Dangling 100 feet off of the ground. Nothing to protect your body from the winter fury except for the clothes on your back. No one knows that you’re there. And no one will be back for 5 days…
Growing up in the greater Boston area, I couldn’t afford to ski at the nicer resorts like Stowe or Okemo Mountain in Vermont. Instead, I often found myself slumming at the ski mountains in Massachusetts that were so small that they only stayed open on the weekends and consisted of three rickety lifts that offered to take you to an easy, medium, or expert hill. For the skier on a budget there was none of the glamour and awe that a “real” east or west coast mountain resort has to offer, but it was the best we could get and so that’s what we did. Those experiences are where this film was born.
Anyone who has been skiing or snowboarding knows the pit that you get in your stomach when the chairlift randomly stops for no reason. While it is a common rule to not discuss or acknowledge the fear of the lift not starting again, the thought of “how would I get down from here?” goes through every skier’s or snowboarder’s mind.
FROZEN is a horror movie that will scare and disturb audiences not with the typical conventions of violence, gore, or torture… but in the overall sense of dread that keeps reminding you “this could really happen.” Even those who have never skied will be able to relate to the fear of heights and fear of freezing to death that this film will terrify the audience with.
Q & A With Director Adam Green
Why did you want to make FROZEN?
While I can never predict what my ideas will be or where they will come from, as soon as I had the basic beats of the story and the characters for FROZEN I knew it had to be the film I made next. The concept of being left behind on a ski lift really struck a chord with anyone who I brought it up to and the primal fears that the story plays on felt like just the right ingredients to really deliver an audience with true thrills. FROZEN was extremely ambitious and challenging in regards to creating and sustaining terror and suspense with such a contained scenario and only three actors who can’t even move.
Throw in the physical challenges we faced with telling a story that is taking place in severe weather and fifty-feet off of the ground and FROZEN simply excited me and challenged me. As a director, these are the kinds of stories you dream of telling. When you can’t sleep because you’re thinking about it and you’re terrified each day you go to set because people are telling you that what you’re doing is crazy… that’s when you really feel like you’re part of something special.
What makes the film unique?
One of the most unique things about the film is the fact that every frame of it was shot practically. While most producers and production companies I met with were adamant that the film have at least a good portion of it shot in the safety and comfort of a sound stage or against a green screen, I have too much respect for my audience to try to pass a “survival film” off on them that did not look and feel 100% authentic.
Everyone involved at Peter Block’s “A Bigger Boat” production company understood and respected that. It was one of many reasons why they were the best home for this project. The actors and the crew were really out there. We were really fifty feet in the air. The weather, the cold, and the elements we faced were all real. And it’s because of that realism that the movie’s tension never lets up. There is no relief.
How / where did you come up with the story?
I was watching the morning news in Los Angeles where the weather report is always the exact same thing. When they show the forecast, however, they always pull up a visual from a different part of the area to be the background behind the graphics. On that particular morning the background was a streaming feed from Big Bear Ski resort. At 7am the mountain was not yet open and operational, so the chairs on the lift were all just hanging there. In a flash, the image on the screen brought me back to my childhood days of skiing and it reminded me of how scary it is to be on a lift when it stops for no reason.
Where I grew up in the Boston area, the mountains that I skied on were not the glamorous resorts that you see in commercials for the major mountains out West or in the far North East. They were low-rent mountains with merely a few operational chairs that were often only operational on the weekends due to lack of business during the weekdays. I started thinking about how shady some of those lifts seemed back then and how terrified everyone on the lift would get when it would inevitably stop for a few moments. I drove in to the office that morning and excitedly explained my “high concept thriller” idea for FROZEN to the rest of the guys at my production company, ArieScope Pictures.
It was probably the easiest pitch I’d ever done as it was so clear-cut and straight-forward. “Three skiers, forgotten and stranded on a chair lift at a New England mountain that’s closed for the week.” Everyone was instantly on board, with no questions asked. We even decided that we would produce the film completely on our own. “It’s just three people in a chair. How hard could it be?” Man, were we wrong. And boy, were we in for it.
What were the challenges of writing the script?
I actually wrote FROZEN while on the set of a movie I was producing called GRACE (which world premiered at Sundance last year). When inspiration hits, I just have to go with it. As much as I’d love to have my best writing happen when it is scheduled to happen at home in my nice office, more often than not it happens at the worst times- like during friend’s weddings, in airport bathrooms, or on set of a different film.
Conceptually the hardest part of the film was the dialogue. The story beats were easy and the thrills and terror moments were all there from the conception of the idea, but for any of it to matter or really have an effect on the audience, they would have to believe and feel like they knew the characters. It’s a tricky situation with films like these as if you use too much comedy to win over the audience the tide can turn and dilute the suspenseful moments.
At the same time, if the audience isn’t enjoying watching the characters you wind up with a film where people just wait to see “how they die.” My producers were well aware of the fine line I had to walk, and they encouraged and pushed me to keep making the script more personal on every re-write and polish that I did in pre-production. In the end, it was the best advice I ever could have gotten.
FROZEN wound up being a very emotional film that really tugs on the heart strings at times, something that most suspense/thrillers cannot accomplish. It really gets you and I think a great part of that is because all three of these characters are real people and every story they tell and everything they say is so obviously coming from the heart. My heart. It’s a very open and personal film where I really laid it all out there and left myself very vulnerable on the page.
How / why did you choose the cast you did?
In Hollywood I have found that many young actors are more interested in being famous than actually working on the craft of acting. For many of today’s Hollywood youth, they are more interested in how famous a role can make them, how many Twitter followers they will get from the marketing campaign, how many times they can get on TMZ, and how pretty they will look in the finished film.
I’m very good at sniffing out the poseurs during casting and with this film it was no different. Once word got out that my plan was to shoot the film all practically, many turned away in fear. So while my unpopular decision to shoot the film the way I did drastically cut way down on the amount of actors I would be seeing to read for the roles, I knew right off the bat that I was going to be seeing the real deal walk through the doors.
Emma Bell was surprisingly the very first person to walk in and read for the film. At the end of the casting process, she had become the standard to which every other actress was held, and she got the part. That may be a “first” in Hollywood. She was real, she was very sympathetic, and most of all- she could really, really act. I had met Kevin Zegers years ago through a mutual friend and was very familiar with his work on screen. When he and I sat down to discuss FROZEN, you could tell right away that he was not just another pretty face. He sat down with countless ideas and questions for me, something that as a director I long for. There’s nothing worse than an actor who just wants to be told where to stand and how to say the lines.
Actors like Kevin who constantly contribute and bring their own soul to the project are more appreciated in the process than anyone can possibly imagine. And Shawn Ashmore not only fit the role and had the chops, but he and Kevin had been best friends for almost two decades in real life. You can’t buy that kind of natural chemistry between actors. Shawn’s character in FROZEN has the biggest and most radical arc so in many ways he inevitably started stealing scenes before our eyes. Some nights it almost felt like watching a boxing match on the chair as these extremely talented actors just kept hitting me so hard with all that they had. You didn’t know who to watch or where to focus on next. There was no weak link and all three of the actors really carried the film over the finish line.
Frozen (2010)
Directed by: Adam Green
Starring: Emma Bell, Kevin Zegers, Shawn Ashmore, Adam Johnson, Rileah Vanderbilt, Kane Hodder, Adam Johnson, Ed Ackerman, Chris York, Kane Hodder, Chris York, Cody Blue Snider, Dee Snider
Screenplay by: Adam Green
Production Design by: Bryan McBrien
Cinematography by: Will Barratt
Costume Design by: Barbara Nelson
Art Direction by: Richard T. Olson
Music byB Andy Garfield
Film Editing by: Ed Marx
MPAA Rating: N for Some disturbing images and language.
Dstributed by: Anchor Bay Films
Release Date: February 5, 2010
