We caught up with Holliston-born filmmaker Adam Green (Hatchet, Hatchet 2) on the phone from his new home in LA (where he was dismayed to find they have neither Dunkin' Donuts or Fluff) to talk about his 2009 ski-survival thriller, Frozen. The film tells the story of three college kids left for dead on a rickety New England chairlift . . .
Your past movies have been slasher films. What inspired you to make a movie likeFrozen?
Growing up skiing in New England, Frozen was something that I had thought about pretty much every time I had ever gone skiing. I think every skier has kind of thought of this before, you know, whenever you're on the lift and it stops, you kind of worry about it. So it was sort of taking all the worst possible scenarios and making a movie that's truly terrifying, and not something that's, like, killing and blood and guts and totally fantastical.
Right, I was thinking I could totally relate.
Right. And if you do a search, it's happened a bunch of times. And actually, the week that Frozen was first in theaters in America there was a guy in Russia that the exact scenario happened to. They rescued him the next morning. He was lighting his money on fire and throwing it up into the air and somebody saw it. He had severe hypothermia. But yeah, somebody just didn't do their job right and he got left.
What was your favorite mountain as a kid?
Wachusett and Nashoba Valley were probably the two biggest, but I learned to ski at a place called Ward Hill, which is sort of just a big mound of snow. But Wachusett was where I really grew up skiing, and in the movie they actually do say at one point, "We should have gone to Wachusett."
Have you ever snowboarded?
No, I haven't. In fact, I stopped skiing after high school, because of the idea for Frozen, basically. And I was never really good enough, either. I was always really terrified the whole time I was doing it. I'd always be thinking, "Why I am strapping myself to wooden boards and sliding down a mountain?" Like, I have no athletic ability whatsoever — I should not be doing this!
There are a lot of Massachusetts references in the flim. The characters kept saying "wicked," and there was that dirty joke about the girl from New Hampshire. [What did the girl from NH say to her Dad when she lost her virginity? "Get off me, you're crushing my Marlboros."] Was your aim for people from New England, especially, to be able to identify with the movie?
Yeah, and I do that with all of my movies. I always have Newbury Comics in there because that was the store where I grew up buying all of my comics and movies and music. And any way I can get a reference to home in, I like doing it. And it's always fun to hear from people in that area that they caught it.
