At the beginning of the movie, the characters scam their way onto the lift. Is that something that you used to do as a broke kid who wanted to ski?
I only personally did it once when I was severely, severely broke, but it was more other people I was with, it was their scam that they did all the time.
Of course, blame it on somebody else.
Well, I felt too guilty! I actually told my parents when I came home, and I got in so much trouble. And that's also horror-movie logic, that if you do something wrong, you get punished. Even down to the fact that Parker is a smoker and that's what leads to her glove getting lost and a lot of what she goes through.
I read that people actually threw up and fainted when the movie screened at Sundance. Is that true?
Yeah, that's true. Even opening weekend, there was a guy in Boston, who went to the AMC downtown, and he fainted in the bathroom and cracked his head open and sent me the pictures of it and everything. I felt bad on one hand, but on the other hand, it's kind of cool that you can affect people like that. And I think because the movie is realistic it gets you on another level than if you're watching just blood and guts and killing like in something like Hatchet.
I imagine that it might have been the scene where Dan was being torn apart by wolves?
It was funny, the first time we ever played the movie was in Austin, Texas, at this thing called Butt-Numb-A-Thon. And when Frozen started everybody thought it was a comedy, because they had no idea what was going to happen, they had never even heard of it. And once they got stuck, the panic going through that audience . . . people were just getting so uncomfortable. And then in Sundance, the first screening we had two faintings, and the second we had a few people throw up. I think we only had one screening out of the five where nothing happened.
I've never heard of or seen a wolf around the slopes in all the years I've been skiing . . .
There was a gray wolf, I think it was in Vermont, we found it on espn.com, the wolf had attacked a kid on a snowboard. And he didn't hurt him or anything, the kid just kept swinging his snowboard and eventually it left. And it's not very common, but if you do a search there are wolf attacks out there. So this is obviously a worst-case scenario where not only is there a guy bleeding out on a mountain that's going to be closed for five days, but it's also the dead of winter, and food is scarce, and so everything the wolves do in the movie is how wolves would really act.
