Robert Hansen is currently serving 461 years in the Spring Creek Correctional Center in Seward, Alaska. His crime? Hansen is one of the most notorious serial killers in United States history. Believed to have viciously raped and assaulted over 30 women and murdering 17 to 21 of them ages 16 to 41 between the years 1980 and 1983, when finally convicted, Hansen actually confessed to murders dating as far back as 1971. A respected member of the Anchorage, Alaska community, Hansen was beloved by all. Happily married with two children, Hansen spent his time as a local business owner, serving the community and occupying his spare time with hunting, so much so, that he became a champion hunter. He also managed to keep hidden crimes of his past which had they taken off blinders and dug a little deeper, may have pointed law enforcement in his direction when women began disappearing and turning up murdered at an alarming rate. But life changed for Hansen and the entire United States criminal legal system as we know it on June 13, 1983, when 17 year old Cindy Paulson escaped Hansen’s clutches.
Taken captive by Hansen and held hostage in his basement lair where she was raped and beaten, Paulson was being taken by Hansen to his private aircraft so that he could do what he had already done with so many other girls, so many times before; fly her out into the frozen grounds of the Alaskan woods and kill her. But Paulson saw a moment of opportunity and made a run for it. Picked up by a trucker who took her to the hotel where she had been staying, Paulson was bleeding, half naked and still handcuffed. Ignoring her pleas to not call the police, the trucker called the Anchorage Police sending them to Paulson’s hotel. Initially, the police dismissed her story, trying to twist the facts to prove that Paulson was trying to do a shakedown on Hansen. But then Detective Glenn Flothe of the Alaska State Troopers came on the scene and took charge. Already on the task force investigating the murder of three women found brutalized in various parts of the Alaskan tundra, Flothe saw truth and similarity with Paulson’s story. Calling in the FBI and agent Roy Hazelwood, Flothe put the wheels in motion to save a community and change history.
Bringing this true story to life with THE FROZEN GROUND is first time feature director, Scott Walker. Structuring the film as a police procedural with the audience knowing early on who the killer is and then with the clock ticking, working backwards from the perspective of law enforcement to obtain evidence to arrest and convict, Walker treats us to nail biting urgency and tension. Shooting in Anchorage and at the specific locations were some of the actual victims’ bodies were found, we are immersed in the horror – and compassion – of reality. Boasting a powerhouse cast, THE FROZEN GROUND captivates with compelling performances. John Cusack delivers an Oscar-worthy turn as killer Robert Hansen, going toe-to-toe against Nic Cage’s Sergeant Jack Halcombe, an amalgamation of several key law enforcement involved in the investigation but primarily Detective Glenn Flothe, while Vanessa Hudgens amazes as she delves into the very heart of Cindy Paulson, drawing the audience ever deeper into the darkness, fragility and strength of this 17 year old girl.
I sat down with writer/director Scott Walker for this in-depth, exclusive interview on THE FROZEN GROUND and his journey in showing us the truth while embracing and honoring the victims and their families.
Spending 27 years in law myself, Scott, I have a different perspective than most to this story, and know the import of what Detective Glenn Flothe and Agent Roy Hazelwood accomplished, not only with Hansen’s arrest and conviction, but with the criminal profiling and issuance of the warrant that led to that. And I remember when the Hansen story came out. Although minimal press was given to it, due in large part to confidentiality and as part of Hansen’s terms of confession, it’s pretty hard to suppress serial killings of this magnitude, especially when it’s Alaska.
They thought he was the Green River Killer. In fact, Glenn [Flothe] spent a lot of time investigating – Hansen flew to Seattle, his parents lived in Seattle – so they thought that’s what he was doing. Then they got to the point where they’ve done all the research and figured out, – No, there were a couple of cases where there’s no way he could have, so maybe he wasn’t [Hansen]. And the FBI involvement with Roy Hazelwood and Joe Douglas – They helped Glenn [and] gave him the information for the first profiling ever which became this 48 page warrant which Pat Dugan wrote, who was Fairbanks’ DA. They wrote that. It was an affidavit for a warrant based on serial killer profile which had never been done before. It’s still the teaching today.
It was landmark. Yes, it’s still, to this day, one of the seminal cases for the basis of issuance of a warrant.
That’s the thing in THE FROZEN GROUND. You get four Assistant DA’s and a District Attorney in Anchorage who would not write that warrant. So Glenn has to fly his mate Pat [Dugan] down from Fairbanks for a weekend. They worked 72 hours straight, the two of them, while Sherry his wife, is bringing them in dinner. They write this affidavit and go straight past the assistant DA’s, go to the DA and go, ‘Here’s your warrant.’ And the DA goes, ‘Who wrote this? And what’s all this stuff about the FBI?’ He had gotten the FBI involved and Washington, by themselves, they’ve flown out. You can’t fit all of that into the movie but there’s so much about this case – and that 48 page affidavit is still used today to teach how to write those. It’s crazy!
This whole case flew so far under the radar. Very few know about it. One of the biggest problems is that it was up in Alaska and even though Alaska is part of the United States, so many people forget about what happens up there. It’s kind of like the saying “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.” What happens in Alaska, stays in Alaska.
Yea. Yea. So right. And also part of Hansen’s deal was no press. There’s not one single photo of him from that trial. The only photo, which most people mistake, is the photo of him holding his jacket up. That’s actually from an earlier arrest. He stole a chain saw and that’s the photo from 1975 or ’78. . . First thing the [Anchorage PD] commander said to me when he sat down with me is, ‘Okay. I’m expecting to take a black eye on this. What are you gonna do to me? What are you gonna do to the force? Because we deserve to be taken to town.’ Because this whole film could have been about how corrupt the APD was.
And how they let this whole thing slip between the cracks over so many years.
I said, ‘Don’t worry. I’m not going after that. There’s a bigger villain in the story. You’ll have one character who represents you guys and that’s it.‘
People forget he had a rather damning criminal background going back to his youth and the early 70’s.
If you find Judge Ralph Moody who’s the Superior Court judge who sentenced Hansen, he says, ‘Everyone in the system has failed. From the lawmakers to the policemen to the psychiatrists to the public who watched this happen. Compared to what [Hansen] did, they were angels compared to him. This is the greatest indictment society as a whole has ever seen.’ It’s an incredible quote. That was why I was so [enthusiastic]. If the real people were interested in this being told, I would tell it. If they weren’t, I wouldn’t. Then it was a matter of how on earth do you take 13 years and tell it.
That’s why I admire the structure that you came up with; the structure of telling the procedural and evidentiary aspects of this case. Then put together with Sarah Boyd’s editing, you really create a great sense of urgency. Nic Cage’s dogged determination and slightly frenetic beats plus the compassion to get this guy blended with Sarah’s work. Stunning on the urgency created. I kept waiting to see a clock in the bottom of the screen. Watching the story countdown to Hansen’s arrest, to get the evidence to catch him. Amazing.
Oh great! That’s good. I’m pleased. That’s great. [Editing] was terrific. That was the biggest challenge. It’s like a police procedural. Cindy [Vanessa Hudgens] is the heart of the film and the procedural aspect always has to be the backbone of the film. I was always fighting this feeling of, ‘I don’t want to have a lot of people sitting around presenting information.’ It always has to be moving. And then it has to be shot in a way where you feel like it’s always crossing the line, coming backwards and forwards, and fast, and the camera’s moving so it feels alive. Otherwise it would just be like this white page of information.
You really get that sense of ‘they’re moving quickly because this guy could take off at any moment.’ The cutting of the final interrogation scene juxtapositioned with Kevin Dunn out at the Hansen premises, back and forth on the phone with Cage’s Halcombe who’s interrogating Cusack’s Hansen at the police station; Kevin Dunn’s Lt. Jent going, ‘We can’t find it. We can’t find it’ and calling in with updates on the evidence search, and then Halcombe dragging out the interrogation with Hansen to buy the search team time – I was on tenterhooks watching that sequence!
Oh great! That was a challenge. We had no footage and there’s so much stuff there. We need this scene. I’d cut 50 scenes two weeks [before] starting to shoot. I had to cut 50 scenes just to keep 225 in 26 days. Even then there were some days [we shot] 10 scenes per day. We were moving at a helluva pace with these actors who are not used to this. I kind of pre-warned them to get them ready for it and they embraced it. We were doing stuff that Nic [Cage] said, ‘I haven’t done stuff like this since I was with Werner Herzog! Or before that, Leaving Las Vegas. Those are the only other two films I feel like this film on.’ I was like, ‘Wow. That’s amazing.’ It was great. He was doing stuff where people were like, ‘No way Nics gonna do this.’ And the next minute he’s sticking his head up a real attic which we’ve only just gone into and five minutes later he’s completely covered in dust. He’s shining a flashlight around and I’m shooting the rehearsal and he’s like, ‘Should we do this?’ And I go, ‘We just did it!’ And he goes, ‘Oh! You didn’t even tell me!’ ‘No, because I wanted the reaction.
That’s one of the beautiful things with your casting of Nic Cage and John Cusack. These two guys are so immersive in every character they tackle. For these performances, with this film, that’s essential. What led you to think of each of them for these parts?
I started with Nic. I’d watched Kick-Ass and for some reason I’d gone through a Nic Cage catch-up, I suppose. I’m a huge fan of Adaptation and the films where his performances are not as operatic as he goes. I love it all and I think he’s amazing. He’s one of the guys that you grew up watching every one of his films. But I watched that and Knowing and in both of those films, and Matchstick Men, in each of those films he has a child. I was watching these films thinking, ‘He’s amazing. And I don’t even really know what kids he has. But he must be amazing with kids.’ There’s something he has where, especially for a young girl, like in Kick-Ass where he’s dealing with that young actress [Chloe Grace-Moretz], there’s just an amazing chemistry between them. And I thought that’s what this character has to have. He has to have this earnestness and this commitment and this seriousness but then they also have to have compassion and that when they first go to these bars, their observation is ‘There’s no humanity here. This is just meat. It’s awful.’ That’s what I wanted. Then when he meets Cindy, he sees something in her which reminds him of his sister – which is a true story; that’s how the real cop’s sister died. That’s what I was interested in.
Then it was, ‘Who’s gonna play the killer? Who’s gonna play Hansen?’ I knew very clearly, the way I had written him was based on the early manuals that [John] Douglas and [Roy] Hazelwood had written on sub-categories of serial killer rapists – I knew exactly which one Hansen was and a bit of the next one and none of these ones. He was written around that. So it was really about, ‘that’s what we need to show.’ We’re not gonna create a Hannibal Lector because we know that Hannibal would want to eat us if we were with him let alone be around him for 13 years and him do this without us knowing anything. So, I need to find someone who’s just a regular guy, who everyone actually likes.
That kind of brings you down to Tom Hanks, John Cusack and maybe Dennis Quaid!
[laughing] Exactly! Then you’ve got to find if they’re able and wanting to do it. When I first met John he had the same apprehension as I did. I was worried that whoever was going to come on board, I was going to be casting someone who’s got to be an incredible actor and a star and has the potential to just drag me in any direction they want and I’m a first-timer so I’ll have no chance of controlling them. In the casting process, I was worried, ‘Crickey! You could go to town on this character and make him so evil and over-the-top and that’s not what I wanted.’ John said, ‘I want to meet Scott. I’ve read the script.’ And he said to me, ‘This character could go anywhere. Where do you see it going?’ I said to him, ‘I want this character to be as truthful a portrayal of an ordinary man who is a serial killer and how he gets away with it by being so normal. That we stay as truthful to these books and these manuals that I’m going to give you, and to these case files and these psychiatric reports that we have on him, and things like.’ And John was like, ‘I’m so glad you said that because I thought you were gonna want to go to town on this thing. I want to do this.’ We made a couple of little changes in the script, a couple of scenes which were ‘Okay, we don’t really need that scene’. . . and then [John] was interested in other scenes. The actual interview [between Cage and Cusack] is much longer than what’s in the film. There’s almost twice as much there and I really wanted to keep that in the film but [had to cut]. But there’s an amazing sequence there where John and Nic, their whole scene, I just LOVED that scene. It was amazing watching them bring that to life and going, “Wow! This is it.”
That interrogation scene between the two is a masterful dance. There are no words.
It’s amazing as it is so the longer version of that is incredible! But the biggest challenge always is – this is a true story. It’s what Nic was talking about. We see this on the news every night and it’s familiar to us and yet it’s true. So you either need to be true or you need to go, ‘Forget the truth. I’m gonna do whatever I want and Hollywoodize it and sensationalize everything’, which I never ever wanted to do. That’s the real challenge. So, I kept clinging to the truth. If I could find a nugget of truth rather than creating something creative; or if I took something that was true from their lives and used that as an element in the story where I needed to bridge two parts of the story which may have happened a week apart or something like that. If you don’t have a bridge, the logic of those two actions is gone and the case doesn’t stand up anymore. That was the real challenge.
As a first-time director you’ve got those challenges to meet, you’re dealing with two megastars and then you decide, ‘I’m going to shoot on location. In Alaska.’
Exactly! And at a certain time of them year, when I hope it snows and we get hit by a superstorm – the biggest in 30 years. [laughing]
How did you convince Patrick Murguia to come on as your cinematographer with all that in play?
He wanted to! He read the script. Patrick doesn’t shoot a lot of films and he should. I keep telling him he should but he’s very very fussy. When [Murguia] came to L.A., he met up with Oliver Stone and straight away he was going to Brooklyn’s Finest and it was like whoosh. Then he read loads of scripts and [moaned] that ‘There’s nothing here that I feel ‘ When we first met, he read the script and said, ‘I want to do this film.’ Then when I met him and showed him books of reference stuff and things that I was interested in and how I wanted Alaska to look and not look. I had said, ‘I don’t want to have an American cinematographer. I want a different look. I don’t want the Ansel Adams.’ With Patrick growing up in Mexico City, I asked, ‘How do we make Anchorage look like any kind of Midwest American city so we don’t think this is just crazy Alaska 1983; so it feels like today and it could be anywhere here in America. But then I want it to feel dirty and gritty like a Mexico backstreet or like 8 Miles.‘ He was, ‘I know exactly how to do that!’ I saw his stuff and it was perfect.
Your tonal bandwidth, your visual tone just compliments the emotional tone so beautifully. Everything is so distinct, so varied. You’ve got your upper middle class neighborhood where Halcombe lives; you’ve got the bright lights and the color downtown in the seedier sections – and I love the use of the lighting and striation of the color. It adds so much depth and texture and adds to that grit you want. Then you’ve got the snowfall which adds another whole layer and then the Arctic tundra that everyone knows by sight – that true “frozen ground”. Yet, as distinct as each element is, it seamlessly blends and you feel the symbiosis amongst all of it. Beautifully structured.
That’s Patrick. Thank you. That’s why I fought to shoot in Alaska. A lot of people said to just go and shoot this in British Columbia, it’ll be easier or shoot it in Michigan and you can double it and then just shoot some exteriors in Alaska. No. This story needs to be told in the place that the events happened with as many locales involved as possible because it’s their story; that’s the story behind the story. That’s a deal breaker for me. . . I had written the locations to be within a mile of downtown. I wrote the script after being in Alaska because I was thinking, how do I get the best chance of being able to do this. And that’s by limiting it geographically when we come to film. So [producer Randall Emmett] was like, ‘Okay. We’ll just take over two floors. That’s our make-up, costume, every crew stays in the hotel and we can walk to set everywhere.’ So we had one or two company moves per day but we were shooting in loads of different places. There are places that I didn’t get because they said, ‘They’re like 1 1/2 miles away and that’s a company move and there’s no way we can do it. And you want the moose scene? There’s only 3 backstreets you can have the moose scene in so pick which one you want.’ Things like that. There were limitations, but I still got to shoot in Alaska and be in the locations where the bodies were found. We filmed where the bodies were found. I think that really brought an enormous level of ‘we can do this and we will do this and nobody will complain about how bad it gets.’ That was part of my thinking. If I could just get everybody there, the seriousness of the situation and the responsibility to tell the story will outweigh any problems; everybody will just realize there’s something more than just making a movie here. It worked.
How difficult was this for Patrick with the equipment? With temperature fluctuations you lose lensing, you lose your battery, it’s as bad as filming in the desert when a sandstorm comes up.
It was really difficult. We would have two cameras identical. The lenses would warp at different temperatures on the exact same lenses from the same lens kit and you have no idea why and then they’re both reading different colors. You certainly can’t take them inside and outside. They always have to stay outside in the freezing cold. And then there’d be like an hour before we could go to shoot an inside scene, even I wanted to do a quick pick-up, otherwise it would fog up and then be gone for a few hours. Everything was kept minimal. Because we had so much to do. I said to [Patrick], ‘Before you say you really want to do this, because I know you do, this is going to be an impossible shoot. We’re gonna have no time. We’re all gonna say we need more time, we need more equipment.’ We took one dolly. We were told we had to take a dolly and we used it once and that was the last time we ever used it because it slowed us down. I said, ‘This is gonna be so fast. You’re gonna need to light like you’ve never lit before. But that’s the look that I think we should go for as well. Everything serves itself and so therefore it’s perfect. So, these constraints, we’re gonna use them rather than fight them.’ And Patrick was amazing. He was, ‘Let’s go!’ And the other grips and the guys – they were just phenomenal. They’re outside in the freezing cold the entire time. They don;t get to come inside. They’re setting up for the next shot and we’re moving so fast.
A cruel taskmaster indeed!
[Laughing]. No! You know what? I’d say, ‘Guys, how are we going?’ And they were like, ‘It’s all under control.’ Nobody shouted on the set – – ever.
No incidents of frostbite?
Actually Nic got a tiny little spot! [laughing] That was the first warning. And we were like ‘wow.’ Because you don’t feel frostbite. You see frostbite. We didn’t even feel it but the temperature dipped. It went below zero. And we didn’t even realize how cold it was. He was like, ‘Holy Moly! I think I’ve burned my ear!’ It was crazy.
Because this is a true story and because there are families of victims who are alive and have had to live with this everyday and because there were only four convictions, with making a film like THE FROZEN GROUND, how much do you feel a responsibility to them, how much does it weigh on you as a filmmaker to hold their hearts in their hands so to speak?
A lot. For a long time I didn’t want to make the film for that very reason. I thought, ‘Why does this film need to be made and how can I make it and still hold on to enough control to insure that this doesn’t turn out to be a horror film which exploits and glorifies and have these people’s daughters or sisters or mothers be remembered in an entirely inappropriate and awful way and to commercialize it?‘ That’s when I decided I will only do it if the real people support me. I’m not going to go against them. And actually Glenn said to me, ‘If I don’t help you, what are you gonna do?’ And I said, ‘I don’t know. . .but I won’t be doing this film because if you won’t help me, the other 15 to 20 people that I need help from, they’re not gonna help me. I’ll just take that as a sign.’ And he said, ‘Well, I’ll help you.’
There’s a touching epilogue, if you will, of photos of the victims.
The photos at the end was a big question of should they even be there. I would go back to the real people, Cindy, Glenn, others, family members, and ask ‘What do you think?’ One of the family members said, ‘Yes, I think it’s an amazing thing. Can you please use this photo of her, can you please call her by this because that’s not the name we knew her by and her friends wouldn’t know her by; that’s what they knew her by is the case files.’ From that angle, that was the toughest thing. They really are the only people that I really worry about. Some of them have seen the film and they write me back and send me beautiful emails, ‘What an amazing film’. I think then you’ve done everything because your intention you managed to keep in the film and the tone and everything like that is terrific. That is really pleasing. People can take out of it whatever they want without knowing the story behind it, but those people whose lives it is about – the lives are massively affected today, destroyed in a lot of ways. That was always the thing that got me the most. All I really worry about is that those people know, ‘The story is being told and my mother or family member is being remembered and through Cindy she’s portrayed as a real human being; through the other girls that are mentioned – much that I had to cut out – but mentions of them being.’ Stuff like that which to me meant a lot about saying these are someone’s children.
You gave each of those women a voice that they didn’t have.
I said to Cindy once, ‘Do you believe in God?’ And she said, ‘No, I don’t believe in God but I believe there’s a reason why I had to have such a horrible childhood so that maybe I would have the strength to stop this guy and stand up and do what I had to do.’ And I said, ‘Do you have any regrets?’ And she said to me, ‘The only regret I had was that when I was sitting in the courtroom and he was being sentenced and I saw all the friends and families of the victims and I looked at them and my regret was that I wasn’t kidnaped and raped a year earlier so that some of their family members might still be alive.’ That’s a 17 year old girl. 18 at the time. That’s like, ‘wow.’ She said, ‘You’re taking on an enormous amount making this film. Why are you doing it?’ And I’d say, ‘I don’t know sometimes. It’s kind of like leading me and I’m just following it.’ And she would say, ‘There’s monsters out there.’ It’s a cliche, but it’s so true. She said, ‘People need to know this stuff exists, to be careful.’
One of the victim’s fathers still tells everybody about what happened to his daughter. His friends would say, ‘Why don’t you just move on?’ And he says, ‘Because if I can save one other daughter from running away then maybe mine’s death wouldn’t be in vain.’ It’s things like that that make you go, ‘There’s a reason to tell this but there’s not a reason to turn it into a horror film.’ And part of it was that [Hansen] only got convicted and sentenced for four murders plus Cindy and it was closed to media. The story wasn’t ever shouted about because that was part of his confession. There were a lot of family members in the courtroom that day who said the world should know what this guy did. ‘I want my daughter remembered and she should be named and remembered.’ When I read and heard things like that, that was part of why there’s the roll at the end. They should be counted. They should be known. They were smiling beautiful girls who didn’t deserve to have anything happen to them.
So now, what do you personally take away from this experience of making THE FROZEN GROUND?
It’s much more than a film. It’s life affecting. You meet such incredible people. Cindy is an amazing, amazing, inspiring woman. And Glenn! They’re both now very good friends. I speak to Glenn especially, a lot. He’s been through the whole thing with me. There’s a lot of cops, like 65 or more real people who are mentioned in the film, all of the police ended up giving us their consent to use their real name. A lot of them came to the set. We were gonna be filming in the actual Alaska State Trooper headquarters at one point. I met an incredible amount of people. So, it’s not a film. It’s much more than that. In the middle of it, I had a son on the same weekend as the film opened in London. My little baby boy was born thanks to my beautiful wife. This film is all about family and what we do to each other and how we look down on each other and trust the isolation and stuff which is on the news every night.
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