Nic Cage and John Cusack have teamed up before for Con Air (and sort of in Adaptation), but now they’re planning a new and rather different movie together – a serial killer biopic called Frozen Ground, about notorious murderer Robert Hansen and the race to capture him.
Variety reports that Cusack will portray Hansen, a seemingly normal family man who was hiding the fact he was killing women in Alaska. By the time he was caught in 1983, it’s believed he’d kidnap, tortured, and raped between 17 and 21 women, mostly prostitutes he thought wouldn’t be missed. He would take them to his remote cabin, then release them on a sandbar, before hunting them down and killing them as they tried to flee.
Nic Cage meanwhile would be be the Alaska State Trooper who cracked the case (in real life this was Detective Glenn Flothe, but he isn’t mentioned in the Variety report, so it’s possible the name will be changed for the movie). Flothe discovered one of Hansen’s victims in the street, who’d managed to escape from the killer, but he faced difficulties getting people to believe Robert really was a dangerous man (he was a baker and viewed as a weak man, so many believed the woman was merely trying to extort money from him). However the woman and polieman formed an unlikely partnership to bring the killer down.
New Zealander Scott Walker will make his feature directorial debut, helming from his own script. Shooting will begin on October 10th in Alaska.