PARK CITY — Shawn Ashmore should be used to being cold by now.
After all, he was born and grew up in British Columbia, which is pretty snowy. And his biggest movie role to date is that of Bobby Drake — better known as the mutant Iceman — in the "X-Men" movies.
Yet the 30-year-old actor says his experiences making the horror-thriller "Frozen" lived up to that film's title.
"I think I'm still warming up," he said. "I get thinking about what we went through to make that movie and my teeth start chattering all over again."
Ashmore, Kevin Zegers and Emma Bell star in the movie, a tale about three winter-sports enthusiasts who face a number of perils when they become stuck on a ski lift overnight. The three characters stand little chance of rescue, and temperatures drop considerably as the hours go by.
According to Ashmore, all three actors really were perched on a ski lift chair for hours, in sub-freezing temperatures. The movie was shot at Ogden's Snowbasin ski resort last January, and writer/director Adam Green insisted on "realism."
So that meant the three actors were dangling more than 50 feet above the ground at times.
"It doesn't sound that high, but when you're looking down at rock-hard ground underneath you and are getting battered by freezing winds, it might as well be a mile," Ashmore said.
"Frozen," which will be released in theaters in February and March, is debuting at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival.
("Frozen" was one of three movies in this year's festival that were shot in the state of Utah. The others are the gay-rights documentary "8: The Mormon Proposition" and the sibling rivalry comedy "Lovers of Hate.")
This is Ashmore's first Sundance Film Festival, and he said he's "eager" to see how the movie is received.
As a horror and science-fiction fan, Ashmore is aware of how certain low-budget movies have become hits there — and how they have then gone onto bigger and better things.
(Among the more notable, recent festival genre hits are 1999's "The Blair Witch Project," 2003's "Open Water" and 2005's "The Descent.")
"Honestly, I'm just happy to have a film at the festival," he said. "I have friends who have been to Sundance before who still haven't stopped talking about what an awesome experience it was."
Still, Ashmore said he is "a little unprepared for the (festival) experience and really don't know what to expect from it."
"All I know going in is that there seems to be a lot of good buzz about the movie," he continued. "I hope that's a good thing, that people are already expecting a lot from it. I also hope that people are genuinely scared and thrilled by it."
Ashmore's Sundance plans include more than just "hitting the red carpet," though. He said he wants to see other festival selections — and more than that, he's hoping to hit the slopes while he's in Utah.
"You'd think the experience of making the movie would have soured me on ski resorts, but you'd be wrong," the avid snowboarder laughed.
"If anything, 'Frozen' made me even more fearless," he said. "Once you've been through what we went through to make that movie, nothing a snowy mountain can throw at you seems that scary any more."
e-mail: jeff@desnews.com