The Ice Road is an action movie that shot in Winnipeg, Manitoba, in early 2020 – wrapping up just in the nick of time at the start of the global pandemic.
Set in a unique environment that begged for a filming destination like Manitoba, the story begins with a diamond mine explosion in remote northern Canada. Heavy equipment is required to rescue the trapped miners, and the only way to transport it is in three semi-trucks across an ice road – at the close of ice road season.
Bart Rosenblatt, a Producer on the film, says it’s exactly the kind of project he and his partners were looking to do: “We had worked with Jonathan Hensleigh before on a movie called Kill the Irishman – Jonathan directed that film – and so we wanted to work with him again. He has a great imagination, and he’s a wonderful screenwriter who has written a lot of big action movies.”
To make The Ice Road, Director Jonathan Hensleigh was inspired by a movie he first saw as a young film fan: “I was interested in a French film by Henri-Georges Clouzot called The Wages of Fear. I saw it on television when I was about ten, and it’s become a minor classic about a band of losers who are hired to take nitroglycerin across a mountain range. I’ve been obsessed with this film ever since.”
“The notion of mismatched blue-collar people who have to go on a journey together – one so perilous that no one without proper motivations would do it – fascinated me. I wanted to make Of Mice and Men crossed with The Wages of Fear,” says Hensleigh.
Producer Al Corley also liked the inspiration from The Wages of Fear: “We didn’t want to make the same picture, but something inspired by it. We liked the world of these tough, visceral, blue-collar guys, and thought that an ice road would be a good environment for an action picture in that it’s almost like another world.”
