Summer blockbusters are a Hollywood beast like no other. Twisters, the follow-up to Jan de Bont’s classic 1996 box office behemoth, is one of them and director Lee Isaac Chung was well aware of that when he took the job.
However, he didn’t expect two of the industry’s most significant forces of nature, returning executive producer Steven Spielberg and Tom Cruise, to be quite the substantial winds beneath his wings that they turned out to be.
“I had to pitch both Steven Spielberg and producer Frank Marshall individually,” Chung explained as we chatted on one of the soundstages on the backlot at Universal Studios Hollywood. “I knew that my filmography would not indicate what I wanted to do with this film, so I tried to fill in many technical details. I have a great affinity for Spielberg’s films, and I was building my pitch with many of those visual details that I believe he does to show how I wanted to do that within Twisters.”
“For example, if you take the incredible scene in Jurassic Park with the cup and the water vibrating on the surface when the T-Rex is coming, our movie has tornadoes instead of dinosaurs. There were fantastic ways to show the effects of that tornado coming, and that builds anticipation through a small detail, so I was talking about those things.”
However, something Spielberg wanted to do was talk about character and theme
“In that discussion, we really got along very well, and I felt like we were seeing eye to eye on things, and I was just hoping to God that they would hire me,” Chung continued. “Once we started working together, they were incredibly giving, and they were just always making sure that I was set up to do what I felt needed to be done. They were listening and giving feedback anytime I asked.”
However, the Minari filmmaker was surprised to find out exactly how much time they would give him. He invited Spielberg into the editing room to watch the film and discuss the cut.
“I thought he would come in for an hour, but he came in for two days and watched the movie with me a couple of times,” Chung explained. “We’d go through it scene-by-scene and talk through even small cuts within the film. That process was like the greatest film school I’ve ever been through. I learned a lot during those two days with him about filmmaking, film language, and other things. I consider it mind-blowing that I had that time with him.”
Cruise, one of the kings of contemporary action, thanks to the Mission: Impossible franchise and films such as Spielberg’s War of the Worlds, turned up and supported Twisters at its London premiere. The A-list actor and producer has formed a close friendship with Chung’s leading man, Glen Powell.
“It was a surprise for me when he showed up, but I think it was in the works with Glen,” Chung said. “It was wonderful to see him there and champion not just this movie but also movie theaters and the theater-going experience. He is all about that, and he gave us so many encouraging words afterward to keep pressing forward with trying to make movies of this scale and scope meant to bring people into a great theatrical experience.”
Twisters sees Daisy Edgar-Jones playing retired storm chaser Kate Carter, who is haunted by the devastating memory of a tornado claiming the lives of a number of her friends. Fellow survivor Javi, played by Anthony Ramos, persuades her to return to the field to help with a project he’s working on. That’s where she meets Powell’s cocky and reckless social-media famous storm chaser, Tyler Owens. Before they know it, they must fight for their lives when they’re caught in the crosshairs of multiple storm systems converging over central Oklahoma. Twisters is exclusively in theaters and not currently available on streaming.
‘Twisters’ Was Personal For Director Lee Isaac Chung
For Chung, Twisters was personal.
“When I got on this project, I did feel that I wanted to implement things that I felt only I would know through my experiences of growing up in the region,” he explained. “For instance, my experience of growing up on a farm, the fact that this film had a sequence that takes place somewhere like that, and I grew up right outside of Oklahoma, across the border in Arkansas, so I knew what the roads should look like, what the place should look like, and even with the music like with the musical choices that I was making on the soundtrack. I felt like those elements were things I knew mattered, but someone coming in from the coasts or the cities coming in to make this movie might not understand how meaningful those choices could be.”
Seeing the 1996 original Twister in theaters is a visceral memory for the filmmaker.
“When I saw Twister for the first time, the scene that Jan had with the family running away from the tornado at night felt very similar to an experience that my family and I had when we were running from the trailer home where we lived when we moved to Arkansas,” Chung recalled “We were trying to get away from a tornado that was somewhere in the area, but we couldn’t see it. As soon as I saw that scene, I was locked in. It was the same when I saw the terrain, landscape, and story unfold because I felt like this story was made for people like me where I lived. Jan de Bont is a master of filming action and visceral experiences, so that combination of my region portrayed in this massive, intensely adrenaline-filled action movie was great for 16-year-old me.”
While a world away from his Oscar-winning movie Minari, Twisters was a dream come true for Chung.
“I had just been hungering and waiting to be able to film some action, and with those two sequences, I just wanted to push it in terms of what I would love to do as a filmmaker. The pool sequence was a great opportunity to do an action scene contained in this smaller space in which don’t even see the tornado, but we see the effects of it,” he explained. “That’s what’s creating many action moments within that space. It was highly technical, but there was also a lot of character and heart within that sequence. I was trying to push things because it was my first chance to do action on this scale in a feature film, so I just wanted to give it my all. The theater scene in Twisters made me feel like I had to do this movie right from the start. When I read that moment about the movie theater screen ripping out, it was such a powerful image that I knew it could greatly impact audiences to see that within a theater. I was like a kid in a candy store and was trying to do best with what was there.”
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