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As a young man, Twisters director Lee Isaac Chung was sure that Twister, the precursor to his film, was going to fail. The 1996 Twisters epic was teased with tense photographs from a driver’s point of view, ending with a windshield smashed by a flying plane. tractor tire. ” When I saw that I thought it wouldn’t be an attractive film,” Chung says. “When you see a tornado, where I grew up, you run away from it. “
Chung came across as honest with his skepticism. Like the characters in his 2020 Oscar-nominated film Minari, Chung’s Korean-American family moved to Arkansas when he was a child. A few weeks after the family moved into a trailer on a farm, they learned that a tornado was approaching. “We didn’t know what we were supposed to do,” Chung says. His father led the family to a low domain and said: “We are passing to go down to this low part of the earth and hide from the approaching tornado,” the director recalled. “I do not forget that it was a traumatic experience. “
When he went to see Twister at the movies at age 17, the opening scene, in which a family tries to escape a tornado, reminded him of everything. “I told my parents, ‘This reminded me a lot of when we were running away from that tornado at night,'” Chung said. “It was an instant connection. “
The roots of his formative years came into play even before Chung accepted the directorship of Twisters. The film is set in Oklahoma, which “is one of the key reasons I tried to make this film,” Chung said. Minari also holds the position in this region. I grew up there,” Chung says. “I might walk to Oklahoma, where I lived in Arkansas. . . It’s in my bones. “
His commitment to the location meant that when the studio encouraged Chung to shoot the film in Atlanta, he returned. “I asked the studio, ‘Please let me shoot it in Oklahoma. I’ll do anything. ’” By eliminating some visual effects and shortening the project’s filming schedule, he was able to pull it off.
Making the film in the same location where it took place added significant verisimilitude, and Chung’s experience in the region amplified that further. “Some of our team members had never been on a farm,” Chung says. Therefore, it was up to the farmer-turned-manager to make sure that small details, such as gloves and clothing designs, were accurate. “I don’t think it’s seen enough in film, in this area, so that’s all I was looking to achieve,” he says.
Both Twisters and Minari are crisis films, Chung adds. In Minari, the crisis is much smaller in scale: the farm-filled barn of the Yi family’s farm is completely destroyed by flames. This personal tragedy “expressed something so visceral and inexplicable, mysterious, and transformed those characters. And I asked myself: What would it be like to make an entire movie where this happens over and over again?
When the Twisters script won, Chung learned that tornadoes could simply update the Minari fire. “Maybe I’ll use them to tell a story about people,” she says.
To do this, Chung started with Kevin Kelleher, former deputy director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Severe Storms Laboratory, who acted as an advisor on Twister and its sequel. “I communicated with him constantly, asking him where the science is, what I can read, what I can see,” Chung says.
Then it fell into a void on YouTube. ” There are a lot of tornado videos on YouTube,” Chung says, most commonly captured by amateur typhoon hunters. He would trim attractive sequences and then set them up based on fast weather formations that might be compatible with the Twisters script. It’s a debatable decision, Chung said. Scientists are very ambivalent about all those hunters. So every time I told them that I use videos of genuine hunters, they felt a little cautious about what I was doing.
“They feel like those guys are on their way,” Chung says of the friction between typhoon hunters and weather professionals. “These guys are there to make their videos while scientists are looking to do genuine research. “
It’s a competitive tension that carried over into the final film, when Chung brought in authentic typhoon chasers to provide original colors. “In the background, you have these real typhoon hunters, with their real decorated vehicles,” Chung says. “There were a lot of attractive characters in that group. “
But perhaps the most important characters in the film are the tornadoes themselves. Citing Steven Spielberg as a major influence on him, Chung says that he considers the 1975 shark attack nightmare, Jaws, as a precursor to Twisters. “It evolved a film language to show more detailed effects of where a monster is than just showing the monster,” Chung says, a useful lesson when the monster in your movie is made of wind.
Spielberg’s edition of The War of the Worlds is also a source of inspiration. The 2015 alien invasion movie, starring Tom Cruise (whom, by the way, Twisters star Glen Powell cited as a mentor), explained how Chung framed many of the scenes. In the movie, the monster is high up in the air,” says Chung. In many scenes in War of the Worlds, Cruise could very well be “watching a tornado. “
The pandemic was also on Chung’s mind. “We went through an era of trauma and worry in society,” she says. “It’s appealing to make this movie now, when we’ve been through this strange time, and now we’re wondering how we’re going to get back to that. Should we look for tactics to just be there and hide?”
The protagonist of Twisters, the traumatized Kate (Daisy Edgar-Jones), personified this impulse. “I consider myself Kate, in many ways,” Chung says. I grew up on a farm, I went to the cities. I felt that I had to run away from this identity. After the birth of her daughter, much of that self-protection and worry began to disappear. “I started seeing things more through her eyes, when I was a kid. “
This return to youth, to the boy who hid from an Arkansas tornado in a ditch, could be the reason why Chung discovers such a relationship with Kate. “There’s a detail in Kate’s story where she just has to capture that childlike joy and convey it to what she loved,” Chung says.
It was a realization that encouraged Chung to forge his own path on Twisters. Although he loves the original Twister and recognizes the effect it had on his life, “I made the decision to follow my own instincts and the things that delight me, and I’ll see where it takes me. ” It’s my toy box and I’m just going to play.
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