'Twisters' Director Reveals the Inspirations Behind the Film

Hi, my name is Lee Isaac Chung

and I'm gonna walk through some visual references

and inspirations for the movie Twisters.

[upbeat music]

When I heard about the first Twister,

I think it was a very mysterious trailer

that popped up at the cinema,

where you're inside of a car and you're just driving.

A tractor tire hits the window

and it kind of cuts to black.

And I remember thinking when I saw that,

that that's not gonna be an interesting movie.

'cause I thought, when you see a tornado, where I grew up,

you just run from it.

When I was very young, when we first moved to Arkansas,

my dad moved us into a trailer home on this farm.

A couple of weeks into that,

a tornado was coming into the area.

We didn't have a storm shelter.

My parents were new immigrants from Korea.

We didn't know what we were supposed to do.

So my dad took us in a pickup truck

and drove us to this place where he said,

We're gonna climb down into this low part of the ground

and hide out if the tornado comes.

And I remember that being quite a traumatic experience

as a four or 5-year-old.

But when I watched the movie Twister,

the first scene is this family running from a farm

and trying to hide out this tornado

and instantly I was sucked in.

[air swooshing] [person screaming]

I remember telling my parents that reminded me so much

of when we were running from that night tornado.

It was an instant connection.

So when I started working on this movie, the first thing was

that I just felt like I knew nothing about tornadoes.

I hit the ground running with our science advisor,

Kevin Kelleher, who was actually an advisor

on the first Twister.

I would be constantly talking to him,

asking him about where the science is

and what I can read, what I can watch.

And then I threw myself into YouTube videos,

which, there is a deep hole of YouTube videos of tornadoes

and storm chasing.

I would take all of these clips, compile them in a folder,

and I'd arrange them according to what I thought

they should be in the script.

And some of these chasers really produce their videos

where you're switching between different angles

and you're seeing the tornado from different places.

And an interesting note on that,

the scientists are very ambivalent about all these chasers.

So anytime I would tell them that I'm using videos

of actual chasers, they would feel a little bit guarded

about what I'm doing.

'cause they feel like those guys are always in the way.

These guys are always out there making their videos

while the scientists are out there

trying to do real research.

So some of that in the movie is actually from real life.

And I would try not to tell the scientists

how much YouTube video I was using as a reference,

because it was a sore subject for them.

And it was fun.

When we were there, we brought in

a lot of actual storm chasers into our scenes.

So in the background you have these real storm chasers

with their real vehicles that are decked out

and they would come and talk to us

[people cheering]

and there were a lot of interesting characters

[chuckling] in that bunch.

I love that, on this page, we have Jaws.

Jaws was definitely a huge reference for me.

This story about trying to figure out

what to do about the shark,

with these three characters coming together, essentially.

With each of them having a very different personality.

One of the things that I introduced in the movie

were yellow barrels as a result.

'Cause these yellow barrels

were indicative of where the shark was, many times.

He developed a language, I feel, cinematically,

of really showing more of the detailed effects

of where a monster is rather than just showing the monster.

And so that was a real touch point for me.

As I tried to show our tornado,

which I believe to be a monster.

I tried to show a lot of the effects

like the way that it would make a stop sign spin

or the way that it would make

the windshield wiper get caught.

But in general, Spielberg was a very huge reference,

War of the Worlds, I watched this one a lot,

not just for story, but also for framing,

because I knew that this film,

the monster is very high up in the air.

So that would just be like Tom Cruise right here

would be looking at a tornado.

I could very well let this be a Twisters frame.

So that was a big reference for me visually,

just to see how he was telling that story.

Al Nelson at Skywalker Sound

who did our sound design for the tornadoes,

he was trying to create a voice for the tornado.

So that it's not just this inanimate object

or an object that has no personality,

but he wanted it to have an organic living voice.

He wanted a kind of lonely sound to it.

So it was wolves, seals and it was horses.

[wind roaring]

[lightening cracking]

So those sounds he put in.

He changed the speed of them and he kind of cleaned them up

and different things.

And he integrated them into the tornado.

Hopefully, people feel it in some visceral way,

that this tornado has a voice.

[wind wailing]

So I had used weather very little in my previous films

and that's typically,

because I've been making very low budget movies

and it tends to be quite a nightmare

to shoot with rain towers and things like that.

But on this movie, I knew that if I wanted rain

then I'd be able to get it.

If I wanted wind, I'd be able to get it.

And I went to town with it.

I thought, I'm gonna really try to use this

and use it very well and learn from the masters.

What have they done with weather?

So Kurosawa, I felt like it all started with him, for me.

I went back and watched Seven Samurai

and Seven Samurai has some incredible scenes

and sequences with rain.

And I knew that I would be using a lot of rain in this film.

And Ran has so much texture within the wind

that's in the story.

And watching the way that he uses his camera

in opposition to the elements or in conjunction.

There are things that he would do to create

much more of an impact of the weather effects.

So that's something that I was trying to do as well

with the way that we were moving the camera.

If wind is going in one direction, we try to counter it

and just create more of a dynamic energy.

By the way, this Wizard of Oz thing,

really happy this was here, 'cause Kate's journey,

to me a tornado affects Kate's life

and she's kind of transported to this new place

and she has to find a way back home.

That wasn't really in the script,

but in my mind I just felt like there's some similar tie

between Kate's journey and Dorothy's journey.

And at the end when I was figuring out

how do I frame the ending of the movie,

when Kate is surrounded by her friends,

this was the exact frame

that I showed to our cinematographer

and our camera operator,

that ultimately we're gonna land on this type of a frame.

I tried to be very intuitive about how I was modernizing

or making Twisters contemporary in the present day.

I have a deep affinity and love for the first Twister,

so I let that be my anchor.

But I also didn't let it be some kind of chain.

I wanted to make sure that we are making a whole new movie

with whole new characters and a whole new science project,

but one in which we really loved the world

of that original film.

And I decided I'm just gonna follow my own intuition

and the things that give me delight, see where that leads.

So this is my toy box and I'm just gonna play.

Oklahoma and verisimilitude.

Oklahoma's really one of the big key factors

of why I wanted to make this movie, to be honest.

And I have such an affection for that state

and for that area, the people.

I made Minari there, a very personal film.

I kept wondering, would I have a chance to go back.

I really wanted to make another movie there.

When I signed onto this film, I had all of that in mind

and then the studio asked me,

Now, could you go please make this in Atlanta?

'cause it's gonna be cheaper to make it over there.

So I went through the motions.

I went to the state.

I scouted locations

to see if I can find Oklahoma in Georgia.

But I just wasn't able to find it.

And I asked the studio, please let me shoot it in Oklahoma,

I'll do anything.

And they said, Okay, reduce the number of shooting days.

Reduce your number of VFX shots

and you can shoot in Oklahoma.

And that's the deal I made.

'cause I just believed even with VFX shots,

the more that I can just have Oklahoma,

the less I need to recreate things digitally

or enhance things.

I grew up right around there.

I could walk into Oklahoma where I lived in Arkansas.

It's just a place that I know really well.

It's just in the bones.

So you just naturally do things that bring you joy

and texture of the place.

So one of the things

that I asked the location scout, Janice Polley,

who's incredible, I asked her,

Can you please find me red dirt roads?

I need red dirt roads.

Not all dirt roads are the same.

That's specifically what I know.

We had a baseball sequence in the script,

but I said I'd love to change it to the rodeo.

I'd also love to change the rodeo grounds

to really make the color of the dirt match

what I remember and know.

And even the look of the rodeo.

I wanted to go that old time, like 1970s look.

Something that is much more classic.

That I recall looking in real life and also in magazines

and also the sequence at the farm that happens in the movie.

That was really important for me.

I tend to be very easygoing on set.

I try not to micromanage.

And I felt like on that day I was very much in the weeds

with making sure that they portray what a farm looks like.

Just 'cause some of our team,

they hadn't ever been really on a farm.

So I was very particular about gloves

and the the way that the dirt should be on the shirt

and stuff like that.

So I do notice when it comes to details of the landscape

and place, I just want to get it right.

I don't think we see it enough in cinema, that area.

So it is something that I wanted to get right.

I feel like I see a Scorsese film

and I understand New York City very well,

or if it's a Paul Thomas Anderson film in Los Angeles,

I know that he knows the place

and he picks up on

these little mundane details of the place.

And I kinda hope to do that too

with this area that I love.

I've been joking that Minari

is in many ways a disaster movie.

It's a movie about this family that really comes together

as a result of a disaster.

And that's often what disaster movies are about.

The way that disaster can really bring people together

or tear them apart or even what it can do to a society

or a group of people.

But with Minari, my production designer,

Yong Ok Lee built this barn and we built it knowing

that we're gonna have to actually tear it apart and burn it.

I remember we had quite a lot of trouble making negotiations

with everybody to do this without VFX,

everybody wanted us to create a VFX fire,

but I was very adamant we need to actually burn the barn

to really feel the fullness of the thing.

And our special effects guy rigged this thing up

and we only had two takes to do it.

And when it went, it was a fireball

and it was much bigger than anything any of us expected.

And this is Steven Yeun and Yeri Han here.

It was so hot that I had to run up

and pull them back physically,

because they were just in it.

They were just performing.

And I felt, from a distance I could feel the heat of it

and once I came to my senses

after seeing this giant fireball,

I ran up and I pulled them back and we reset

and continued filming.

They were just in awe, as were a lot of us on set.

And when I was editing the movie,

this scene, I would go back to over and over again,

'cause I just felt like it expressed something so visceral

and unexplainable, mysterious.

And it did the job of really transforming these characters.

And I wondered what would it be like to make an entire movie

where that is happening over and over again.

And when I got the script for Twisters,

it was an aha moment.

I could feel like my new fireballs were these tornadoes

and I could really use those

as a way to tell this story about people.

I'm hoping for that sense of awe.

This one, this Wakita scene,

I remember my production designer worked on this scene

in the first Twister, Patrick Sullivan.

And he had so many regrets about this scene,

even though it was so beautiful.

He kept saying, We can do better,

so we're gonna do better.

And he just felt like we can get more damage

and we can make it look more epic.

So for the past 27 years,

he's been sitting on this scene wishing to improve upon it.

And I let him go to town in our film

and he and Missy Parker, our Set Dec,

they hit the ground running.

They went to places where they were actually salvaging

from real tornado damaged areas.

Bringing trees over and rubble into our film.

It's not just a bunch of junk that gets thrown out there.

You have to really build these buildings

to look like they were built fully

and then they were destroyed.

That verisimilitude is very difficult

and that level of detail, yeah, it's impressive.

[upbeat music]

I love all of these Howard Hawks movies in the 1940s

and there are many other filmmakers

who were doing these films.

Preston Sturges was one, Billy Wilder.

They were doing these movies

in which often it'd be a divorced couple.

The question in the movie is,

will this couple ever come back together?

And more often than not,

what is missing in their lives is adventure.

It's almost a purpose for that adventure

to exist in the movie

simply as a means to get the two people back together.

Michael Crichton and his wife,

they were the ones who decided we need to bring back

His Girl Friday into this story of Twister.

And they're the ones who implemented that.

I thought it was brilliant.

It's two people who share a similar interest.

And that's what I was hoping with Twisters,

that Glen's character. Daisy's character,

you see the shared affinity and it brings them together.

I would listen to the soundtrack of Fire of Love

while I was making this film

and I recommended that all of the actors

watch Fire of Love 'cause I wanted them to understand

that at the core this film is about a relationship.

And I love that this relationship between these two

is really informed by a shared reverence for nature.

One that leads them to the brink of disaster.

I mean, they actually got so sucked into it

that their lives were consumed by an actual volcano.

And I just thought that relationship and love story

was very fascinating.

Daisy so loved this movie

that she wanted a camera in Twisters.

She said she also wants to be a photographer

that ended up being a part of her character.

And it specifically came from Fire of Love.

In some ways I kind of felt like

we have gone through a time of trauma and fear in society

and I thought it's interesting to be making this movie now,

when we went through this weird time.

Now we're wondering how do we get back out there?

Do we look for ways to simply be safe and hiding and away

and in New York City the way that she does

or what of her past can she go back to and really explore

and go back to and and honor and embrace?

I've generally felt in my life

that the people who annoy me most

are the people who have traits

that I myself wish I did not have.

And I felt like Kate must be running from certain aspects

of herself and those aspects are in Tyler.

So I was hoping that'd be a nice romance between Kate

and somebody who has all these qualities of herself

that she's been really wanting to bury and remove

and that she might actually hate.

And that creates this nice love/hate tension

in relationship.

I asked Glen to be really annoying to her in the beginning,

and it was fun. [chuckling]

I could tell he really relished doing that.

But what I love was that Daisy always stood her ground

and that just made her so much cooler.

There were so many scenes where she would do something

and she was just not falling prey to Tyler's charms

or to his teases.

And it just made her so much of a better character to me.

I kinda see myself as Kate in many ways.

I grew up on a farm. I headed to the cities.

I felt like I needed to run away from this identity.

Also, when I was a kid, I loved Spielberg movies.

Amblin' movies, those were my favorite movies.

When I got to college,

I found out that those are not very sophisticated.

Just as I was trying to remove

any bits of my Ozark, hillbilly, farming identity,

I was squashing even that side.

And I was really trying to develop tastes

and all these different things.

I think it wasn't until maybe my daughter was born,

that I just thought all of that stuff,

all of those concerns,

maybe I take life a little too seriously

or even tastes of films too seriously.

And I started to see things more through her eyes as a kid.

And then in wanting to do my next project after Minari

I just wanted to be a kid again.

And there's an element to Kate's story

where she just has to capture that childlike joy

and go back to what she was always loving.

[upbeat music]

Thank you so much for watching, for listening.

I hope you all will take a chance to go out there

and find some awe.

[upbeat music fading]