Usually when a sequel comes out 28 years after the original, you can attribute it to money. But Twisters director Lee Isaac Chung has a surprisingly personal tie to his Twister sequel, as he makes his move into big-budget filmmaking.
His last film, the Oscar-winning Minari, was a small, personal story loosely based on his experiences growing up in Arkansas with his parents, who moved from South Korea with dreams of farming. Minari is a moving, ground-level story of surviving in a strange new land.
But it didn’t capture all of his childhood memories, including his family’s first experience with a tornado. He was only five at the time.
“As soon as we moved to a farm in Northwest Arkansas, we moved into a trailer home that didn’t have a storm shelter. My dad didn’t know we needed anything like that,” Chung recalls. “Within the first three weeks, a tornado landed in the area, and I remember that my dad woke us up in the middle of the night and drove us to try to find a safe place. We had no idea that even being in a car is not the safest place to be when there’s a tornado nearby.”
As the years passed, his family got used to the idea of tornadoes potentially upending their lives.
“I distinctly remember when big storms would roll through on our farm, I would love to go outside as a boy to watch it happening. You could feel these massive storms changing the atmosphere and passing overhead.”
Twisters, which returns to the world of the 1996 Twister, starring Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton, follows Daisy Edgar-Jones as Kate Carter, an ex-storm chaser who is haunted by a disastrous encounter with a tornado during her college years.
Kate is studying storm patterns from the safety of New York City when she’s lured back to the open plains by her friend Javi (Anthony Ramos). The duo are testing a groundbreaking new tracking system when they cross paths with Tyler (Glen Powell), a charming but reckless stormchaser and social-media superstar. They have to fight for their lives when several storm systems converge over central Oklahoma.
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Twisters was already in development when Chung was offered the job by executive producer Ashley Jay Sandberg of The Kennedy/Marshall Company. After Joseph Kosinski (who directed Powell in Top Gun: Maverick and came up with the story for Twisters) dropped out of directing the project, Sandberg met with several directors. But it felt like Chung had the closest connection to the subject.
“Isaac is from this area and the characters are the type of people he grew up with,” she says. “The authenticity he brings to the project is really important because once we got to Oklahoma and saw the plains, we knew it was the only place that made sense to film Twisters.”
It also helps that Chung studied ecology in high school and majored in it at Yale University.
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Twisters doesn’t just make sense now because of Chung’s experience: It also reflects the state of the world. The U.S. had its second-most tornadic month this past April, with 300 recorded storms.
“I decided that we should film this in Oklahoma instead of on stage somewhere else. One of the trade-offs that I agreed to was that we had fewer production days in exchange that we film during tornado season,” Chung says. “That ended up being quite a challenge, maybe a bigger challenge than I was originally expecting, but we made it through and we got some incredible footage as a result of being on the ground during that time of year.”
A team from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration advised Chung and Sandberg on storms throughout production to keep the crew safe.
“We planned our days based on what the forecast was showing and had to shut down production once because there was a tornado coming,” says Sandberg. “Every time the sky looked just perfect to shoot, we would say, ‘Oh no,’ because that meant a storm or lightning was coming.”
Chung and Sandberg estimate that 75% of Twisters was shot outside.
The production built a big set at a motel near Oklahoma City, expanding the existing buildings into a U-shape with new but temporary additions.
“We were able to destroy the segments that we built so it really felt like a storm had passed through the motel,” says Chung. “We were also able to build a swimming pool and a rodeo from scratch in a field across the street.”
The remaining production took place at Prairie Surf Studios in downtown Oklahoma City.
MovieMaker toured Prairie Surf’s 1.3-million-square-foot facility during the production of Twisters last June while attending the deadCENTER Film Festival. The studio was converted from an old convention center, and it’s truly awe-inspiring.
“We had some massive set pieces that used rigs and ropes to yank stunt players into tornadoes,” Sandberg says. “We weren’t always able to do that out on real locations, so sometimes we’d use Prairie Surf for it. They have really good high ceilings and we were able to rig that place up for the difficult stunts that we needed to do.”
Sometimes executive producers, like Sandberg, aren’t closely involved in the production. But she was.
“There was this level of camaraderie on Twisters because we wanted to champion and support Isaac in this new kind of filmmaking opportunity for him,” she says.
Twisters arrives in theaters July 19, from Universal Pictures.
Main image: Daisy Edgar-Jones, Glen Powell and Lee Issac Chung on the set of Twisters. Universal