AN UNLIKELY DIRECTOR AND A SEARINGLY HOT CAST UNITE TO PUT A FRESH SPIN ON ONE OF THE BIGGEST DISASTER MOVIES OF THE 90S. TOTAL FILM GOES STORM CHASING WITH LEE ISAAC CHUNG, GLEN POWELL, DAISY EDGAR-JONES AND ANTHONY RAMOS TO FIND OUT HOW TWISTERS IS HONOURING THE ORIGINAL WHILE FORGING ITS OWN PATH OF DESTRUCTION…
Growing up in the southern state of Arkansas, Lee Isaac Chung was familiar with tornadoes. ‘At school, that was always the drill that we had to practise: the tornado drill,’ he tells Total Film. One of his earliest memories is as a four-year-old, three weeks into living on the Arkansas farm in a trailer home, when his parents called out, ‘There’s a tornado coming.’
‘We didn’t have any storm shelter,’ recalls Chung. ‘So we were immediately looking for a place where we could hide it out.’ The family were unscathed, but it made a huge impression. It also meant that the 1996 blockbuster Twister resonated with the young Chung when he saw it at the cinema with his dad and sister. The opening scene in particular. ‘It was a family on a farm, and it’s night-time, and they had to run from a tornado... It was like, “Oh, I understand this feeling.”’
Filmmaker Chung is best known to date for Minari, the intimate, semi-autobiographical tale of a family of South Korean immigrants in 80s Arkansas. The 2020 film was Oscar-nominated in six categories (including Director and Original Screenplay for Chung, and Best Picture), and marked Chung out as a sensitive storyteller to watch. But it didn’t particularly feel like a calling card for a natural-disaster blockbuster. Still, when Twisters – a new chapter rather than a direct sequel – spun his way, his interest was immediately piqued.
‘I felt like I knew this film, and what I wanted to do in particular with it,’ he says. ‘I wanted to make it even more regional than the first one, because it’s an area where I grew up. [Twister director] Jan de Bont’s film is incredible, and I just felt like I could really lean in even further with the area, and what I know about that place, and the people there. It takes place in Oklahoma. I grew up right on the Oklahoma border.’
That level of specificity is just one facet of Twisters that separates it from the blockbuster pack this year….
CUTTING TO THE CHASE
In the summer of 96, Twister was also a breath (or F5-rated blast) of fresh air. An old-fashioned disaster movie powered by emerging VFX tech and modern pacing, it grossed $495m at the box office, the second biggest hit of the year (behind another disaster epic, Independence Day).
It also featured a surprisingly eclectic line-up of storm-chasers, headed up by Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt as Bill and Jo. The adrenaline-fuelled
