Twisters director reveals risks of "stupidly" filming in tornado season
Lee Isaac Chung explains to RadioTimes.com that the set of the disaster film was frequently destroyed by storms.
Almost 30 years after the original film became a box office smash, new disaster thriller Twisters is arriving to blow away cinema audiences this week.
The film, which is billed as "a standalone sequel" and is largely separate from the 1996 movie, stars Glen Powell, Daisy Edgar-Jones and Anthony Ramos as a new group of storm-chasers caught up in an extreme storm season – and it sounds like the experience of filming was rather an immersive one for the cast and crew.
That's because director Lee Isaac Chung – who previously made the Oscar-nominated family drama Minari – made the decision to shoot the film at the height of tornado season, which came with a few more challenges that he'd bargained for.
“I think, stupidly, it came with more risk than I was expecting," he explained during an exclusive interview with RadioTimes.com. "I had this great idea, let's film during tornado season, because I want good skies. That's what I said.
"And then when we're filming, we were getting shut down... maybe every three days or so, something would shut us down. And we'd be filming half days as a result of storms just coming through, destroying our sets sometimes. So that was a huge challenge."
But he added that despite these drawbacks, there were certainly positives about shooting in such extreme conditions – even if he isn't sure he'd make the same decision again today.
"It really filled us with this feeling of what it's like to be storm chasers," he said. "All the actors, I think, really felt the texture of reality and so in some ways, it was nice that we did it. [But] I don't know if I would do it again. It was a crazy decision."
Asked if there was one scene in particular that presented a major challenge, Chung picked out the "entire ending" of the film.
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"I really tried to up to scale with everything that was happening in the ending, all of that was just logistically pretty crazy," he said.
"And then we'd have tornadoes and storms coming through while we were filming. So that would shut us down, it would destroy our sets and stuff. And yeah, I can't believe we did it, we pulled it off, that sequence."
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Twisters is released in UK cinemas on Wednesday 17th July 2024.
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Authors
Patrick Cremona is the Senior Film Writer at Radio Times, and looks after all the latest film releases both in cinemas and on streaming. He has been with the website since October 2019, and in that time has interviewed a host of big name stars and reviewed a diverse range of movies.
