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To borrow a bit of social-media parlance, “Twisters,” the new disaster movie from the director Lee Isaac Chung, understands the assignment. The movie, which is set in Oklahoma during peak storm season, does not skimp on the spectacle of annihilation. When a tornado blows into view, people race—too late—to get out of its path, only to be carried away by winds that can surpass two hundred miles per hour. Buildings are ripped apart, like Lego structures under a toddler’s onslaught. A car bearing two unlucky (if not terribly sympathetic) passengers gets sucked up into the sky. We don’t see their fate, but we can assume they’re toast—or, rather, funnel cake. It’s all suitably jaw-dropping; for many, it may also induce a certain nostalgia. It was exactly twenty-eight summers ago that Jan de Bont’s “Twister” (1996), starring Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton as intrepid meteorologists trying to figure out tornadoes from the inside, laid waste to the box office. The reviews were middling at the time, but the movie was, and still is, close to critic-proof, and it long ago ascended to a position of pop-cultural permanence. Even the mockery that people still hurl in its direction feels like a variant of love.
“Twisters,” which opens in theatres July 19th, is counting heavily on that love, although the film isn’t a direct sequel. There is almost no narrative overlap; rather, the continuity is in the ideas and the science. Once again, the focus is on a few daredevil data collectors, or storm chasers, now working with high-tech new iterations of the first “Twister” ’s tornado-tracking technology. Daisy Edgar-Jones stars as Kate, a former chaser who is coaxed out of retirement by an old friend and colleague, Javi (Anthony Ramos), as an outbreak of tornadoes bears down on Oklahoma. There she proceeds to ignite verbal and romantic sparks with Tyler (Glen Powell), a cocksure social-media influencer who peddles a line of T-shirts that read “NOT MY FIRST TORNADEO.” Maybe not yours, either, but “Twisters” is determined to make the old feel new again.
A summer blockbuster might seem like an unusual choice for Chung, a director who came up under the spell of art-film auteurs like Abbas Kiarostami and Hou Hsiao-hsien. Chung began his filmmaking career with “Munyurangabo,” a sombre drama set in post-genocide Rwanda. It premièred, to much acclaim, at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival, but his next two features, the spare and poetic “Lucky Life” (2010) and “Abigail Harm” (2012), drew scanter attention. He was nearly ready to give up on filmmaking when, in a burst of personal inspiration, he wrote and directed “Minari,” an intimate family drama rooted in his history as a son of Korean immigrants, growing up in rural Arkansas. The movie became a critical sensation; it won the top prize at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival, and the Korean actress Yuh-jung Youn, who plays a character inspired by Chung’s grandmother, won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress. It also received several Oscar nominations, including for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Original Screenplay, and planted Chung firmly on the Hollywood map.
Chung, who is forty-five and goes by Isaac, met me for coffee in Pasadena just a day after wrapping color correction on “Twisters.” His sense of relief at having finished the film was palpable. Before I asked him a single question, though, he had one for me: “Are we allowed to do this?” I had asked myself something similar, since the two of us have been friends since 2010. Allowed or not, we have done it. In our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed the curious humanity-versus-nature parallels between “Minari” and “Twisters,” the challenges and rewards of working on a big-budget canvas, and what a movie in which Glen Powell shoots firecrackers up a tornado’s ass has to say about spirituality, the environment, the fate of humanity, and the future of cinema.
Isaac, what’s your life like right now?
I’m just trying to get back to a normal life. I’ve been in “Twisters” land for about a year and a half, and it was a lot more all-encompassing than I thought it would be.
Filmmaking is always all-encompassing, but directing “Twisters” is obviously a different thing from directing “Minari.”
I was able to do “Minari” really quickly. There were no delays. I had a very small team. With this one, the machine is so big. I feel the weight of it a lot. I would see the Universal office buildings and think to myself, Oh, the choices I make today affect their livelihood. Those thoughts never crept in with independent movies, where you just hope that the movie gets out there. And even for the cinema itself, whether people are going to the theatres this summer or not—I feel that pressure, in a weird way.
I don’t want to get into spoilers, but there’s a tornado sequence in which a movie theatre figures significantly. I found it moving in ways that went beyond the story.
There’s a moment when the theatre screen gets ripped out by a tornado. When I read that in the script, that was honestly a moment where I said, “I’ve got to do this movie. I’ve got to do that scene and nail that scene.” On a metaphoric level, it contains so much.
I gasped when the screen ripped apart.
I had been thinking a lot about trying to make a movie that has more of a sense of awe in it. I think about just how little awe I have in my own daily life, because I’m so focussed on my little phone screen. And I had been wondering, How do I bring awe into the next thing that I make? The climactic fire in “Minari,” for me, was a scene that had that kind of awe, that makes the characters transcend whatever mental space they’re in. I tried to inject that into “Twisters” throughout—that feeling of, how do we get out of ourselves?
What was it like to film the theatre sequence?
It was a really big logistical nightmare. When our location scouts were looking for that town, the key thing I was looking for was a good movie theatre. I really loved the one that we saw in El Reno, Oklahoma, and that street looked like an old Western sort of street as well, which was a big aspect of the story for me; I wanted it to feel like a Western at the end. We actually rebuilt that theatre inside a stage and tried to improve upon it, using some vintage seats from a Colorado movie theatre that had just closed. That was an interesting element, the fact that a theatre had died in Colorado and we were using those seats and showing a scene where a theatre is basically under threat.
That sequence was all hands on deck. We had so many special and visual effects, and the actors had to be on board with what we were doing. What kept me going—and this is a random thing that maybe you would understand—is that my wife, Val, would keep bringing me bubble tea while we were filming that scene, every day. So I was always by my monitor, drinking bubble tea, during that season.
Bubble tea is life-sustaining.
This was a watermelon-slushy bubble tea that you would not expect to find in Oklahoma City, but it was there. It’s funny, even my daughter now is, like, “Can we go to Oklahoma City to get the bubble tea?”
Wow. It’s better there?
Yeah, somehow it was really good over there.
There’s a tense early scene in “Minari” that now plays like “Twisters” foreshadowing. It’s a dark and stormy night, there’s a tornado warning, and your parents have a huge fight. Did this really happen?
That scene definitely happened. It was a few weeks after we moved to Arkansas. My parents were having arguments about my dad’s decision to move us there, and then a tornado was in the area, and my mom was so pissed. I think, in retrospect, we were never really in danger. We found out that the tornado was maybe thirty miles away. But when we were there, we thought the threat was imminent. So my dad got us in a pickup truck and we drove to this ravine, where he felt that we could climb down and hide from the tornado if it came. So we were just hanging out there at two in the morning. I remember the radio was playing the news reports, and then I fell asleep. I think I was,like, five years old.
We found out, later, that you’re not supposed to get in your car during a tornado. It was also maybe not wise to be in a low place where we could have had flooding. But we didn’t know anything.
That is way crazier than what we actually see in “Minari.”
I filmed a scene where they get into the car, but it ended up being way too much. It fools you into thinking it’s going to be an action film.
When you were filming that scene, I gather you didn’t have any inkling that your next movie would be “Twisters.”
No, I had no idea. It is so weird how life works out that way. But when I pitched “Twisters” to the studio and Steven Spielberg, the executive producer, and the producer Frank Marshall, I showed them images from that scene and put it side by side with the first scene of Jan de Bont’s “Twister,” when the family runs from the tornado. I just told them, “This is my story, too.”
It worked.
It strangely did. And then Steven Spielberg has this similar story that you see in “The Fabelmans,” of his family running to a tornado. And that was from real life as well.
Random question: does it bother you how often people still mispronounce “Minari”? That they say “Mi-NAH-ree” instead of “MEE-nah-ree”?
I’ve started to say “Mi-NAH-ree,” too, depending on the context.
You’re Korean code-switching.
Yeah. Part of me dies.
During the past year or so, when “Twisters” has come up in conversation, it’s been funny to see people react with surprise when they realize, Oh, the “Minari” guy is directing this.
I do think, on an immediate level, people feel like, if you’re doing a sequel and it’s a blockbuster, then that’s just some kind of career move. But I didn’t think of it as that. That said, my twenty-year-old self might’ve been very skeptical or thought, There’s no way I would ever do a movie like this.
You became a cinephile around that age, when you were in college. Was there a single filmmaker who you would say opened your eyes to cinema?
It was Wong Kar-wai. First I watched “Chungking Express.” A friend was, like, “I think you’ll like this.” I was amazed. And then I think I watched “Happy Together” after that, and I thought that was incredible, and then “Days of Being Wild” and “In the Mood for Love,” which had just come out. So, I was already anticipating that one. Man, when that one came out, I was, like, This is pure art. And then, when I went to film school, I started watching Terrence Malick and Yasujirō Ozu.
I remember something a mutual friend of ours told me years ago. It was sometime after “Munyurangabo,” and you were having various industry meetings. Is it true that you talked pretty openly about wanting to direct art films?
Yeah. I did that at Creative Artists Agency. I have to say, I’m with C.A.A. now, so it’s come all the way around. But the agent laughed at me. I’m not going to name names. But, yeah, she laughed and called somebody else in and said, “This guy wants to make Terry Malick films,” and the guy was, like, “Really?” But I regretted that conversation, too. Maybe I was being a little bit snobby, when I told them my strong opinions about what cinema is. I think I was just thirty. I had just made one movie.
That got into the Cannes Film Festival! You had a right to your strong ideas.
Yeah, I guess so. I don’t know.
The opening shot of “Twisters” is Kate in a field, watching the skies. It’s entirely germane to the movie and the story, but it does have some Malick vibes—and, of course, now I would say it also has Isaac Chung vibes. It reminded me of “Minari” and even “Lucky Life.”
Oh, really? That’s cool. I don’t know if that was done at all consciously. In a moment like that, it’s just the stuff I love: people’s faces and a certain tenderness and vulnerability within that kind of space.
Faces even more than landscapes?
As much, or together. There’s something about that combination that really matters to me. But, yeah, I’m never trying to quote myself or think about my own style. Anytime I’ve done that, it’s turned out really bad. So I try not to do it.
Perspective matters a lot. I want to trust the way I look at people and situations. That in itself is something I can offer that no one else can. So, even in a movie like this, how do I look at this scene, and how do I present that to people? I hope to have a certain generous perspective on people when I’m telling stories. I hope to strip away my own ego.
You want to look at what’s in front of you, without imposing your own vision.
It’s not that I don’t have any opinions about things or about the way the world should be, but I just generally find that having a perspective that is more loving is the hardest thing of all. It’s hard to avoid self-aggrandizement, you know? I’m not saying this because I look at what other people have done and I don’t like it. I don’t like it when I’ve done it, myself.
“Minari” was often written about—reductively, I think—as this quintessential movie about the Asian American experience. Was it refreshing to make a movie that had nothing to do with the Asian American experience?
You know what our friend Douglas Seok, an associate producer on the movie, said? He’s, like, “Everyone will love it, except maybe certain Asian Americans.” [Laughs.] I don’t know if it’s disappointing to people. It wasn’t a conscious thing, that I wanted to not do something Asian American. But, at the same time, after “Minari,” I didn’t like that many of the things I was getting, script-wise, were, oh, there’s a character who happens to be Korean—as though that is the only justification for having me as the director of a project. What I liked about this one was that that didn’t play a role. It was just, we like the way that you look at characters.
I know you had some early qualms about telling your own story, in “Minari.” Did you have any qualms about doing “Twisters”?
I was really worried with the tone of this one. Tornadoes are a real fact of life and they’re destructive, and there are many ways that making a Hollywood movie about that can feel exploitative. And it’s also supposed to be campy. You can’t make a tornado movie and not let it be a little campy. I wasn’t sure if I could deliver on that.
I really like de Bont’s “Twister,” but the first thing people think about is the flying cow. There’s no flying cow in this one.
The VFX team put a cow in somewhere, on a flying object, for anyone who wants to go frame by frame. Because, yeah, everybody wants that cow.
So that was your way of getting the cow in without getting the cow in.
That was their way of getting the cow in, when I said absolutely not. I could tell that they had done it, and I just let it pass.
You had to applaud their ingenuity.
Exactly.
Were there other qualms?
There was the giant machinery of it all. I knew that would be a learning curve for me. With “Minari,” I could just craft it and perfect it. With “Twisters,” I knew it’d be a lot more expansive and I’d have less control. Honestly, I felt intimidated and afraid. But then that lit a fire within me to do it, because of that reason. I felt like, if I didn’t do it, I would always regret it. That’s something I put into the movie—that feeling of going into something that you’re scared of.
The road to “Twisters” was not a direct one. What projects were you considering after “Minari”?
I thought I would do an original love story, based on me and Val coming together, but that ended up feeling way too personal. It’s one thing to do a story like that when it’s the perspective of yourself as a little boy; it’s another to do one as part of this partnership. I just wasn’t getting anywhere with the script. And then I got attached to a live-action remake of the 2016 Japanese anime “Your Name.” It just ended up not working out for me, as a fit for that particular project. From there, I decided to learn how to do visual effects and to work on a show that I really loved. I asked Jon Favreau if I could do an episode of “The Mandalorian.”
That must have been good preparation for “Twisters.”
It was great preparation. That whole show is so full of cutting-edge VFX, and they work with the best. They work with Industrial Light & Magic, which worked on “Twisters” as well. And Jon gave me a lot of advice before I took this on. He really liked this project for me.
What was his best advice?
He told me he doesn’t want to see anybody’s version of this movie except mine. So he told me to just make it mine.
Was there any sense in which the process of making “Twisters” was similar to that of making your earlier films?
I give people a lot of chances to collaborate. I was surprised that I was allowed that opportunity with this one, to allow actors to improvise, write their own lines, and come up with their own scenes. I didn’t think the studio would be as generous about that, but they were. So that was really great, to be able to play in the same way that I did with those earlier movies, with actors like Daisy, Glen, and Tony Ramos.
I feel like the tendency, in a movie like this, would be to regard the characters as disposable cyclone fodder. But even in the original “Twister” the character dynamics are really winning and memorable.
They wanted to make Howard Hawks’s “His Girl Friday.” They were trying to do “His Girl Friday” within the disaster film.
It’s what the philosopher Stanley Cavell called the comedy of remarriage.
“It Happened One Night” was my model. And I had Hawks as a model, too, for sure. I was thinking a lot about his movie “The Big Sky.”
In both “Twister” and “Twisters,” the characters take time to help those whose homes have been ravaged by tornadoes. The emphasis on service may be even greater in your film.
I wanted it to feel like a story about a character who has to come home and try to do something to save others. She needs to awaken to a cause. It’s a good story to tell right now.
At the beginning of “Twisters,” Kate experiences profound loss. The way you film that is terrifying.
Daisy was so incredible. She’s a great actress. She wrote me a letter early on in the casting process, and she was the only one to do that. I think she related to what I was doing in my own work. We had both had intimate projects come out during the pandemic, and now we wanted to make something that went more into genre. One of the things we talked about was, how do we get people invested in her character without her feeling so down and dour the whole time? She cannot just be sad the whole movie. And that was a subtlety that Daisy keyed in on. She was able to reveal to the audience this side of Kate that she’s lost, and that Glen’s character, Tyler, is really helping to draw back out of her.
At one point, she has this line about her passion for storm research: “It was a stupid dream I had as a kid.” I really love that line, and that’s something Daisy came up with. In a way, the movie is her reclaiming who she was as a kid. There were elements there of the comedy of remarriage, which Cavell talks about. There’s a passage that I really respond to in Cavell’s book, where he says that knowing each other as kids, and having a sense of play, is such an important aspect of falling in love. So there’s a lot of that in the story, the way Tyler is able to bring Kate out and let her be herself.
I’ve been waiting for Glen Powell’s star to blow up since Richard Linklater’s “Everybody Wants Some!!” (2016), and he’s now clearly having a moment with another Linklater movie, “Hit Man.” His role in “Twisters” really does feel like a classic leading-man showcase, full of rascally charm.
He was so fun to work with. He’s very down-to-earth—he says hi to everybody. He kind of is who he presents himself to be in public. He and Daisy are similar in being really good at shaping their character arcs and stories. Those two together made the set such a pleasant place to be, and that’s a very big part of film-production culture. If the two leads are like that, then it just changes the whole culture of the set.
There’s an angularity to the dynamic between Kate, Tyler, and Anthony Ramos’s character, Javi, who pulls Kate back to storm chasing.
Tony’s incredibly creative. Javi was written as someone else, a local from Oklahoma, but I just really wanted to work with Tony. And Steven Spielberg was on board, because he was a fan of Tony’s as well. He said, “You should let Tony just have whatever accent he wants. He doesn’t have to emulate an Oklahoma accent. Figure it out.” And so I asked Tony to come up with his own name and his own story.
Funnily enough, on Tony’s first day, there was a tornado that hit a town fifteen miles south of us. We found out we were in lockdown, and so we just worked on the script. I didn’t know that he was kind of freaking out!
Life imitating art.
That year, there was a classic tornado outbreak that mirrored what we were filming. I think, during the heart of the storm season, there were only two days with no tornadoes that year. It was weird when we filmed the El Reno scene. We built a farmers’ market. The day we arrived, we had eighty-mile-an-hour winds come through, and they just destroyed the set. And we just had stuff like that happen over and over again. I mean, it makes sense, because we were making a movie during storm season. And it was kind of good to go through it as well. It changed our schedule a lot; we had so many delays. It was nuts.
There’s a great deal of tornado science in the movie, and it really builds on the first “Twister.” How realistic or accurate is any of it?
We had an adviser, Kevin Kelleher, who was the adviser on the original film, and he was formerly a deputy director of the National Severe Storms Laboratory. A lot of the science is based on stuff he was telling us, and then I’d have to figure out ways to dumb that down, because he goes very granular. And then my editor, Terilyn Shropshire, had to rein me in further. So we had these three levels, where it was Kevin, who lives in that world and just speaks that language, and then me trying to translate it, and then Teri trying to be the audience.
You’re speaking at the upcoming Hollywood Climate Summit about making “Twisters.” Did the movie change your thinking in any way, from an environmental perspective?
I wondered if the science behind climate change and tornadoes would be clear, but it isn’t. And I am speaking as someone who’s studied environmental policy and is quite an environmentalist. So I wondered, Is this film something that could really have a climate message? But I actually went a lot more measured with this movie than I expected to. And that was because the scientists were saying, We can’t make a clear connection between climate change and the number of tornadoes. Climate change has clearly changed the way tornadoes happen. There are more outbreaks now. It seems like they’re expanding eastward, to places where they are not prepared for tornadoes. So there is that element. But it’s not as simple as saying, “It’s now called ‘Twisters’ because of climate change.”
I hadn’t even thought about that. I thought it was just that convention of pluralizing a sequel title.
That wasn’t my decision, though.
Did you have a better title?
They’re all bad.
In the movie, Kate is figuring out how to not just track tornadoes but actually stop them. Watching the movie, I sort of wondered, Is that necessarily a good thing?
That’s the biggest thing I wrestled with, because, in general, I do believe in submitting to nature. That’s a big part of what I actually believe. But here’s one way that I wrap my mind around it: I generally am very sympathetic to Indigenous voices on the environment. And I did some research into this, and there are Indigenous practices in which they would have prayers or meditations or practices to stop a tornado. So I was kind of thinking about that as well, to let Kate go on more of a spiritual sort of journey.
There’s a moment where we see a kind of submission on Kate’s part. I don’t know if I’m just projecting because I know you, and because there is always spirituality in your movies, but it felt almost prayerful to me.
I’m very touched that you noticed that moment, to be honest. Throughout the movie, she holds on, and that’s how she survives. I wanted to show her holding on to things really tightly with her hands, and then ultimately show a release—that’s part of the journey, getting over her fear. I do give Teri a lot of credit, because she asked me to film that insert shot of her releasing her hands. She felt like that was really important. Teri is an incredible editor. She picks up on these things, and, to me, it might be the most personal moment in the film.
Speaking of holding on: throughout the movie, we see Tyler and other characters anchoring their cars into the ground with spikes and drills, to secure them when the tornado hits. Is that . . .
. . . really a thing? It’s really a thing. There’s a guy we hired to get our storm footage for us. He’s a storm chaser. His name is Sean Casey. He has a Subaru with spikes that go in two feet deep. He said that he has really good luck finding tornadoes when he’s driving the Subaru, and he had just decked his car out in a kind of plastic coating that doesn’t get chipped in hail. And it’s a real thing, if you see some of these vehicles out there. They’re pretty crazy. There’s a whole subculture of this, by the way. Have you watched any YouTube videos of it? It’s, like, the most mesmerizing YouTube thing. There’s a whole genre of videos of people inside tornadoes.
We see some of that in the film. Tyler’s whole persona and business are inspired by that.
Yeah. And these guys, they’re celebrities. Some of these guys have a million followers. I had no idea all that existed until I was doing research for this movie.
There is enormous pressure on “Twisters” to do well, especially in light of recent studio movies, like “The Fall Guy” and “Furiosa,” that were perceived as box-office disappointments.
I do profoundly believe in theatrical moviegoing and what that experience offers to people. And I love what a lot of filmmakers are doing with the big screen—people like James Cameron, Denis Villeneuve, Greta Gerwig, and Christopher Nolan, the types of experiences that they’ve been able to offer audiences. And I do feel very bad for these incredible films this year that have not done as well at the box office. I’ve heard a lot of opinions of why that’s happened, but I think it’s so easy to make those comments in retrospect.
And sometimes premature.
I do think it is on us as filmmakers to really show why that big-screen experience is an important experience. When I watched “Dune: Part Two” this year, with the sandworm scene, there was just something about that that made me want to stand up. That moment was so incredible, cinematically, and it would just never play as well on a smaller screen. And I’m interested in that. I’m interested in, what is that thing? Why is that so cinematically powerful and transcendent? I’d love to be chasing that. ♦
Sourse: newyorker.com
