Before he made his previous film, Minari, director Lee Isaac Chung was considering quitting filmmaking altogether and taking up a college teaching position.
Fortunately for us, that didn’t go to plan, with the personal drama bagging several Oscar nominations – including Best Picture, Director, and Actor for Steven Yeun – giving him the career boost he was hoping for. Making a sequel to Twister, then, was not the move I imagine anybody who saw that movie would assume he’d take next.
“I wasn’t thinking too much about my career when I said yes to this”, he told Zavvi. “What I wanted after Minari was to figure out the kind of movie I’d find most inspiring and challenging to make and skip straight to confronting it, facing up to the genre which scared me the most as a filmmaker.
“That was a big action movie – I didn’t want to just make this because I wanted to make one, but because it felt like it would be the challenge I needed in life.”
Perhaps the most pleasant surprise of Twisters is that it feels equally like the product of a director who has mastered intimate character dramas, and one who has made nothing but $200 million blockbusters with gigantic action set pieces for his whole life. To be able to perfect this, Chung essentially went back to the drawing board, forgetting everything he ever learnt and learning how to direct again from scratch.
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“There are seven big, action-driven set pieces in the movie, which is obviously new territory – it’s a completely new way of working for me to think about the structure of a film in terms of those, rather than the character beats, or the turning points of a three-act structure. I essentially had to learn how to formulate the way I tell stories all over again, it was like going back to film school!
“I found myself watching a lot of older Bond movies, as well as Tony Scott and Spielberg movies, to try and figure out the ways they use action in a way that continually develops characters and keeps pushing the story forward, all whilst keeping the set pieces varied. It was great to learn that stuff, but I still feel like I’ve got a lot more to learn.
“I don’t feel like I’ve mastered the blockbuster, and my favourite part of this was being able to create massive moments for an audience that must be seen in a movie theater. That’s the experience I’m chasing again, making people come up close and personal with something that huge in scale, and I’m hoping I can get another chance to grow and develop my skills”.
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It’s a humble response befitting a director who never lets his characters get lost beneath the Earth-shattering spectacle. Although it doesn’t have any direct connections to Twister, it does aim to go bigger than the original, opening with a tragedy that has played on the mind of meteorologist Kate Cooper (Daisy Edgar-Jones) for five years as her prototype tornado-taming equipment malfunctions in the heat of the moment.
After her old friend Javi (Anthony Ramos) reappears with his own device to track tornadoes, she’s persuaded to join him and his team on a trip to Oklahoma at the start of a particularly violent storm season. It’s here where she crosses paths with YouTuber Tyler Owens (Glen Powell), a wannabe cowboy who has become a niche internet celebrity due to his livestreams where he performs Jackass-level stunts in the eye of tornadoes.
The rural setting of the drama is one of the most important factors for Chung, who grew up in Arkansas. The original movie was a favourite of his as a teenager precisely because it was set in the small towns you rarely see in blockbusters of this size.
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“I grew up on 90s action blockbusters, but Twister in particular was really important because it was set right outside where I grew up. I was also, unfortunately, very familiar with tornadoes as well, so when it came out it was a huge deal for me and my friends.
“I didn’t even realise until I went to college that the movie was huge everywhere else. I just thought it was this cult thing people only watched in Arkansas!”
This leads us to the surprise connective tissue between Minari and Twisters, as with both films, he had one specific audience in mind: the friends he grew up with.
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“I wanted to make a film that I hoped would resonate with everybody but fill it with the things that bring me joy, which I’d always hoped to see in movies growing up in small, ryral towns. A lot of creative decisions were made with my friends back home in mind, thinking what they’d have found great, many of which were things you’d never normally see in a movie of this size.
“One small thing was that I always wished a blockbuster summer movie would have a whole country music soundtrack. Thinking back to myself as a high schooler, I would have found that great, and it wasn’t something I’d ever seen done before.”
Although it’s being billed as a legacy sequel, Twisters doesn’t have any direct ties to the 1996 movie (unless you count the tornado as a returning character, that is). But as that movie was the second-highest grossing film of its year at the global box office, naturally there has been talk of making a Twister II for years – original star Helen Hunt even pitched an idea as recently as 2020, but Universal rejected it.
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Chung said: “When I came on board, it was with this screenplay by Mark L. Smith, it was always completely new. And that was a surprise to me, as I assumed nothing was in the works at all, let alone that there was a parallel discussion happening with Helen Hunt.
“I remember when Bill Paxton died, and how heartbreaking that was – it made me assume that nothing would ever be in the works again without him. It was a shock signing on and discovering that so many different attempts at making a sequel were in the works and had been for years by that point!”
So, where does Chung go next after making the unlikely leap to blockbuster auteur? Well, the answer also lies in his pre-filmmaking days, as before he went to film school, he studied ecology – and he was surprised that his knowledge of the environment played such a big part in why he chose this over other projects.
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“There were a few scripts I was considering directing before Twisters, and a lot of them had some kind of ecological element. It wasn’t a conscious decision to choose a movie because of that, but I later realised my interest in the environment is a big factor in choosing a project.
“I’ve always wanted to tell stories in which the Earth plays a big part, where its fate is linked directly to us as human beings. That’s something I found in Twisters, and it continues to be something that really inspires me.”
Expect disaster movie thrills when you see Twisters, then – but also expect a lot more food for thought than you bargained for. Who would have expected a sequel to such a silly movie could become the thinking man’s top choice this summer blockbuster season?
Twisters is released in UK cinemas on Wednesday, 17th July.
