‘Twisters’ | Anatomy of a Scene

My name is Lee Isaac Chung and I am the director of “Twisters.” So this is a scene that happens about halfway through the film. Internally, we would always say this is T4, tornado number four, because we number each of our tornadoes. And Kate is played by Daisy Edgar-Jones. And then we have Tyler played by Glen Powell. Other interesting actors in this sequence, we have James Paxton, who is actually the son of Bill Paxton. You only see him very briefly. He’s the man in the couple who try to drive away from this tornado. No! Stop! And Lily Smith, who is the daughter of our writer Mark L. Smith. And then we have Samantha Ireland, Aila Grey, who’s the little girl. And we also had Jeff Swearingen, who plays the hapless desk clerk. I really wanted to film a night tornado because growing up around tornado alley, the night tornadoes were always the most frightening. Really, the intent of doing this was to create that feeling, that subjective feeling of what it’s like to experience a tornado in real time. We had Scott Fisher, who was our special effects person, who rigged a lot of interesting things to happen within this scene after we saw that Coke machine fall and I saw that top shell loose. We rigged that top shell to fly off into the wind. Jeff Swearingen was game to be rigged up, to be pulled back to the back of the pool. And then after he’s yanked back, that’s where we changed Jeff out with this wonderful stunt performer who we rigged up to really be pulled up into the air. I think he went up about 60 feet. And then this trailer, we slammed it against the edge of the pool. We had lots of debris falling as a result. And this was a little bit scary to film because when that trailer falls on these actors, it’s loud, it’s very loud. And I felt the actors were really great sports doing this. We were keeping them safe, of course, Because we were filming a sequence in which the background is intact, and then later when they come out of this swimming pool, everything is destroyed, we needed to destroy the set. So any time we’re filming inside of this swimming pool, there were people outside, our crew, who were destroying the set. So that was going on in the same time that we were filming all of this stuff within the pool. The swimming pool had actually never been there. We had found this motel in which there were three separate structures within the motel. And what we did was we built out the hotel into a horseshoe shape and built an office so that later we could destroy those parts of our set to make it feel like a tornado really ripped through a horseshoe motel. When we were walking out with these guys, with the crane, this was really a beautiful shot. I give so much credit to Geoff Haley, our incredible camera operator, for all of the technical expertise he did in this entire sequence to make sure our camera is level and that all of these moments somehow work in this seamless way.