‘Twisters’ | Anatomy of a Scene

My name is Lee Isaac Chung and I’m the director of “Twisters.” This is a scene that happens about halfway through the film. Internally, we would always say that 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 are James Paxton, who is actually Bill Paxton’s son. You only see him briefly. He’s the guy in the couple that’s trying 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 nighttime tornado because growing up near tornado alley, the nighttime tornadoes were always the most terrifying. The idea was really to create that feeling, that subjective feeling of what it’s like to experience a tornado in real time. We had Scott Fisher, our special effects guy, who set up a lot of interesting stuff that happened in this scene after we saw that Coca-Cola machine fall and I saw that top casing come off. We rigged that top casing so that it flew into the wind. Jeff Swearingen wanted to be rigged, to be pulled back to the back of the pool. And when he was pulled back, we replaced Jeff with this amazing stuntman who we rigged to actually be pulled up into the air. I think he went up about 60 feet. And then we threw this trailer against the side of the pool. And that sent a bunch of debris crashing down. And that was a little scary to film because when that trailer falls on those actors, it’s loud, really loud. And I thought the actors were really great athletes doing that. We kept them safe, of course, because we filmed a sequence where the background was intact, and then later when they come out of this pool, everything is destroyed, we had to destroy the set. So every time we filmed in this pool, there were people outside, our crew, destroying the set. So that was happening at the same time that we were filming all of this stuff in the pool. The pool had never actually been there. We had found this motel with three separate structures inside the motel. And what we did was we converted the hotel into a horseshoe shape and built an office, so that we could later destroy those parts of our set to make it feel like a tornado had actually gone through a horseshoe motel. When we walked out with these guys, with the crane, it was a really beautiful shot. I give so much credit to Geoff Haley, our incredible cinematographer, for all the technical expertise he had in this whole sequence to make sure that our camera was level and that all of these moments somehow worked seamlessly.