As a young man, Twisters director Lee Isaac Chung was sure that Twister, his movie’s precursor, was going to flop. The 1996 tornado epic was teased with tense footage from the POV of a driver, ending with a windshield smashed by a flying tractor tire. “I remember thinking, when I saw that, That’s not going to be an interesting movie,” Chung says. “When you see a tornado, where I grew up, you just run from it.”
Chung came by his skepticism honestly. Like the characters in his Oscar-nominated 2020 film, Minari, Chung’s Korean American family moved to Arkansas when he was a young child. A few weeks after the family moved into a trailer on the grounds of a farm, they got word that a tornado was approaching. “We didn’t know what we were supposed to do,” Chung says. His father drove the family to a low-lying area and said, “We’re going to climb down to this low part of the ground and hide out of the tornado comes,” the director remembers. “I remember that being quite a traumatic experience.”
When he went to see Twister in theaters at the age of 17, its opening scene—in which a family attempts to evade a tornado—brought it all back. “I remember telling my parents, ‘That reminded me so much of when we were running from that night tornado,’” Chung says. “It was an instant connection.”
Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton in Twister, 1996.© Warner Bros/Everett Collection
His childhood roots came into play even before Chung accepted the job of directing Twisters. The film is set in Oklahoma, which “is really one of the big, key factors of why I wanted to make this movie,” Chung says. Minari was also set in that region. “I grew up right around there,” Chung says. “I could walk into Oklahoma where I lived in Arkansas…it’s just in the bones.”
His commitment to place meant that when the studio encouraged Chung to film the movie in Atlanta, he pushed back. “I asked the studio, ‘Please let me shoot it in Oklahoma. I’ll do anything.’” By cutting some visual effects and shortening the project’s filming schedule, he was able to make it happen.
Making the movie in the actual place it was set brought important verisimilitude, and Chung’s background in the region amped that up further. “Some of our team, they hadn’t ever been, really, on a farm,” Chung says. So it was up to the farm boy turned director to make sure that little details, such as gloves and patterns of apparel wear, were accurate. “I don’t think we see it enough in cinema, that area, so it is something I wanted to get right,” he says.
Both Twisters and Minari are disaster movies, Chung adds. In Minari, the disaster has a far smaller scale: The produce-packed barn at the Yi family’s farm burns to the ground. That personal tragedy “expressed something so visceral and unexplainable, mysterious, and it did the job of really transforming these characters. And I wondered, What would it be like to make an entire movie where that is happening over and over again?”
When he got the script for Twisters, Chung realized the tornados could take the place of Minari’s blaze. “I could really use those as a way to tell a story about people,” he says.