“Twisters” director Lee Isaac Chung’s first introduction to twisters was through a real life encounter with a tornado in Arkansas — a traumatic experience that drew him to the original film.
In an interview with Vanity Fair, the director said that just a few weeks after his Korean American family moved to a trailer on a farm in Arkansas, news broke that a tornado was coming. Chung remembers his father telling his family, “We’re going to climb down to this low part of the ground and hide out” if the tornado comes.
Chung said his family, having only recently moved to the United States, didn’t know what to do. “I remember that being quite a traumatic experience,” he told Vanity Fair.
Yet, when the original “Twister” came out in theaters when Chung was 17, he thought that the movie would fall short of the tense trailers advertising the movies. “I remember thinking, when I saw that, That’s not going to be an interesting movie,” Chung told Vanity Fair. “When you see a tornado, where I grew up, you just run from it.”
When Chung saw the 1996 film, however, he immediately connected with the story and landscape. The Midwestern scenes and his memories of tornadoes drew Chung to direct the movie “Twisters.”
“The original ‘Twister,’ when it came out, it meant a great deal to me because I was watching a film that took place around where I grew up,” Chung said in an interview with NBC Inside. “I grew up on a farm, just outside of Westville, Oklahoma, and that terrain, that landscape, is a part of me.”
The movie was produced by Universal Studios, which like NBC News, is part of NBCUniversal, a Comcast company.
Chung told Vanity Fair that he had “an instant connection” with the 1996 film. “I remember telling my parents, ‘That reminded me so much of when we were running from that night tornado,’” Chung said. His connection to the landscape led Chung to insist that the movie be filmed in Oklahoma, instead of in Atlanta.
“Twisters,” the disaster epic sequel to “Twister,” made $80.5 million upon its debut.
“It’s perfect summer entertainment,” David A. Gross, who runs the movie consulting firm Franchise Entertainment Research, told Variety. “This is essentially the same havoc we saw the first time, but it’s 28 years later, and the spectacle, the special effects and the set pieces are bigger and better.”
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