Twisters and 5 other man-versus-nature nail biters

In 2021, writer-director Lee Isaac Chung won six Oscars, including the coveted Best Picture and Best Director awards, for Minari, a story based on his own experiences growing up on a farm in the South Western United States as the child of Korean immigrants. Then, in 2024, Isaac returned to familiar territory to film tornado disaster movie Twisters in Oklahoma. In fact, he pitched for the job by showing co-producers Frank Marshall, Steven Spielberg and Jay Sandberg a presentation that combined footage of the original 1996 movie Twister, with a scene from Minari in which his characters wait out a tornado watch.

When Lee Isaac read Joseph Kosinski and Mark L Smith’s Twisters script, he also immediately recognised Glen Powell’s “cowboy” storm chaser character Tyler – whose life’s ambition is to light up a tornado from the inside by shooting firecrackers into it. “It cracked me up so much. It reminded me of the stupid stuff me and my friends would dream of doing where I grew up in Arkansas,” Lee Isaac admits. “I don’t know if it’s because I have a hillbilly streak or if it’s the filmmaker in me, but all I knew after reading that scene was that I wanted to film it … and the people back home would laugh when they saw it.”

While Tyler represents the hillbilly side of storm chasing, the science side is handled by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) meteorologist and storm tracker, Kate Carter (Daisy Edgar-Jones), whose friend Javi (Anthony Ramos) invites her to Oklahoma to test a new portable radar system during what will become a terrifying storm season, featuring at least six tornados, each of which was inspired by at least one real-life storm event. 

“With each sequence, the way in which people encounter the tornadoes is different. I wanted to depict different perspectives on tornadoes, from the scientific to the personal, and to show how they affect people’s lives in various ways,” explains Lee Isaac. To help him do so, the production team drew on original footage of supercell clouds and real tornadoes filmed for Twisters by its technical consultants, including professional storm-chaser Sean Casey, host of the Discovery Channel’s Storm Chasers. 

Twisters’ final tornado, the one that rips through El Reno, was inspired by three different tornadoes: a wedge-shaped tornado that rolled through Kansas in 2023, captured on film by Twisters’ storm chasers, a multi-vortex tornado that touched down in the real El Reno in 2013, and a tornado that struck Mayfield, Kentucky, in December of 2021. 

“There’s an eerie, heartbreaking photo that was taken from inside a movie theatre in Mayfield, showing how the tornado had destroyed the screen wall, revealing the wrecked town outside,” adds Lee Isaac. “It got me thinking about the value of an experience that asks us to look at things that are grander and bigger than ourselves … to engage the grandeur and terror of the natural world, and unify around the urgency of being caretakers of the Earth.”

Stream Twisters now.

13 lucky facts about Twisters

1. Production filmed during Oklahoma’s real-life storm season. Former military meteorologist Joel Martin oversaw a squad of radar monitors who kept tabs on weather conditions, while film safety experts, led by Lacie Mackey, devised shut-down protocols and set up escape and shelter routes for 300-400 cast and crew members. 
2. About 70% of the on-screen action captured required car stunt driving. Daisy Edgar-Jones joked, “There’s so much car-based action in the movie, I was always behind the wheel, doing some very speedy driving. I’m ready for a job in the next Fast & Furious movie because of Twisters.” 
3. Sean Casey’s custom-made “tornado intercept vehicles” inspired the armour and accessories of the film’s storm chasers, while Sean Waugh, a research scientist at NOAA’s National Severe Storms Laboratory, designed the weather-measuring instruments and radar displays for Twisters’ vehicles. 
4. Meteorologist and former NOAA analyst Kevin Kelleher (a technical advisor on both Twister and Twisters) set up a “weather boot camp” to teach the cast about tornadoes from meteorologists’ and storm chasers’ perspectives. 
5. Glen Powell was nine years old when his family was driving through Jarrell during the infamous F5 tornado that obliterated 30 homes and killed at least 27 people. His family took shelter in a carpet shop and helped locals with cleanup following the tragedy. The experience gave him insight into Tyler beyond being a “self-promoting adrenaline junkie.” Glen explains, “They have deep respect for the awesome power of tornadoes and care about the people affected by the destruction they cause. They’re a band of misfits that have grown into a family that works together and takes care of each other … and those they find on their way.”
6. Twisters production designer Patrick Sullivan was an art department intern on the 1996 film Twister. He admits he’s had to step up his game for Twisters. “Back in 1996, we just didn’t have the kind of footage and social media reference material to draw upon. But because of YouTube, we have it now. We had to meet the expectations of audiences for what tornado damage looks like.” 
7. To convincingly show how tornadoes tear buildings apart, Patrick had his team study building construction, explaining, “When you’re tearing apart a house or commercial building, exposing its guts and its innards, you have to build it and understand how a house really goes together, so you can determine how it comes apart.”
8. To build up their field of debris and tornado damage in Crystal Springs, the art department contacted local demolition and salvage companies to source wreckage from old houses, including broken timber, walls and roofing, furniture, appliances, and knick-knacks. “We also purchased three largely intact houses from a demolition company and artfully destroyed them so you could see into the interior and all the wreckage,” says Patrick.
9. Set decorator Missy Parker adds, “Each of the five houses dressed and destroyed required a different character and history. We shopped at local estate sales, as well as many small-town stores, to bring the story of each home to life … .We dressed more than four blocks of destruction and remains, revealing everything from the personal – family photos, holiday decorations, pet bowls – to the practical – exposed walls of homes, downed power lines – to the unbelievable, like cars in trees.”
10. For the final El Reno tornado scenes, production constructed a fully detailed farmer’s market, complete with foam and other soft material reproductions of produce that could be flung about by the wind machines without hurting the cast. But the day of shooting, a storm with 129 km/hour winds touched down and wrecked the set. Missy Parker reveals, “The storm carried away tents and mangled vendor stalls. Fake pies were rolling down the street, vegetables were flying in every direction.” 
11. One of Patrick Sullivan’s favourite projects was creating Kate’s teenaged model diorama of a tornado in an Oklahoma town, complete with fans that could create mini-twisters. “The props department built these amazing little houses and the special effects department fabricated the overhead fan unit that generated some vapour to become a mini cyclone that could be filmed with a camera,” he reveals. 
12. The hail pelting the cast in Twisters was made using polyacrylamide, a rubbery water-soluble polymer that doesn’t hurt as much as ice. But the hail pelting the vehicles was made of real ice. 
13. Visual effects studio Industrial Lights and Magic (ILM) used CGI to model complex and realistic CG weather simulations based on real events and observations, and combined these with the film’s practical effects. ILM’s official video here reveals how they combined the footage. 

Stream Twisters now.

5 natural disaster movies to get swept up in

1. Supercell (2023)

Quinn Brody (Anne Heche) is widowed when her storm chasing partner and husband Bill (Richard Gunn) ignores her warnings and is killed in a tornado, leaving her to raise their young son, William. Quinn takes housekeeping jobs to make ends meet, but William (Daniel Diemeer) grows up fascinated by storm chasing. As a teenager, he tracks down his mom and dad’s former chase partner, Roy Cameron (Skeet Ulrich), and convinces Roy to take him along on a work trip with Brody Storm Chase Tours, run by Zane Rogers (Alec Bladwin). And as Quinn sets off to find William, he and Roy take an old invention of Quinn and Bill’s out into a growing tornado in their old storm chasing car. 

Fun fact: Supercell features tornado footage shot by the famous YouTube Texas storm chaser Pecos Hank (Hank Schyma), who was one of the chasers on the ground for the 2013 El Reno, Oklahoma tornado (referenced in Twisters).

2. The Perfect Storm (2000)

Directed by Wolfgang Petersen, this disaster movie is based on the 1997 novel of the same name by journalist Sebastian Junger. It closely followed the real life story of the Andrea Gail, a fishing boat that was lost at sea without a trace in 1991 after it was caught in a super-storm with 30-metre high waves and 50-80-knot winds. George Clooney plays Captain Billy Tyne, with Mark Wahlberg as the least experienced member of the six-man crew, Bobby, and Michael Ironside as the owner of both the Andrea Gail and its rival boat, the Hannah Boden, captained by Linda Greenlaw (Mary Elizabeth Masterantonio). 

Fun fact: Storm scenes were shot in a six-metre deep water tank on a soundstage, using a full-scale replica of the Andrea Gail. The water tank was set up to allow the computerised wave maker to drench the Andrea Gail from any angle, using accumulator tanks mounted on forklifts, along with dump tanks.

3. Into the Storm (2014)

Directed by Final Destination 5’s Steven Quale, this “found footage” disaster movie centres on a team of tornado chasers, led by Pete Moore (Matt Walsh), who head for the (fictional) town of Silverton, Oklahoma, along with gung-ho amateur storm chasers, to capture a line of developing storms. While helping a local school’s vice-principal Gary Fuller (Richard Armitage) to rescue his son, Pete’s team find themselves surrounded by a group of tornadoes. A cameraman is swept up in the action while filming a fire-tornado, and one of the tornadoes develops into an F5, sending the storm chasers racing to evacuate Gary’s school. 

Fun fact: While effects artists used wind machines and lobbed real dust and water at the cast for tornado scenes, the larger debris was added in with CGI, as were the movements of trees and forests. The wind machines were no joke, though. Richard Armitage revealed that in one scene he was running full tilt, but the force from the wind machines was so intense that he wasn’t gaining ground at all.

4. Ice Road (2021)

Action thriller. After a diamond mine collapses, trapping surviving workers underground, a group of four ice road truckers commit to the dangerous mission of transporting vital earthmoving and rescue equipment over frozen lakes and iced-over roads to save them. Between terrifying conditions including pressure waves in the ice, sabotage, greed, bridge collapses and avalanches, the disasters just keep piling up as we chew down our nails to stumps. With Liam Neeson and Laurence Fishburne.

Fun fact: The cast and crew of Ice Road filmed in freezing conditions on real-life ice roads and a frozen lake in Winnipeg, Manitoba in Canada, where temperatures dropped to as low as -50°C during the shoot. 

5. Moonfall (2022)

In this sci-fi disaster movie directed by Roland Emmerich, conspiracy theorist KC Houseman (John Bradley), who believes that Earth’s Moon is really a moon-sized secret alien base, tries to warn NASA that the Moon has left its orbit and is on a collision course with the Earth. As NASA picks up their own signs about changes in the Earth’s orbit, KC sparks a global panic when he goes public with his recent findings. NASA head Jo Fowler (Halle Berry) comes up with a way to avoid the impending collision, using the retired Endeavour space shuttle, and disgraced Apollo 11 astronaut Brian Harper (Patrick Wilson). While NASA mounts its rescue operation, the Moon’s approach causes natural disasters from tsunamis to loss of the Earth’s atmosphere. 

Fun fact: A museum in Florida lent Moonfall an original Space Shuttle cockpit, while NASA shared real-life spacecraft data with the crew.