AP – Growing up in the Midwest, filmmaker Lee Isaac Chung developed both a healthy fear of tornadoes and a reverence for Jan de Bont’s 1996 disaster film Twister. He saw the movie in the theatre with his family when he was a teenager. “I remember thinking, ‘I didn’t know you could chase after these things,’” Chung said.
“That, to me, was very mind-blowing.” These were forces of nature he and his schoolmates in rural Arkansas, near the Oklahoma border, were being taught how to safely hide from. And here’s Helen Hunt, Bill Paxton, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Alan Ruck driving towards them.
Intentionally. When he was hired to direct Twisters, storming theatres on July 19, he knew one thing was non-negotiable: They needed to shoot in Oklahoma, not on soundstages. “I told everyone this is something that we have to do.
We can’t just have blue screens,” Chung said. “We’ve got to be out there on the roads with our pickup trucks and in the green environments where this story actually takes place.” There would be sacrifices that would have to be made, cutting the number of shooting days to make the budget work, but it was important.
Twister might have been a major blockbuster, the second-highest grossing film of 1996 behind Independence Day, but for Chung it always seemed like a local film done in his backyard. He’d also filmed Minari there, his autobiographical family film that got six Oscar nominations, including best picture and director. While most .