Later this month, audiences will ride the stormy summer blockbuster season through the offering that is Lee Isaac Chung’s Twisters , a reimagining/reinterpretation of the classic 1996 thriller, helmed by Jan de Bont. The new Twisters already is getting positive reactions , including a vote of confidence from the unofficial King of Blockbusters, Tom Cruise . Imagine the irony, then, if Cruise were to learn the full story behind his one-time Eyes Wide Shut collaborator Stanley Kubrick supporting Jan de Bont on the original Twister, allowing him to use a clip from The Shining during a pivotal scene in the original film? Behind-the-scenes stories like this are the best.
Jan de Bont was coming off of Speed , and looking for his next high-profile adventure. He found it in Twister , a movie about professional storm chasers who increasingly encounter more dangerous tornadoes over the course of the film. De Bont, from the very beginning, knew that he wanted to associate one of the bigger twisters – visually – with Stanley Kubrick ’s horror masterpiece, The Shining .
And while appearing on CinemaBlend’s official ReelBlend podcast, De Bont told the cool story about how the movie was included in his film. You can see a clip of The Shining during this scene from Twister , when a massive tornado rips apart a drive-in movie theater: Whenever a clip from an existing movie appears in a new movie, you know that permission had to be granted. So I asked Jan de Bont what it took to get .