[Editor’s Note: The following contains minor spoilers for Twisters]

The Big Picture

During our advanced screening of
Twisters
, Collider’s Steve Weintraub spoke with director Lee Isaac Chung for an exclusive Q&A.
During the interview, Chung discusses how he landed the sequel as his first big-budget film and how his experience with
The Mandalorian
influenced the production.
The director also talks about working with Glen Powell and Daisy Edgar-Jones, the scenes that were almost cut, chasing real tornadoes, and feedback from Steven Spielberg.

If you’re here, you’ve seen the long-awaited Twisters, or you really like spoilers. Before this summertime blockbuster began its path of destruction (its box office climb) through theaters, Collider’s Steve Weintraub had the opportunity to moderate an exclusive Q&A with Oscar-nominated director Lee Isaac Chung at our early screening. The filmmaker shared his journey with us, from Academy Award-nominated indie movies like 2020’s Minari to helming a $20 million Hollywood movie starring Glen Powell and Daisy Edgar-Jones.

While there’s no direct connection to Jan de Bont’s Twister (1996)—aside from Dorothy in that devastating opening sequence—Twisters takes a spin in the same universe with all-new characters who share a dangerous passion for the eponymous forces of nature. Chung’s sequel, co-written by Mark L. Smith (The Revenant) and Top Gun: Maverick’s Joseph Kosinski, takes everything fans loved from the first film—a stellar cast, scientists who risk their lives for what they love, cheeky banter, and lots of killer tornadoes—and delivers a big-screen spectacle worthy of 2024 VFX.

Check out the full Q&A in the video above or in the transcript below to find out how Chung took over the director’s chair from Kosinski, what it was like working with ILM, and why Chung says this epic movie wouldn’t be possible without the Star Wars Universe. He talks about poetic thirst traps, the steamy chemistry between Powell and Edgar-Jones, what he learned from fellow filmmakers like Twisters executive producer Steven Spielberg and Jon Favreau, what feedback Tom Cruise had, and tons more.

Twisters An update to the 1996 film ‘Twister’, which centered on a pair of storm chasers who risk their lives in an attempt to test an experimental weather alert system.Release Date July 19, 2024 Writers Mark L. Smith , Joseph Kosinski , Michael Crichton , Anne-Marie Martin

Read Our ‘Twisters’ Review

COLLIDER: When did you realize that you didn’t crash the Ferrari?

LEE ISAAC CHUNG: I’m still wondering how this is gonna go. [Laughs]

I don’t think you have to worry. I really don’t.

CHUNG: I appreciate that. Thank you. We’ve been in this since the beginning of 2023 trying to meet this deadline, and it was such a hard deadline to try to meet. We had so many things derailing us in many ways, so just to get to this point, we’ve just been focused on this date. All along the way, we’ve been really proud and happy about what we’ve been doing. We’ve been loving the actors and each other, and we’ve been getting really into tornadoes. It’s just been this interesting adventure that all of us behind the scenes have been going on. Now, to finally launch it out, we’re just hoping that this summer people love this film and really appreciate it.

How ‘Minari’s Oscar-Nominated Director Landed ‘Twisters’
Image via Universal Pictures

Often I hear from people about how the studio sets a release date and then they’re like, “Oh, maybe we should come up with a script.” This is one of those times where you had the release date, but it all came together and worked. I think it’s also because this film was in development and people were working on it for a few years.

CHUNG: I know for a while Mark L. Smith and Joseph Kosinski had been working on this along with producers at Kennedy/Marshall. Joe had to step off the project to do F1, so it was fortunate for me to be able to jump onto this project. They wanted me to work a little bit with Mark on the script and go into production for a week, four months after I had gotten on board. So, that was all happening at the same time — casting, trying to finish the script, and trying to get the locations and all of those things.

When you got involved, how much did the script change while working with Mark from what they had to what ended up on screen?

CHUNG: The number that a lot of people were throwing around was that it’s 75% there. So, “Could you come in and try to do that 25%?” [Laughs] I don’t know if that math even works out. But it did feel like there were certain pockets that needed to be fleshed out. Mark is a brilliant writer.

Can you give an example?

CHUNG: We were still trying to work out the end of the movie quite a lot, and then just different elements of the characters and the way those character relationships resolve at the end. For me, it was a big thing to try to figure out a way to get Javi’s character and Tyler’s character to come together at the end, as well, so that it’s not just about Kate and these two individuals, but it’s really the three of them, and there’s a certain relationship and dynamic that changes.

Image via Universal Pictures

You have not made a movie on this scale with this kind of budget before. Was this something that you were looking to do?

CHUNG: After Minari, what a lot of people in the industry would tell me is, “Minari did alright, so maybe you can make a $20 million picture afterward.” [Laughs] Minari was under $2 million. I wasn’t after this. I wasn’t thinking, “This is the next thing. I gotta make this huge blockbuster thing.” There was always a dream to do something like this, and when this opportunity came up, I definitely raced into it, but I was never in the background trying to find that thing to jump onto that’s of this scale. It just happened to be that this one really lined up with something I felt I could execute and I believed in—fate, in some way.

I always feel like there’s an element of fate when it comes to a project. You could just kind of like it and think, “Oh, I can do this,” and maybe that will sustain you for a few months, but you have to really feel like there’s a deeper sense of yourself—fate—within the project to keep you in it for many years and then to love it after it’s done, and to be glad that you went through that life experience. It’s like getting married to this film or birthing a film. There’s really something a lot more long-term to it, so that’s the way I thought about it.

One of the key things is the department heads that you’re gonna hire for this film can really help you because they obviously have a skill set that you need when you’re making films on this scale. How did you figure out who you wanted your DP to be, your second unit director, and the key positions that will enable you to deliver a successful film?

CHUNG: That’s a great question. I definitely did want to surround myself with very key people who had done this before. I had done a couple of things with Lucasfilm—Mandalorian and Skeleton Crew—so I’d worked with some veterans on those projects. My assistant director, Dave Venghaus, was huge for me.

Then for the cinematographer, I wanted to shoot on 35 mm. I had kind of come up doing film, and then I did digital, and then I was trying to make the argument, “Let’s do film again.” I felt like there was a lot of resistance from the studio for that. As I was looking at DPs and talking to them, Dan Mindel was really someone who’s a champion of film and had done it on an epic scale and had always also delivered very VFX-heavy projects shot on film. At the beginning of the conversation, when I talked to Dan, I said, “I’m kind of thinking we’ll shoot on film,” and he said, “We have to.” He was the only person who was really adamant about that, and I knew I found a partner.

‘The Mandalorian’ and ‘Skeleton Crew’ Influenced ‘Twisters’
Image via Disney+

You mentioned your time at Lucasfilm on Mandalorian and Skeleton Crew. What did you learn using VFX over there and with the Volume that helped you with the VFX on this?

CHUNG: Those projects are very much virtual production. We were scouting with VFX goggles from our own bedrooms and beaming into shared spaces in the Star Wars Universe. We would basically be going to other worlds within our VR headsets and then recreating those worlds when we were doing production. Long story short, those were super VFX-heavy, so I kind of had to dive into a process in which almost everything is rebuilt virtually and digitally.

This movie was really a chance to go back to the way that I had learned how to make films, which is to go on location and try to do as much practically as possible, to go back home in a way, to go to Oklahoma and make this film. So, working on Lucasfilm, you definitely learn VFX really quickly, and then this one, it’s trying to bring back the real world a little bit more.

I know you filmed in Oklahoma, but a lot of people film in Atlanta because that’s where the big tax break is. How tough was it for you to get to Oklahoma, even though they do have a tax break?

CHUNG: There was some pushback when I wanted to film in Oklahoma. Initially, it was, “If you shoot in Atlanta, you can get a lot more of a tax break. You save on the budget quite a lot.” But when I was over there, the more that I looked at the landscape, I really felt like we would have to do a lot more VFX and rely on stage a lot more, like filming within the sound stages, in order to get the look that I needed. It just felt like a no-brainer. “The look I need is in Oklahoma. Let’s spend the money by going on the ground there and by capturing all the things that really make that place special.” This movie is very much about Kate’s story of trying to get back to Oklahoma and find herself and her identity in that place, and it just felt weird to me that we would film somewhere else. So, I had to make some negotiations and cutbacks on the budget in order to film in Oklahoma, and I’m just so glad we did.

Image via Universal Pictures

Was it one of these things where you originally had a 60-day shoot and it became 53?

CHUNG: Yeah, it was more than 60 days, and I had to negotiate to be just under 60.

What surprised you about making your first big-budget Hollywood movie?

CHUNG: It’s weird. There was one day I remember we were on the dirt roads and I just needed to turn the camera around, and it’s like, “Why is that truck there?” I just started to go over, “Okay, why is that truck there,” just to figure out, “Is there a way to speed up the process?” A good friend of mine puts it this way: it can kind of become a snake eating its own tail. The size of the production ends up making the production even bigger because you need support to support the size of it. Some stuff like that felt frustrating at times.

It’s the slowness of it. I think a lot of filmmakers who go up to a bigger-budget film will often talk about that. With the smaller film, it feels like maneuvering a quick-speed boat. With this one, it’s like an aircraft carrier that you have to understand what’s gonna happen 10 steps in advance and really make the decisions quickly and do it in a way that you can steer the ship where you need to be, like, five days from now. That’s just constantly the way that it felt.

Did it make you think about what you would do the next time you helm a film of this size? Did you try to analyze, “Well, maybe I can have a splinter unit go do this instead…?”

CHUNG: Constantly. I still think about that stuff. I’m still thinking about different ways to economize stuff. It’s interesting, I’m also studying what other filmmakers do. That was great. I was picking people’s brains quite a lot just to hear, “What do other filmmakers do to speed this thing up?” And it’s not just about reducing the number of vehicles and trailers and stuff like that. Even the way that you shoot and cover a shot can very much be dictated by the schedule.

I don’t want to speak for people too much, but one of our guys works with David Fincher a lot, and I was asking, “How does Fincher do things?” He does these very smart things with his camera and the way he sets up his different cameras, and I realized that some of the style that David is using comes from just trying to economize the process a lot. So, I think some of that dictates style quite a lot more than maybe people would think. It’s in my mind, as well, for the next one.

Related Every David Fincher Movie, Ranked According to IMDb The best of the best.

I’ve been fortunate enough to interview David and one of the things he said to me is the importance of having as much time on set as you can manage even if that means giving up crane shots or whatever else.

CHUNG: Absolutely.

I’m fascinated by the editing process. When you get in the editing room, you have your assembly cut—are you ready to jump out the window, or are you like, “Oh, I think I have it?”

CHUNG: [Laughs] Gosh, this one was really tricky. When I saw it, bless Teri Shropshire’s heart—she was the editor for this one—I did go into a bout of depression. I try not to do that. I go into it thinking, “I’ve been in it for a bit. I’ve made a few films, so I know that I’m gonna feel kind of weird after I see that first assembly,” but this one, I was like, “Oh, god, this is terrible.” But the magic of the editing process and also just this weird willful belief that it can get better really crept in, and we had a wonderful, wonderful post-production process. I’ve just got to say Teri is a genius. She’s just an incredible editor—Woman King, Love & Basketball—she’s a legend. So, I was just relying on her and depending on her positivity, as well. That was really important. And she’s got a comfortable couch. [Laughs] It’s like a therapist’s couch. She was doing a lot of counseling for me, as well, in many of those days.

How long was post-production?

CHUNG: Post was January until we just finished and were at Skywalker in May.

When you say January, do you mean January of this year?

CHUNG: Yes.

Yeah, that’s fast.

CHUNG: It was fast. We finished filming right before Christmas because the strike ended, and then we just returned to it.

It Wasn’t Just the ‘Twisters’ Writers Who Benefited from the Strikes
Image by Annamaria Ward

I have so many follow-ups. I’m gonna jump into the strike thing real quick. One of the things about the strike is it sucked for everyone, but you were then able, I would imagine, to look at your footage and see what you had and possibly use when the strike ended to be like, “Oh, we missed these shots. Let’s go get them.” Is that what happened?

CHUNG: Yes, absolutely. The delay just provided me a chance to hang back, stop, rest, and watch to figure out the film and to figure out what we actually needed when we went back. There was all this stuff that I thought we needed that we actually didn’t, as well. So when we got back to film, it was great to know in a very focused way what we really needed. I even went back to storyboarding and working with our previous guy, as well, to work on scenes just so, “When we go back, we know we’re going to do this exactly.” So, that whole pool sequence that happens, that was really something that I could hone and figure out during the strike, which is great. And also a lot of the beats that are happening in the ending.

How did the film change in the editing room in ways you didn’t expect?

CHUNG: I don’t feel like we deleted too many scenes with this one. We were pretty economical, so it is kind of what it is. It just became a lot more refined in a way.

‘Twisters’ Director Shares Steven Spielberg’s Feedback
Image via Axelle/Bauer-Griffin/Getty Images

I’m assuming at some point, Steven Spielberg saw this movie. Were you there when he saw it, and what were you doing while he watched? What’s going through your head?

CHUNG: [Laughs] I knew he was watching it at home in his theater. I was counting down the minutes— “Oh, he’s watching the rodeo scene…” I knew all that stuff. But he called me afterwards and he was incredibly encouraging. The first thing he said was, “You’ll be happy to know that I watched this on a very big screen and that’s what this movie deserves.” So that was the first thing he said to me. It was incredible. He came into the editing room after that and spent a lot of time with me. We watched the movie again twice together. I took notes of things that he was seeing and thinking about, and we talked about movies together. It was wonderful. It was like a real film school with him.

I can’t imagine being in an editing room with Spielberg giving you notes on the movie. Was there something specific that you can remember that he was like, “Maybe you should think about this?”

CHUNG: Oh, yeah. There’s just so much of that stuff. Even some basic stuff that I feel like I should know that he would do. For example, there are a couple of moments in the movie where some characters are talking about another character, like the men are talking about Kate, and Ben is saying, “She’s very intriguing,” and then we cut to Kate right after that. In the edit, originally, Ben says something like, “She’s very intriguing,” and then you cut to a reaction from Tyler or something else, and then we cut to Kate. But Steven was saying, “When a character talks about another character, it’s great to cut straight to that character. It makes a really good dynamic cut.” I just remember little things like that were really great adjustments that he was making.

Who did you trust for honest feedback—not named Steven Spielberg—and did they give you a note that made you really think about things?

CHUNG: I always try to show family members and very trusted friends. Doug [Seok], he’s an associate producer, is someone who I really trust, and then a couple of different filmmakers. Rick Famuyiwa came in and watched the movie. We worked together on [The Mandalorian]. Just different people. A small group of people who I really trust.

Related ‘The Mandalorian’: Director Rick Famuyiwa Talks Season 3’s Scope & Says It’s the End of a Chapter Famuyiwa also discusses directing the season premiere and finale and how volume technology has changed the series.

I’m curious about the casting. Daisy and Glen have fantastic chemistry. When did you realize, “Wait a minute, they’re gonna be really good together?”

CHUNG: Screen tests. I knew the auditions were great, and that was over Zoom, where we were trying to do the chem test between the two. I could see that they were really just giving to each other, and so that was always promising. Glen is just so charming and Daisy texted me after, and she was like, “I love Glen.” When he was cast and we brought him in, we did a screen test with the two of them and I took a picture of the monitor because those two just look so electric together. I was sharing that picture to my family, my wife, and I was showing her, like, “Look at this picture.” Because you just know that when these two are together, there’s a film there. There’s a story.

That ‘Twisters’ Thirst Trap Was Meant to Be Poetic!
Image via Universal Pictures

Let’s talk about the most important scene that’s gonna get a lot of women into the theater, and that’s Glen in the rain in a white shirt. Talk about filming that scene.

CHUNG: [Laughs] I was thinking about how rain makes things poetic, and my costume person, Eunice [Jera Lee], was like, “This is what he’s gonna wear.” We turned on the rain and I thought, “This is gonna be a nice expressive moment,” and he comes out, and then I was like, “Oh, of course.” I was not putting two and two together until it happened, and I was seeing it on the monitor. I turned to Ashley Jay Sandberg, who’s our executive producer, and she had this smile on her face, and I just said, “You’re welcome.” [Laughs]

The funny thing is I was trying to cut down the film a bit in the edit to bring down the running time, and I entertained us cutting that scene shorter. For a day, that scene was shorter, and then Teri said to me, “Sorry, there’s gonna be a riot if you do not restore that footage.” And I said, “From who?” And she said, “The ladies.” That’s all she said. [Laughs] So, I just know that in our editing office, they were all pressing on Teri to come tell me to restore the scene to what it was, so you’re welcome.

A+. I definitely want to touch on something else, which is the London premiere. I saw photos of a certain Tom Cruise there, and I’m just curious: When did you find out he was going to be there, and did you notice all the people taking pictures as he was leaving?

CHUNG: The cast and Ashley and I, we took a picture on the red carpet, and then someone on my team was kind of whisking me to a place, and she was saying, “You’re gonna have to come and say hello to somebody. It’s Tom Cruise.” That’s when I found out. So, it was right before the film was gonna play and we all went to this little room, and he greeted all of us. What I remember from that is when he and Glen started talking, they just looked like they were best buds, and that was really, really great. I was very touched to see that. He was cheering us on, man. He was saying, “We gotta make movies for the big screen, and I love that you guys did this. You went for it,” and, “This is a big-screen movie.” All that stuff was just fuel for all of us because that’s exactly what we were thinking about throughout this process. To have him there, cheering us on, was really cool.

If I’m not mistaken, when you were filming this, you actually dealt with a tornado.

CHUNG: Multiple tornadoes. There were a bunch of storms that were passing through and shutting us down. We’d have to take off and then we’d find out the storm produced a tornado. So, that happened a couple of times. Then, on one of the times, there was this big outbreak that did happen and I got to go chasing, which was really great. [We had] lightning delays, constant stuff like that, wind. We set up that town because we were going to destroy the farmer’s market, a windstorm came through, destroyed it, and then we had to rebuild it and then destroy it again. Stuff like that was happening. Then at the very end of it, our weather advisor goes, “This was a pretty calm year weather-wise. I guess this year was really a heavy, hard year. This was a real outbreak year, and last year we were pretty fortunate, apparently.

‘Twisters’: Is the Science (and the Truck Spikes) Real?

Some of the stuff you depict in the film with the truck drilling into the ground, driving into a tornado, the stuff that can go up and try to disrupt it—how much is that real and how much is that movie magic?

CHUNG: Our storm chaser guys, Sean Casey, who we sent out to go get actual storm footage for us, he showed us his vehicle and he has these three-foot spikes that go into the ground because he’ll go into a place and then he’ll spike down and he’ll take footage. So, that’s kind of real. Apparently, Mark L. Smith went chasing with some storm chasers, and they were all having a debate about whether you could drive in and launch fireworks into a tornado, and Mark thought that was amazing and put that into the film. But Kevin Kelleher, our scientist advisor, told me to please tell any crowd I talked to, “Please do not do anything you see in this movie.” [Laughs] So, I’m obligated to him to say that here.

Is the technology that Daisy’s character is trying to do real or made-up stuff?

CHUNG: That’s 100% theoretical and sci-fi in many ways. We tried to keep it as real as possible. We worked with a chemist and Kevin Kelleher, again. He was also very helpful on, “If they were to do this experiment, this is how it would work,” and, “This is what would need to happen within that experiment.” So all of those parameters that they’re talking about—the updraft, loading the updraft, all of that stuff—are real, but whether or not you could actually do that, I think that’s quite sci-fi right now.

I’m just wondering if anyone who’s going to see this as a kid will be inspired by Daisy’s character. Movies influence science and vice versa.

CHUNG: Even that first twister, those sensor balls, if you talk to scientists about it, scientifically that’s really impossible to have these moving sensors, each of them having a mobile device. Hopefully, this might inspire people to get into the sciences. That’s what I’m hoping. But to do that actual experiment, that’s not something we’re trying to prescribe in any way with this film.

What scene or sequence in the film do you think ended up being the biggest pain in the ass to pull off?

CHUNG: Gosh, I think it’s everything that happens in that town of El Reno, really. We just went flat all out with that. The weather wasn’t cooperating with us. If it wasn’t windy and tearing down that farmers market, as I said, it became, like, 106 degrees for a few days, and people are really suffering under that. It was just a slog to get through all of that sequence. But the actors were so game for it.

ILM Took ‘Twisters’ VFX to the Next Level
Image via Universal Pictures

I really enjoyed the VFX on this. It looked believable—it didn’t look like I was looking at VFX. Talk a little bit about working with your VFX teams, creating the look, and making sure that the audience thinks, “Oh, that could be a real storm.”

CHUNG: From the very beginning, what I did was I assembled this folder of tornado references and storm references for every single shot that we would need in the film, scene by scene. That was kind of the starting point for all of our discussions. Ben Snow was our incredible VFX supervisor; he worked on the first Twister, so to have him on this one, I mean, he was just excited to hit the ground running to show what they can do now with the technology. It was a great process of really artistic expression. I really tried to give them a lot of space to create within the parameters of the film, the location, the effects that we were creating, and it’s fantastic what they did.

One of the things that I’ve learned over the last few years is when you tweak VFX, that’s where you start spending money. If you go in knowing, “This is what we want, these are the shots, it needs to look like this,” you can really make the dollar go further. Was that something that you were aware of going in? How did it work in terms of tweaking shots, et cetera?

CHUNG: I do feel like working on the Lucasfilm projects was a real education for me where I could learn how to help economize the process and what people needed. With this one, knowing that this is my first big film, I wanted to make sure to show that I’m not going to be the obstacle. That’s where I was trying to, like that folder that I mentioned, stay ahead of things and communicate—that was a really big thing for me—really far in advance what we wanted, what we needed. I didn’t want VFX to just be, “Do it, and then let’s see it. No, never mind. I don’t like that.” I wanted to make sure to set them up to succeed from the beginning.

It was a great process with all of those guys. ILM, they’re just phenomenal. What I loved was that they all got very passionate about this project and about storms, and all of them became massive weather nerds. So we were constantly sharing YouTube videos with each other. Anytime a tornado hit, we would all be sending each other videos that we had found of those tornadoes because, inevitably, there were always eyewitnesses who had found these things. And what I found out was that a lot of those guys at ILM were frame-by-frame analyzing details of those videos to such a small degree of detail that it’s really remarkable. By the end, Charles Lai, one of our guys, was saying, “We could do seven more months of these tornado videos if you need. Please. We love doing this.” [Laughs] So they got really into it, and they got really good at it, and I hope they put tornadoes into a bunch of random films now.

Image via Universal Pictures

Well, with Universal, it’s tornadoes and dinosaurs.

CHUNG: That’d be cool. I worked with storyboard artists, but also with this company called The Third Floor. We had a gentleman named James Willingham, who was my pre-vis artist, and I worked very closely with him. A lot of things start with that process of storyboarding and figuring out the camera angles and all those things. That is part of the process, but shooting on location, there is that element that I love, which is that you have to respond to the environment and to what you’re actually seeing when you get there. The weather is different, lighting is different. There are so many things that are different. There’s that process of changing what I originally was planning that often leads to much better things.

I’m curious if you think you could have made this without having done Skeleton Crew and Mandalorian.

CHUNG: No, not at all. Definitely. As soon as I started working on The Mandalorian, Jon Favreau said this can often be like an academy for filmmakers such as myself who had done more independent films. He kind of sees it in that way, that he really wants to train filmmakers who are coming up in this process of cutting-edge technology, and I really owe it to him that he gave me an education. It was a great education, and it made the VFX process for this film feel quite smooth. It didn’t feel too intimidating to do that many VFX shots. I kind of knew what’s gonna be expensive and what’s gonna be time-consuming, and I realized all of that came because I got to spend that time in the Star Wars Universe.

I know you just finished this movie, but have you started thinking about what you want to do for your next thing besides a vacation?

CHUNG: I keep thinking, I’ve been wanting this vacation but I’m also a little bit afraid because I know that I’m going to be so restless once it starts happening. I’ve got some things that I’ve been thinking about, and, of course, I’m always tinkering with what that next thing might be.

Listen, the reviews are good, the audience, they’re gonna really enjoy this movie. It’s gonna allow you to have meetings, if you will. People are going to meet with you to talk. Have you started thinking about that? Have the meetings started?

CHUNG: No, they haven’t. [Laughs] But one thing that I want to take from this is that I love the experience that I had with this movie, which was a sense of awe. I felt like while I was making the film, I was out there under these incredible clouds, and I tried to translate that into the actual film itself so that the audience could come up close and personal to things and experience this sense of awe. I believe in awe. I believe that we need awe, and that’s kind of what I’m hoping to run into on the next thing—to figure out, “What does that mean in a film?” I’d love to do something with that.

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