A pre-ordained summer blockbuster, “Twisters,” a decades-later sequel, was a gargantuan step up for director Lee Isaac Chung.
Chung, born in Denver to a South Korean family, had scored double Oscar nominations – as Best Director and for Best Original Screenplay — for his 2020 autobiographical indie hit “Minari.”
That film changed his world. After helming a “Mandalorian” episode, Chung, 45, then jumped into the driver’s seat for this spectacular tornado “ride.”
“These big blockbuster films, it becomes like a giant freight train and as a director, steering that thing is very difficult,” Chung allowed last weekend in a Zoom interview.
“As I was thinking about stories that I might tell, I just didn’t want to go back into the very dark personal space that led to ‘Minari.’ What I wanted was to bring joy to people — and I was hoping to make an ambulance-style adventure movie. I was telling people ‘That’s what I’m looking for!’ I even would say, ‘I’d love to make something like ‘Twister.’”
Talk about synchronicity: “A couple weeks later this script landed on my desk — and the producers hadn’t even heard I wanted to make something like ‘Twister.’
“What I loved about doing this film,” he said, “was that I wanted to do a movie in which there is a very big, mysterious element that rips people out of their own selves and out of their own minds. Some kind of force of nature.
“In general, I was feeling I would like to have more of that in my life — where I’m not so locked up in my tiny phone screen and small concerns in my own brain. I just felt like tornadoes would be wonderful!”
He did extensive research on tornadoes. Then, with just four months before filming began, he found his three leads: England’s Daisy Edgar-Jones as traumatized Kate, who returns to the Midwest tornado fields after a tragedy, Texan Glen Powell as the showboating tornado chaser Tyler and Brooklyn native Anthony Ramos as Javi, who persuades Kate to come back for just one week.
Chung oversaw every aspect of the sprawling production. “I had to get involved with every facet, working very hard on the tornado element, the visual elements from the start with ILM and Ben Snow, our VFX supervisor.
“I was compiling videos and footage of actual tornadoes according to each scene number. I wanted each of those ‘beats’ to really be not just spectacular in their own right but for those tornadoes to also inform character and inform the story of what Kate is going through from beginning to end.
“That human level is really the anchor of the film.”
“Twisters” opens in theaters Thursday