Crowing up in the southern state of Arkansas, Lee Isaac Chung was familiar with tornadoes. ‘At school, that was always the drill that we had to practise: the tornado drill,’ he tells Total Film. One of his earliest memories is as a four-year-old, three weeks into living on the Arkansas farm in a trailer home, when his parents called out, ‘There’s a tornado coming.’
‘We didn’t have any storm shelter,’ recalls Chung. ‘So we were immediately looking for a place where we could hide it out.’ The family were unscathed, but it made a huge impression. It also meant that the 1996 blockbuster Twister resonated with the young Chung when he saw it at the cinema with his dad and sister. The opening scene in particular. ‘It was a family on a farm, and it’s night-time, and they had to run from a tornado… It was like, “Oh, I understand this feeling.”’
Filmmaker Chung is best known to date for Minari, the intimate, semi-autobiographical tale of a family of South Korean immigrants in 80s Arkansas. The 2020 film was Oscar-nominated in six categories (including Director and Original Screenplay for Chung, and Best Picture), and marked Chung out as a sensitive storyteller to watch. But it didn’t particularly feel like a calling card for a natural-disaster blockbuster. Still, when Twisters – a new chapter rather than a direct sequel – spun his way, his interest was immediately piqued.
‘WITH CASTING THIS MOVIE, I DEFINITELY WANTED TO FIND ACTORS WHO I WANTED TO SPEND TIME WITH CHASING WEATHER’
LEE ISAAC CHUNG
‘I felt like I knew this film, and what I wanted to do in particular with it,’ he says. ‘I wanted to make it even more regional than the first one, because it’s an area where I grew up. [Twister director] Jan de Bont’s film is incredible, and I just felt like I could really lean in even further with the area, and what I know about that place, and the people there. It takes place in Oklahoma. I grew up right on the Oklahoma border.’
That level of specificity is just one facet of that separates it
