Lee Isaac Chung didn’t know what he had on his hands when Glen Powell walked down a sidewalk in a white T-shirt under a giant rain machine. The costume designer, Eunice Jera Lee, had chosen the shirt, which hugged Powell’s biceps and complemented the cowboy hat atop his pretty head. Chung wasn’t even sure the shot would make Twisters’ final cut, but Ashley Jay Sandberg, one of the film’s producers, understood right away what he had captured. This was a movie-star moment, the kind that makes audiences erupt. “A woman screamed in our theater,†one Reddit commenter wrote this week.
“I was not looking to create a wet-white-T-shirt moment for Glen,†Chung says. “I was honestly trying to make something very cinematically poetic, with rain falling at a moment that’s very emotional. I called ‘action’ and we had the rain towers going. He started walking in the rain, and that’s when I realized what I had just done. Then I looked over at Ashley, and Ashley was smiling and I said, ‘You’re welcome.’ … Glen felt a little funny about it, but I was telling him, ‘This is how it’s going to go, and this is how you’re going to do it,’ and he just said, ‘Okay, I’ll trust you.’â€
Those who have seen Twisters have found plenty to debate after its $80.5 million cyclone of an opening weekend: Should Powell and co-star Daisy Edgar-Jones have kissed at the end? Does the movie do enough to address climate change? How’s the science? (Iffy.) Where’s the cow? (It’s in there.) But no one is questioning Powell’s charisma, sodden T-shirt or otherwise. It’s one of many factors, big and small, that helped turn Chung’s first studio movie into a quintessential summer blockbuster.
Arriving 28 years after Twister swirled rom-com repartee with disaster-flick chaos to create one of the 1990s’ most rewatchable hits, Twisters’ development began in earnest in 2020. Top Gun: Maverick director Joseph Kosinski devised the story and pitched it to Amblin Entertainment and The Kennedy/Marshall Company alongside The Revenant writer Mark L. Smith, who then drafted the script. “The stars aligned, and there was a spot in our development slate that made sense to rethink about this property and reimagine it,†Sandberg says.
From the outset, Kosinski and Smith intended to make a standalone sequel without any narrative link to the original, according to Sandberg. Kosinski had signed on to direct, but around the same time that he dropped out to make the forthcoming Brad Pitt vehicle F1, Chung — best known for the intimate family drama Minari, which earned him Oscar nominations for directing and screenplay — decided he wanted to learn about visual effects. After he asked Jon Favreau if he could direct an episode of The Mandalorian, the idea of making Twisters felt like a natural upgrade. Once Chung came aboard, he expanded the characters’ relationships, made the action sequences more intense, and culled down the final sequence so it would all take place in a movie theater instead of being spread out across a few different locations. That latter tweak helped win him the job.
“When we met with Isaac and he was going through his director’s pitch for the film and some of the things that he wanted to work on, this was a big area that he highlighted for us,†Sandberg says. “When he said that, I was like, Yes, he gets it — this is a big moment. Our characters were kind of dispersed within this town, so having them in the same environment where the stakes are high and where we feel like it’s our friends that this is happening to was really a great move.â€
Along the way, Helen Hunt approached Universal executives about a screenplay she’d co-written with Daveed Diggs and Rafael Casal that focused on a team of diverse storm chasers at an HBCU. “They wouldn’t do it,†she said of the studio on Watch What Happens Live in 2021, revealing that she’d also hoped to direct the film. Diggs went a step further in 2023, suggesting that the reasons their version didn’t move forward are “potentially shady.†But a source close to Universal tells Vulture the reason is because the studio had already agreed to produce Smith’s script. (A representative for Hunt did not respond to Vulture’s request for comment.)
Online, people have also speculated whether Daisy Edgar-Jones’s character, Kate, was at some point meant to be the daughter of Hunt and Bill Paxton’s characters — and whether Hunt was approached for the role of Kate’s folksy mother, now played by Maura Tierney. Chung and Sandberg say that was never on the table, if only because it would link Twisters too explicitly to Twister. “Jo Harding is off doing work,†Chung says, referring to Hunt’s adrenaline-junkie meteorologist. “She’s out there chasing storms. I would hate to think that she’s lonely at home. It would have to have been a major script overhaul if it was going to be Jo Harding. I like that Maura Tierney’s character takes pride in the fact that she’s a farmer and has never left. It would be a dream come true for me to work with Helen Hunt, but it just didn’t feel right.â€
Something else that didn’t feel right to Chung was a kiss shared between Kate and Powell’s YouTube-famous Tyler in the movie’s final minutes. The actors shot the culminating airport sendoff with and without a lip-lock, as evidenced by footage that circulated online right before opening weekend. Chung wishes it hadn’t leaked — he’d specifically decided not to include the alternate take among future special features — but he always knew that whatever choice he made would be polarizing. Sandberg advocated for the kiss, and so did Steven Spielberg at first. Chung’s 14-year-old niece thinks omitting it was “the stupidest decision her uncle has ever made.†But when he and the producers screened the movie for a test audience in Los Angeles, they watched people (particularly young women) physically recoil at the sight. A second screening sans kiss went over far more favorably.
“The advice I was given that really swayed me was our editor, Terry, telling me, ‘It’s better to leave an audience wanting than to leave them overfilled,’†Chung says. “I think that’s what we’re doing with the kiss. If people actually saw it in the film, they might come away feeling like they didn’t really need it. It’s better to wish that they had kissed rather than to actually see it. Poor Glen jokingly said it was his performance, but it was not.â€
While everyday moviegoers became arbiters of Twisters’ romantic climax, the science was left to the experts. Universal suggested Chung address climate change head on, but the researchers he spoke to — meteorologist Kevin Kelleher, who also advised on the original, is credited as the project’s tornado consultant — said that, unlike hurricanes, there isn’t firm data linking tornados to climate change. In fact, some evidence suggests that rising temperatures have decreased their frequency. In lieu of a potentially dubious lecture, Twisters treats extreme weather more gravely than Twister did, with extra emphasis on the destruction they leave behind.
“The characters kind of talk about the issue, but this just wasn’t really the type of film and subject matter that could be a climate-change message movie, if that makes sense,†Chung says. “It’s a lot more nuanced than what this movie could do, and unfortunately our discussions about climate change in the press are often without nuance. I think that’s what’s losing our red-state voters who have not been inclined to believe in the human connection to climate change. I am an environmentalist, but I noticed all the storm scientists were very measured about this, and they asked me to tone it down and not go too far into that area.â€
The production team did implement other ways to mitigate certain ecological concerns behind the scenes, adopting the tenets of the GreenerLight Program that NBCUniversal launched last year. The initiative aims to reduce the company’s carbon footprint, which meant limiting food waste and other environmental impact throughout Twisters’ Oklahoma shoot last summer.
“It’s such a tricky issue, and I knew that no matter what I do, it’s going to make people mad on either side,†Chung says. “We all tried our best to just be responsible.â€
More on Twisters
- Why Twisters Became a 4DX Hit and Dune: Part Two Didn’t
- Please Don’t Try to Shoot Diaper Gel Into a Tornado
- Move Over, Glen Powell