Lee Isaac Chung on Capturing American Storms, Big and Small

Lee Isaac Chung: : I haven’t told anyone this but on my own, I’ve been thinking about the different elements of the earth that I want to have running through the films I’ve made. I’ve thought of Munyurangabo as my “earth” story. There’s a lot that’s in the mud and in the dirt with that one. Lucky Life is very much about water. Minari is also about water in some ways … I played with a lot of elements in that one but the main element is fire. With Twisters, I was thinking of the element of “wind”… obviously, it comes with the territory [laughs]. I like having these elements as anchors in my films. It reminds me to think about how our environments inform who we are.

LIC:: [Laughs] That’s my buddy, Doug Seok, who’s an associate producer on this movie. I put him in that scene; we wanted to sneak in some lines of Korean. But I like this theory that who we see there is David grown up. I’m going with that.

LIC: : I’ll admit I really didn’t have as much of an education until I started this project. I really did feel like I went to storm boot camp. I’ve become quite a weather nerd now. I can see why people get into it.

LIC:: After Minari, I went back to watching a lot of Spielberg movies. I wanted to get a better sense of the way he uses his camera and the way that he tells stories. That was all in service of me trying to make that Mandalorian episode and also Skeleton Crew. I’ve always loved Amblin movies growing up [Spielberg’s production company]. I always wondered when I was researching and watching those films, what it would be like to actually make one myself and to try to do some of the things that I saw Spielberg was doing. Watching his movies makes me feel like a kid again and that’s what really drove me with this one. The journey that Kate goes on is one of her wanting to reclaim some of that childhood wonder and joy which mirrors what I wanted to do with this film.

LIC: : [Laughs] Yeah, and in the next one, I’ll have to set outer space on fire.

LIC:: I’m glad that comes across for you. That sentiment was definitely something the team and I were working hard on. Early on when I was researching tornadoes, I remember I read this article that in Medieval times, the mythology of dragons was tied to the power of tornadoes. People who had seen tornadoes had no way of describing what they had seen because what they witnessed was so monstrous and unexplainable. I love this idea that dragons throughout storytelling have had their own personalities and their own terrifying qualities, but they’re also things that you can absolutely revere and be in awe of.

With this film, these tornadoes were my dragons. I wanted them to have their own personality and look and for them to do something different in each scene. On the VFX side, that meant we treated them as their own characters and were very clear about the differences between them and the different functions they’d serve. The VFX team and I had a shorthand about how we’d describe each tornado and we’d often talk about them as if they had human characteristics and traits.

On the sound side, we worked with a lot of interesting sounds to help give the tornadoes their voice. Al Nelson was putting in sounds of wolves, horses, and seals into these tornadoes to fill them with this sort of howl. We didn’t want this howl to be inorganic but to really feel natural and to make a tornado feel as though it has an individual voice.

LIC: : When we were shooting in Oklahoma, we were filming from before sunrise all the way to sunset. The clouds can be so epic out there. You find yourself looking up constantly and that influenced a lot of the way we filmed. We were looking up with such reverence while filming and I hope that can be communicated to the audience.

LIC: : I’m always most interested in people. I’m interested in depicting nature in the way it specifically relates to human beings. Human beings are not outside of nature but very much a part of it and so in every scene, whether it’s thrilling or harrowing, I wanted to make sure that we talk about the reality of that. Personally, for me, I wanted to make sure I was talking about it in a very responsible, realistic, and yet entertaining way. To balance all of those things though is very difficult and so the tonal element is something I wrestle with.

LIC: : The filming of it was unfortunately not as glamorous as what you see on-screen. I knew from the very start when I got involved with this project that that moment in the script was a key reason why I wanted to do this film. I said, “I have to film that scene.” I had this wonderful image to reference of an actual movie theater in Kentucky where a similar thing happened. A wall gave way and what you see is this empty proscenium with destruction behind it and all the movie theater seats are covered in dust. That was such a powerful image and I was working towards that in the actual production.

In the moment of production though, there are so many logistical things going on. We have fans that are running at high speed in this theater space we built. There’s this false ceiling where we have rigged stunt performers and wires. We had this giant rigging for that theater screen to rip out and that took a lot of work and force to actually rip that out. This was all in this giant, reconfigured basketball arena that was in Oklahoma City. We were able to build a giant blue screen environment. That sequence was definitely tons of movie magic and wind [Laughs].

LIC: I feel as though in many ways, films have not depicted the reality of our changing environment. It’s a hard topic to tackle because it’s very easy to become preachy, and we didn’t want to preach with this movie. What I felt was good about making this film was that we can acknowledge how the nature of storms has changed due to the effects of climate change and we can use it not to preach, but to point to the good work that scientists are doing in this area. Twister motivated a lot of people to get into the meteorological sciences and I do hope that the way we present the science of this film, can inspire a generation of people to possibly do the same.

LIC: I do feel like the more that we invest into an appreciation and love for the world around us and for nature … the more we feel like something good can happen despite what’s going on. We can have optimism about the future and I hope that we have more stories that really show the beauty of the natural world.