Twister (1996 film)
Twister is a 1996 American disaster film directed by Jan de Bont, and written by Michael Crichton and Anne-Marie Martin. It was produced by Crichton, Kathleen Kennedy, and Ian Bryce, with Steven Spielberg, Walter Parkes, Laurie MacDonald, and Gerald R. Molen serving as executive producers. The film stars an ensemble cast that includes Helen Hunt, Bill Paxton, Jami Gertz, and Cary Elwes. It follows a group of storm chasers trying to deploy a tornado research device during a severe outbreak in Oklahoma.
Twister was released in theaters on May 10, 1996, by Warner Bros. in the United States and Canada and internationally by Universal Pictures through United International Pictures. The film grossed over $499 million worldwide, becoming the second-highest-grossing film of 1996, and selling an estimated 54.7 million tickets in the United States. It received generally positive reviews from critics and Academy Award nominations for Best Visual Effects and Best Sound. It is notable for being among the first films to be released on DVD in the United States. A standalone sequel, Twisters, was released in 2024.
Plot
On an Oklahoma farm in 1969, young Jo Harding, her parents, and their dog take shelter from an F5 tornado that destroys their farm and kills Jo's father as he tries to secure their cellar door. Twenty-seven years later, Jo is a tornado-obsessed meteorologist leading a team of storm chasers. Her estranged husband, Bill, an ex-storm chaser turned television weatherman, travels to Oklahoma with his fiancée Melissa to obtain Jo's signature on their divorce papers.Jo shows Bill the realized "Dorothy", a device containing hundreds of small weather sensors that he conceptualized. Dorothy could revolutionize tornado research and potentially provide an earlier storm-warning system, but the device must be deployed dangerously close to a tornado to work. Jo's team rushes off to chase a developing storm, failing to sign the papers, forcing Bill and Melissa to follow.
Jonas Miller, a rival storm chaser and former colleague with corporate funding, stole Bill's idea for his own Dorothy-like device, Dot3, which he plans to deploy first and claim credit for the design. Enraged, Bill agrees to accompany Jo and the team for one day to launch Dorothy. As the team pursues a rope tornado, Jo's truck runs into a ditch attempting to intercept it. Jo and Bill are forced to take shelter under a bridge as the tornado corners them resulting in the truck and one of the four Dorothy prototypes destroyed. With more storms developing, Bill leads the team in his own truck, chasing another tornado. They encounter Jonas's team just as Bill predicts a change in the tornado's path and diverts their course. They chase the tornado, now a waterspout, onto Kaw Lake that is accompanied by another with multiple vortices. The other waterspout thrashes the truck around leaving them unharmed, but Melissa traumatized in the process.
The team visits Jo's Aunt Meg in nearby Wakita for rest and food. The team then scrambles to chase a developing twister. Jo and Bill intercept an F3 tornado with unpredictable movements. It knocks over power lines that crush Dorothy II. With the truck damaged, Bill forces them to retreat, but Jo undergoes an emotional breakdown over the failure, and unloads about her motivations and her father's death. Bill admits his feelings for Jo, unaware that Melissa is overhearing them through the CB radio.
The team overnights in Fairview to repair their vehicles. While there, Jo signs the papers. A nocturnal F4 tornado forces the team and others into a garage pit near a drive-in theater for protection. The tornado destroys the garage and two team vehicles, and injures several people before proceeding toward Wakita. Before the team rushes there, Melissa ends her relationship with Bill, encouraging him to reunite with Jo.
The town's storm sirens provide little warning time ahead of the tornado, which leaves Wakita in ruins and flattens Aunt Meg's house. The team, however, rescues Aunt Meg, who only has minor injuries, and her dog, who is unharmed. The National Severe Storms Laboratory forecasts that a potentially record-breaking tornado will form the next day. Inspired by Aunt Meg's wind-vane sculptures, Bill and Jo add aluminum "wings" to the last two Dorothy prototype sensors, making them more aerodynamic.
True to the forecast, a mile-wide F5 tornado forms the next day, and the team pursues it. Bill and Jo attempt to place Dorothy III in its path; however, the device is knocked over and destroyed by an airborne tree. Meanwhile, Jonas attempts to deploy Dot3, ignoring Bill and Jo's warnings that the tornado is changing direction and headed straight at him. The tornado sweeps Jonas's truck away, killing him and his driver Eddie and destroying Dot3. With the last remaining Dorothy affixed to the bed of Bill's truck, Bill and Jo drive directly at the tornado, then jump out, sacrificing the truck to ensure that Dorothy IV can release its probes into the wedge. The gamble is successful, as Dorothy IV's probes provide immediate scientific data, but without their truck, Jo and Bill are forced to run as the tornado shifts toward them. Inside a nearby pumphouse on a farm, they strap themselves to deep pipes. As the building rips away, the F5's core passes over them and they find themselves inverted in the vortex. After the tornado dissipates, the team celebrates their success while Jo and Bill reconcile.
Cast
Production
Development and writing
Twister was produced by Steven Spielberg's Amblin Entertainment, with financial backing from Warner Bros. and Universal Pictures. In return, Warner Bros. was given the North American distribution rights, while Universal's joint-venture distribution company, United International Pictures, obtained international distribution rights. The pitch was not a script, but a proof of concept clip of the visual effects by Industrial Light & Magic, done entirely in computer-generated imagery and featuring a pickup truck driving towards a tornado pulling up a tractor, with one of its tires snapping off and smashing through the truck's windshield. ILM assigned Stefen Fangmeier to be the effects supervisor for his experience with tornadoes, having helped create simulations while working with storm chasers in the National Center for Supercomputing Applications.Spielberg himself was originally attached to direct the project, and directors such as James Cameron, John Badham, Tim Burton, and Robert Zemeckis were also in talks to helm the film before Jan de Bont signed on to Twister after leaving Godzilla due to creative differences. De Bont was invited by Spielberg after the success of directorial debut Speed, which was released in 1994, following a long career as a director of photography, and described the project as "a Grimm fairy tale where the monster comes out of dark clouds". Michael Crichton and his wife and co-author, Anne-Marie Martin, were paid $2.5 million for a screenplay, which started being written in January 1994. Crichton said the two bases for the script were a PBS documentary about storm chasers and the plot of romantic comedy His Girl Friday, where a newspaper editor and his ex who is engaged to another man do one last job together. Two screenwriters would later sue the studios claiming Twister was taken from their ideas: Daniel Perkins, whose script Tornado Chasers dealt with the military harnessing tornadoes as weapons and settled for an undisclosed amount; and Stephen B. Kessler, author of a script about storm chasers in Oklahoma called Catch the Wind, and whose case was eventually dismissed. Dorothy was inspired by TOTO, an instrumented barrel-shaped device used to research tornadoes in the 1980s. De Bont pushed to make the dialogue "very energized" to reflect the excitement experienced by storm chasers, adding that the dialogue "gets very stilted very quickly" if it is not "moving forward and energized in the same pattern as the action", while encouraging the cast to improvise their lines. He also attempted to reduce the amount of establishing scenes and exposition "that makes a movie almost immediately less interesting" while feeling that "things will explain themselves as you keep watching", but the studio insisted on it. For the explanatory moments there was a focus on the character of Melissa, serving as an audience surrogate given she had no experience with storm chasing.
Helen Hunt was de Bont's first choice to play Jo Harding, and while the studio was reluctant because of her lack of big movie roles, he insisted, considering her a good actress who could deliver the physical demands of the role. Hunt initially was uninterested, declaring that "I just didn’t know what I could really contribute acting-wise", but changed her mind after having lunch with de Bont and Spielberg at Amblin's offices. Tom Hanks read for the part of Bill Harding but passed on the film and suggested that Bill Paxton try for the role. De Bont wanted the storm chaser crew to resemble the ones he met during pre-production, a team of University of Oklahoma grad students. The National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, Oklahoma worked closely with the production, training the crew on weather safety, allowing the actors to visit their facilities and go along on a tornado chase, and providing consultations on the script that included discarding an impossible tornado that would last a day and a half to instead go for an outbreak of tornadoes, which could strike at any place at any time, in any location, and with different magnitudes.
Filming
The production was troubled with problems; Joss Whedon was brought in to rewrite the script through the early spring of 1995. When Whedon contracted bronchitis, Steven Zaillian was brought in to work on revisions. Whedon later returned and worked on revisions through the start of shooting in May 1995, then left the project after he got married. Two weeks into production, Jeff Nathanson was flown to the set and worked on the script until principal photography ended. Among the changes, Hunt complained that Jo and Melissa's interactions were "sort of catty with each other", prompting her to tell the producers “That’s not gonna be fun to play or to watch. I’m not sure if I want to do that.” After the Oklahoma City bombing occurred on April 19, 1995, filming of Twister was suspended while the cast and crew worked with relief efforts.Filming was to originally take place in California, but De Bont insisted the film be shot on location in Oklahoma. Shooting occurred all over the state; several scenes, including the opening scene where the characters meet each other, and the first tornado chase in the Jeep pickup, were filmed in Fairfax and Ralston, Oklahoma. The scene at the automotive repair shop was filmed in Maysville and Norman. The waterspout scenes were filmed on Kaw Lake near Kaw City. The drive-in scene was filmed at a real drive-in theater in Guthrie, though some of the scene, such as Melissa's hotel room, was filmed in Stillwater near the Oklahoma State University campus. Stanley Kubrick's 1980 film The Shining was played during the sequence.
The real town of Wakita – serving as the hometown of Lois Smith's character, Meg, in the film – was used during filming, and a section of the older part of town was demolished for the scene, showing the aftermath of the F4 tornado that devastates the town. This location was selected after scouts discovered leftover debris from a major hailstorm that occurred two years earlier in June 1993. Most of the residents signed up as extras and were paid $100 per day. Additional scenes and B-roll were filmed near Ponca City and Pauls Valley, among several other smaller farm towns across the state. However, due to changing seasons that massively transformed the look of Oklahoma's topography, filming was moved to Iowa. The climactic scene with the F5 tornado was almost entirely shot around Eldora, Iowa, with the cornfield the characters run through located near Ames.
Halfway through filming, both Paxton and Hunt were temporarily blinded by bright electronic lamps used to make the sky behind the two actors look dark and stormy. Paxton remembers that "these things literally sunburned our eyeballs. I got back to my room, I couldn't see". To solve the problem, a Plexiglas filter was placed in front of the beams. The actors took eye drops and wore special glasses for a few days to recuperate. After filming in a particularly unsanitary ditch, Hunt and Paxton needed hepatitis shots. During the same sequence, Hunt repeatedly hit her head on a low wooden bridge, and was so exhausted from the demanding shoot that she stood up quickly and struck her head on a beam. During one stunt in which Hunt opened the door of a vehicle speeding through a cornfield, she momentarily let go of the door and it struck her on the side of the head. Some sources claim she received a concussion in the incident. De Bont said, "I love Helen to death, but you know, she can be also a little bit clumsy". She responded, "Clumsy? The guy burned my retinas, but I'm clumsy... I thought I was a good sport. I don't know ultimately if Jan chalks me up as that or not, but one would hope so". Jo and Bill inside the F5 tornado was filmed by rolling the set in a gimbal so the ground stood in the ceiling as Hunt and Paxton hung from a metal bar, with the footage then being flipped upside down to appear as if they were being sucked upwards by the storm.
Bad weather was frequent during production, with hailstorms, lightning, floods, and mud. Some crew members, feeling that De Bont was "out of control", left the production five weeks into filming. The camera crew led by Don Burgess claimed De Bont "didn't know what he wanted till he saw it. He would shoot one direction, with all the equipment behind the view of the camera, and then he'd want to shoot in the other direction right away and we'd have to move and he'd get angry that we took too long... and it was always everybody else's fault, never his". De Bont claims that they had to schedule at least three scenes every day because the weather changed so often, and "Don had trouble adjusting to that".
When De Bont, in a fit of rage, knocked over a camera assistant who missed a cue into a ditch and refused to apologize, Burgess and his crew walked off the set, much to the shock of the cast. They remained in place for one more week until Jack N. Green's crew agreed to replace them. Following the incident, Spielberg angrily flew down to Oklahoma to admonish De Bont for his behavior. Two days before principal filming ended, Green was injured when a hydraulic house set, designed to collapse on cue, was mistakenly activated with him inside it. A rigged ceiling hit him in the head and injured his back, requiring him to be hospitalized. De Bont took over as his own director of photography for the remaining shots.
Because overcast skies were not always available, De Bont had to shoot many of the film's tornado-chasing scenes in bright sunlight, requiring Industrial Light & Magic to more than double its original plan for 150 "digital sky-replacement" shots. Principal photography was originally given a deadline to allow Hunt to return to film the fourth season of her NBC sitcom Mad About You, but when shooting ran over schedule, series creator and co-star Paul Reiser agreed to delay the show's production for two and a half weeks so Twister could finish filming. De Bont insisted on using multiple cameras, which led to the exposure of of film, compared to the usual maximum of. The crew used a Boeing 707 airplane engine and smaller fans to generate wind throughout the film. Pickup trucks followed the actors' vehicles to throw debris, including ice pieces to simulate hail, made with an ice machine imported from a neighbor state as Oklahoma lacked them. Ford Motor Company tried to get the 1997 F-150 as the main vehicle of the movie, but were beaten by Chrysler and their Dodge Ram. Five Rams were provided, one of which was a prototype to be used in scenes where the vehicle suffered extensive damage, and the trucks went through 20 windshields as they were broken by the flying debris. Chrysler also provided eight Dodge Caravan minivans. The scene where a tornado drops tractors in the way of the protagonists' truck was achieved by dropping the combines from helicopters onto the road, and filming with longer lenses to make the distance seem very close when they were actually away.