'Twisters' director Lee Isaac Chung says a tornado encounter drew him to film
'Twisters' director Lee Isaac Chung says his Korean American family, which had recently arrived in the U.S., had just moved to a trailer and didn't know what to do when news of a tornado hit.
“Twisters” director Lee Isaac Chung’s first introduction to twisters was through a real life encounter with a tornado in Arkansas — a traumatic experience that drew him to the original film.
In an interview with Vanity Fair, the director said that just a few weeks after his Korean American family moved to a trailer on a farm in Arkansas, news broke that a tornado was coming. Chung remembers his father telling his family, “We’re going to climb down to this low part of the ground and hide out” if the tornado comes.
Lee Isaac Chung. Gareth Cattermole / Getty ImagesChung said his family, having only recently moved to the United States, didn’t know what to do. “I remember that being quite a traumatic experience,” he told Vanity Fair.
Yet, when the original “Twister” came out in theaters when Chung was 17, he thought that the movie would fall short of the tense trailers advertising the movies. “I remember thinking, when I saw that, That’s not going to be an interesting movie,” Chung told Vanity Fair. “When you see a tornado, where I grew up, you just run from it.”
When Chung saw the 1996 film, however, he immediately connected with the story and landscape. The Midwestern scenes and his memories of tornadoes drew Chung to direct the movie “Twisters.”
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