The Making of Twister - 1996

it's is the tornado's playground meteorologists come from all over the world because this is where they happen from texas all the way up to nebraska and into canada is what's known as tornado alley and usually starting in early april through the summer is what they call the storm season [Music] this is the 50-year storm that's coming we were in the hottest tornado spot in the world at the hottest tornado time and it was scary i want your audience to feel the same amazement that's what the storm cases feel get us out of here here we go okay in the summer of 1995 during the heat of storm season the director of speed yonder bound along with producers kathleen kennedy michael crichton and ian brice set out to capture the dark side of nature on film the result is twister the latest film from steven spielberg's ambulant entertainment it tells the story of two recently separated meteorologists played by helen hunt and bill paxton who were brought together again by the threat of the 50-year storm a deadly system that threatens to drop multiple tornadoes into central oklahoma dennis his health says the cap is breaking tower's going up 30 miles off the dry line all right let's go from the moment i read the script i knew this was only one person could play the part i absolutely actually two people i mean both helen and bill i knew from day one they had to be the you know the joe and bills and i was like god how do you get her you know i'm just doing this tv this tv series very successful and and and he had never done one of those big movies and the studios were a little bit worried about you know taking the risk of you know movie not finishing on time and then having her to go back to the tv series what are you going to do if you run over schedule and and i finally convinced him that it is more important to have an actor actress that's perfect for the part then you know then the risk you would take by maybe losing a week or so at the end or two weeks and they finally agree with me and she turned out absolutely perfect it couldn't be couldn't be better i play a woman who chases tornadoes uh for a living a scientist who is interested for research purposes and personal purposes to find out about tornadoes um someone who is touched by one early in her life and has bordering on an obsession with getting near these things [Music] still outside it's okay toby grab joe honey thank you [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] for these storm chasers it's an opportunity to launch a tracking device nicknamed dorothy that can unlock the secrets inside nature's most mysterious killer they're they're hoping in their attempts to get close enough to a tornado to possibly learn ways of creating a better warning system to to in the hopes of eventually saving lives and also just to the to understand better what takes place inside of a tornado there's still uh a lot of unanswered questions they understand the uh the atmospheric things that come together to cause them but they're for years they've been trying to get a weather package kind of like a flight recorder inside the twister we put her up inside a tornado she opened and releases hundreds of these sensors that measure all parts of the tornado simultaneously i'm a guy who walked away from it i'm a gun fighter who left the gun fight when i go back to see my ex-wife helen hunt to get the divorce paper signed i've got my fiance in tow i realize that since i've seen her she's become even more obsessed did you sign papers oh she didn't come on you can still catch him [Music] i sort of hold them ransom if he goes on this one final chase with me dusty the battle zone should be north east of 81. wait a minute with the battle zone billy what are we doing we're going again it's very fun to get to play a relationship that's already fueled by a lot of rage and love and a mixed bag of emotions okay guys let's go get it add to this makes a rival storm chasing team headed by carrie ailways dead set on getting to the twister first and you have the makings of an incredible terrifying ride it's that cat and mouse chased with the weather with this great ominous thing that these storm chasers deal with and that's where the rush comes from people tend to say that speed was a very fast-moving picture i think this one is a little quicker go in there boy you're gonna miss me just hold on a second have you lost your nerve tighten your seatbelt this week would be good are you mad i'll be mad later right now trying not to kill us this was a great idea why can't we spend a normal day together come on [Music] oh nominal shooter i mean this movie in terms of action goes beyond speed so it is non-stop and yawn is nonstop i mean he moves faster than any person on the crew so it becomes really a job of keeping up and jan is usually running placing every camera himself he works with multiple cameras on every single shot so that you have a very fast cutting quick moving energy to every single scene in the movie [Music] come on everybody down in the pit get down let's go everybody down go move come on [Music] it's okay it's okay my head you're okay traveling hundreds of miles throughout tornado alley the line between the script written by michael crichton and anne-marie martin and reality began to blur the production found itself surrounded by the same violent weather they were portraying on screen we could see on our portable doppler that we had a supercell moving toward us and in fact not only was it moving toward us it was literally bearing right down on us it's exhilarating because what's happening around you is completely and totally beyond your control the night before we started shooting there was an awesome thunderstorm thunder and lightning storm and as an actor you always hope that there'll be some omen that you were born to play the part or that you're you know perfectly suited the night before this movie started i was lying in my bed going if there were a tornado coming i would run the other way lightning came out and man it was the loudest storm and it was really powerful the idea of people going out there chasing tornadoes tells you a lot about a person i mean the the f5 which is like the most powerful tonight they can go over more than a while mile wide and and this wind speed of up to 300 miles an hour inside inside the core which is like two to three times as strong as the biggest hurricane it's totally you know totally pulverized everything nothing's left it's like it's like nothing even existed before so the power is unbelievable on the very same day the twister cast and crew hit the road their real-life counterparts the storm chasers from vortex had their sights set on the real thing an offshoot of the national severe storm lab the team of scientists was tracking a massive storm system that had formed over the texas panhandle just south of the production mission today is to document the near tornado thermodynamic fields using a caravan of 20 vehicles two airplanes in a command vehicle manned by the team leader eric rasmussen the vortex team was able to pinpoint the tornado's touchdown a terrifying place where in the middle of the day it looks like night [Music] there's an adrenaline rush to doing all this you know some guys like to go and surf the banzai pipeline some guys are in the hang gliders these guys are into chasing tornadoes and it's almost like chasing a rogue murderer it's one of the most terrifying sights a human being can witness almost 345 degrees tornado we saw friday was so strong that it peeled the asphalt off of a highway and threw it 600 feet out through a field get us out of here not only are the storm chasers of tornado alley begun to unravel the physics behind the violent storms through the increased use of video cameras they have also captured some of the most terrifying images ever seen it was this kind of urgency combined with the excitement of discovery that yonderbot wanted to capture in twisting the production became its own storm-chasing unit ready on a moment's notice to move that the weather was right or in this case wrong i wanted to have this feel feel of it almost like a documentary that like those guys are really doing they had this one day and in this day they have to get there and i guess it a very unique look to the moment [Music] i always feel that beauty gets in the way of the content and i want to forget the beauty i want to just go right to the heart of the story we're getting slammed in here guys you better hang back time for deployment guys let's do it sometimes when i didn't know what to do with this character i decided i was playing yan just just focused and fearless [Music] meg joe take a flashlight careful [Music] careful okay she's down here meg we're here we're coming down hey we got to get this off over hang on hey don't move don't move okay ready watch your hand go you gotta hurry let's go think you can walk watch out the violence of winds that can reach 300 miles an hour de bont again went for realism using the jet engine from a 707 massive fans and even a turning rig that allowed bill and helen to be swept up by the force of the tornado i knew reading the script it wasn't gonna be you know like a easy picnic of a hold shoot for the scenes when helen and bill drive straight into the storm de bob rigged up a caravan of semi trucks spewing debris and ice chunks over the camera car and onto the actor's truck just before the tornado happened there's others huge hail storms because i said i had that real health zone scene in the morning i wish i'd never thought about it we couldn't get any hail in all of oklahoma we had to import it from the neighboring state we had like four or five 40-foot trailers moving at the same time 10 seconds later all the ice is gone all the debris is gone and we had to go back to one it took forever to shoot that scene stand by the road all right in the road this is pretty real i don't have to do a lot of acting in this movie you know they're raining basically chipped ice on me they're throwing debris i mean although it's it's lightweight stuff it still hits it still hurts it's exciting stuff this is why i signed up it's a very physical role [Music] it really looks like the end of the world they built a set using existing buildings and buildings they built for the establishing shot and then they tore down i'd say it was seven square blocks and they just reduced this place to rubble and they had got literally cars and trees and they copied a lot of famous tornado photographs for blocks and blocks and blocks we were walking through rubble up to our knees it was just really bizarre and and just to walk around that and just see how close it looks to the footage that that i've seen and i'm sure others involved with this picture have seen it the the it's uncanny and i think even the locals are kind of stunned they're out there and a lot of them are the extras and they're like looking around they're going my god i guess this is what would happen if a tornado hit us you know and it's it's a pretty hairy thought we need some hanging wires electric power lines that can spark so that when we look this way behind them they're this shower of sparks behind him [Music] i had no warning even just to create very very small scenes took a phenomenal amount of manpower and equipment and it really made all of us step back and realize how nature itself can create this on such a massive scale and we were putting all our energy into just creating what would exist in the frame this is topeka kansas and this is the aftermath of the most destructive tornado ever to strike the state capital it sliced a path of death and damage a half mile wide and 15 miles long the nature of the tornado and the reason it is able to destroy so much so quickly is that it is completely unpredictable able to turn on the observer in the blink of an eye it was this unpredictability that led to bond to industrial light and magic the computer effects facility owned by george lucas it was a rare chance to control the uncontrollable it should be a lot lower i wanted to make it be as realistic as possible we have so many tapes of real tornadoes but always again seen from a distance you never see the inside of a tornado which we hopefully gonna see for the first time in this movie it's kind of really a new wave in terms of saying we can do everything in the computer because all the cars that are flying all the houses you know the spinning house onto the road and and all the tanker and everything that's all computer graphics are you gonna make this the quality of computer imaging and the cgi is so incredible right now that you almost have to um make it look like there are little mistakes in it it's too perfect almost we add the level of shake to it so that it builds up the closer the tornado comes the more intense that shape becomes [Music] right maybe we should get off of this road i think it's in the eye of the beholder you know whether it's a monster that's coming to get you or a force of nature to be listened to or something fascinating or something terrifying i think what makes it a good thing to make a movie about is it's all of those things if they just get 10 of that feeling then you still will be enormous would be so fantastic we as as a society people just in general have a innate fascination with these storms these tornadoes are just so captivating to look at it here we're throwing the audience right into the middle of them and it's going to be it's going to be a hell of a ride

Channel: That's Entertainment

Views: 90,700

Keywords: Twister, bill Paxton, helen hunt, jan de bont, Michael Crichton, van halen, titanic, tombstone, aliens, weird science, vertical limit, true lies, thunderbirds, training day, as good as it gets, bobby, pay it forward, what women want, speed, speed 2 cruise control, humans being, minority report, lara croft, tomb raider, the haunting, tornado, hurricane

Id: anUmbKa6mhk

Length: 22min 17sec (1337 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 03 2020