My name is Lee Isaac Chung and I'm the director of Twisters. This is a scene that takes place about halfway through the film. Internally, we might all the time say that is T4, tornado number 4, because we number each of our tornadoes. And Kate is played by Daisy Edgar-Jones. And then now we have Tyler, played by Glen Powell. Other interesting actors on this sequence are James Paxton, who is definitely Bill Paxton's son. You only see him very briefly. He's the person within the couple attempting to drive away from this tornado. No! Stop! And Lily Smith, the daughter of our author Mark L. Smith. And then now we have Samantha Ireland, Aila Grey, the little girl. And we also had Jeff Swearingen, who plays the unlucky receptionist. I actually desired to film a nighttime tornado because I grew up near Tornado Alley and the nighttime tornadoes were all the time the scariest. The intention behind it was to create that feeling, that subjective feeling of what it's wish to experience a tornado in real time. We had Scott Fisher, our computer graphics guy, who did a whole lot of interesting things in that scene after we saw the Coke machine fall over and I saw the highest shell come off. We arranged the highest shell to fly into the wind. Jeff Swearingen was able to be pulled into the air. And after he got pulled back, we switched Jeff out for this excellent stuntman who we arranged to truly get pulled into the air. I believe he flew about 65 feet. And then we slammed that trailer into the sting of the pool. That caused a whole lot of debris to fall down. And that was slightly scary to film because when the trailer falls on these actors, it's loud, very loud. And I assumed the actors were really great sports doing that. We obviously got them to safety because we were shooting a sequence where the background is unbroken and later after they come out of this swimming pool, it's all destroyed, we needed to destroy the set. So each time we were filming on this swimming pool, there have been people outside, our crew, destroying the set. So this was happening at the identical time we were filming all of the stuff within the pool. The swimming pool had never actually been there. We had found this motel where there have been three separate buildings. And what we did was we built the hotel out in a horseshoe shape and built an office in order that later we could destroy those parts of our set to make it appear to be a tornado had really swept through a horseshoe motel. When we went out with those guys with the crane, it was really a gorgeous shot. I give a whole lot of credit to Geoff Haley, our incredible cinematographer, for all of his technical expertise that he dropped at this whole sequence to ensure that our camera was straight and that every one of those moments by some means worked so seamlessly.
image credit : www.nytimes.com