As a young man, Twisters director Lee Isaac Chung was sure that Twister, his movie’s precursor, was going to flop. The 1996 tornado epic was teased with tense footage from the POV of a driver, ending with a windshield smashed by a flying tractor tire. “I remember thinking, when I saw that, That’s not going to be an interesting movie,” Chung says. “When you see a tornado, where I grew up, you just run from it.”

Chung came by his skepticism honestly. Like the characters in his Oscar-nominated 2020 film, Minari, Chung’s Korean American family moved to Arkansas when he was a young child. A few weeks after the family moved into a trailer on the grounds of a farm, they got word that a tornado was approaching. “We didn’t know what we were supposed to do,” Chung says. His father drove the family to a low-lying area and said, “We’re going to climb down to this low part of the ground and hide out of the tornado comes,” the director remembers. “I remember that being quite a traumatic experience.”

When he went to see Twister in theaters at the age of 17, its opening scene—in which a family attempts to evade a tornado—brought it all back. “I remember telling my parents, ‘That reminded me so much of when we were running from that night tornado,’” Chung says. “It was an instant connection.”

His childhood roots came into play even before Chung accepted the job of directing Twisters. The film is set in Oklahoma, which “is really one of the big, key factors of why I wanted to make this movie,” Chung says. Minari was also set in that region. “I grew up right around there,” Chung says. “I could walk into Oklahoma where I lived in Arkansas…it’s just in the bones.”

His commitment to place meant that when the studio encouraged Chung to film the movie in Atlanta, he pushed back. “I asked the studio, ‘Please let me shoot it in Oklahoma. I’ll do anything.’” By cutting some visual effects and shortening the project’s filming schedule, he was able to make it happen.

Making the movie in the actual place it was set brought important verisimilitude, and Chung’s background in the region amped that up further. “Some of our team, they hadn’t ever been, really, on a farm,” Chung says. So it was up to the farm boy turned director to make sure that little details, such as gloves and patterns of apparel wear, were accurate. “I don’t think we see it enough in cinema, that area, so it is something I wanted to get right,” he says.

Both Twisters and Minari are disaster movies, Chung adds. In Minari, the disaster has a far smaller scale: The produce-packed barn at the Yi family’s farm burns to the ground. That personal tragedy “expressed something so visceral and unexplainable, mysterious, and it did the job of really transforming these characters. And I wondered, What would it be like to make an entire movie where that is happening over and over again?”

When he got the script for Twisters, Chung realized the tornados could take the place of Minari’s blaze. “I could really use those as a way to tell a story about people,” he says.

To do that, Chung began with Kevin Kelleher, the former deputy director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Severe Storms Laboratory, who acted as an adviser for both Twister and its sequel. “I would be constantly be talking to him, asking him about where the science is, and what I can read, what I can watch,” Chung says.

Then he went down a YouTube hole. “There is a deep pool of YouTube videos of tornadoes,” Chung says, mostly captured by amateur storm chasers. He’d clip footage of interest, then arrange it by where specific weather formations might fit in the Twisters script. It was a controversial decision, Chung says. “The scientists are very ambivalent about all these chasers. So any time I would tell them that I’m using videos of actual chasers, they would feel a little bit guarded about what I’m doing.”

“They feel like those guys are always in the way,” Chung says of the friction between storm chasers and weather professionals. “These guys are always out there making their videos while the scientists are out there trying to do real research.”

It’s a competitive tension that made its way into the final film, as Chung brought real storm chasers in to provide authentic color. “In the background you have these real storm chasers, with their real vehicles that are decked out,” Chung says. “There were a lot of interesting characters in that bunch.”

But the film’s biggest characters may be the twisters themselves. Citing Steven Spielberg as a primary influence, Chung says he sees 1975’s shark attack nightmare, Jaws, as a Twisters precursor. “He developed a language cinematically of really showing more the detailed effects of where a monster is rather than just showing the monster,” Chung says—a useful lesson when the monster in your movie is made of wind.

Spielberg’s take on War of the Worlds was also an inspiration. The 2015 alien invasion film, which starred Tom Cruise (whom, incidentally, Twisters star Glen Powell has cited as a mentor), informed how Chung framed many scenes. “In this film, the monster is very high up in the air,” Chung says. In many scenes from War of the Worlds, Cruise could just as easily “be looking at a tornado.”

The pandemic was on Chung’s mind as well. “We have gone through a time of trauma and fear in society,” he says. “It’s interesting to be making this movie now, when we went though this weird time, and now we’re wondering how we get back out there. Do we look to ways to be simply safe and hiding?”

The protagonist of Twisters, traumatized Kate (Daisy Edgar-Jones), personified that impulse. “I kind of see myself as Kate, in many ways,” Chung says. “I grew up on a farm, I headed to the cities. I felt like I needed to run away from this identity.” After his daughter was born, a lot of that self-protectiveness and fear started to slip away. “I started to see things more through her eyes, as a kid.”

That return to youth, to the kid who hid from an Arkansas tornado in a ditch, might be why Chung finds such a kinship with Kate. “There’s an element to Kate’s story where she just has to capture that childlike joy and go back to what she was always loving,” Chung says.

It’s a realization that set Chung up to chart his own Twisters course. Though he loves the original Twister and acknowledges the impact it had on his life, “I decided I’m just going to follow my own intuition and the things that give me delight, and see where that leads. This is my toy box, and I’m just going to play.”