Perfect storm: How “Twisters” continues the legacy of a classic blockbuster with some, well, twists

Daisy Edgar-Jones, Glen Powell, Anthony Ramos, and director Lee Isaac Chung take EW inside the making of their blustery "standalone sequel."

"We got cows."

The Twister line was inescapable following the blockbuster disaster film's release in 1996, but it's just as apropos over a quarter century later on a Universal soundstage as Anthony Ramos joins his Twisters costars Glen Powell and Daisy Edgar-Jones on the Universal City, Calif., set of their Entertainment Weekly photo shoot.

Powell's rescue pup Brisket has been everyone's favorite guest all morning, but Ramos walks in with his own companion: an inflatable cow he's named Nancy. “Nancy's a star,” Ramos declares of the petite plastic pet he's carried with him since CinemaCon in Las Vegas the weekend prior. Indeed, Nancy has been all over social media — but she's about to be upstaged as Ramos enters the set and discovers a life-size cow statue. "Oh, s---," the Hamilton and In the Heights alum exclaims. "It's Nancy's mom!"

The talk of offspring is fitting, given the actors have gathered to promote their follow-up to the Helen Hunt-Bill Paxton hit. (All involved avoid calling it a traditional sequel, instead using terms like "standalone sequel" or "current-day chapter" — meaning it exists in the world of the original film but with no continued story or returning characters.) Smiles burst across their faces when discussing the 20 million views their Twisters Super Bowl trailer has racked up on YouTube and the thunderous applause they received at their CinemaCon presentation. But they get more serious when asked about the first time they saw the original, Powell leaning in to share his memory. "Growing up in Texas, Twister was one of the most iconic movies of all time," the Top Gun: Maverick and Anyone But You star tells EW. "You grow up in Tornado Alley, and that's the monster that exists in your own backyard."

It's an experience Powell shares with his Twisters director, Lee Isaac Chung, the Oscar-nominated writer and director best known for his quiet, semi-autobiographical 2021 Best Picture nominee Minari. Twisters executive producer Steven Spielberg & Co. learned of Chung's ability to direct action from his work on Lucasfilm's The Mandalorian and upcoming Star Wars series Skeleton Crew, but, more importantly, the Golden Globe winner grew up in rural Arkansas near the Oklahoma border. "From what I understand, they were hoping that they could find a filmmaker who comes from the area," Chung explains. "There's just a feeling when you're living in that part of the country where you have to be humble to nature and to weather. I wanted to bring that feeling of what it's like to live in that part of the country and deal with nature: to be in awe of it, to fear it, but also to be in love with it. I wanted to combine all of those things in this movie."

When Edgar-Jones and Ramos heard Chung was attached, they jumped at the chance to work with the director, whom the cast refers to by his middle name. "The idea of seeing someone like Isaac — who's so incredibly good at crafting relationships and stories and character — take on this huge scale of a project was so exciting," says Edgar-Jones, who wrote a letter to Chung detailing how she felt she was on a similar career trajectory, ready to graduate from smaller projects like Normal People (which garnered her a 2021 Golden Globe nomination). Adds Ramos: "Sometimes when these big movies come around, maybe the script doesn't feel like it's all the way there. Or it feels like they pick a director who can just get bossed around by the studio. But when I saw Isaac was directing this, I was like, 'Nah, this feels different. I know that this guy's going to do this film in a way where we really care about the people, and we really want them to survive, and we really want them to win.'"

The team started working off a script by Mark L. Smith (The Boys in the Boat, The Revenant) from a story by Top Gun: Maverick director Joseph Kosinski, who'd signed on to helm Twisters in 2020 before leaving for another project. (In 2021, Helen Hunt expressed interest in directing a Twister sequel she was writing with Daveed Diggs, but it never came to fruition.) Chung loved Smith's "smart" script but also collaborated with his cast to flesh out their characters: Edgar-Jones as Kate, a former storm chaser who gave up her pursuits after a fatal "wrong call" while studying at Muskogee State University (the alma mater of Hunt and Paxton's Twister characters, though neither is referenced in the new film); Powell as Tyler, a former rodeo star who has amassed a large social media following as a "tornado wrangler"; and Ramos as Javi, Kate's former classmate who persuades her back into the field to help his company, which is developing technology to help predict tornado strikes.

"It really felt like a story just about Kate and Tyler, and Javi was kind of like the segue," Ramos says of the first script draft he read. "But now, it truly feels like he's in the center of that. We feel the connection between him and Kate throughout the film. We really worked to develop Javi in a way where it felt like, 'Oh yeah, no, we need this guy.'"

And Javi needs Kate, traveling to New York to convince her to return home to Oklahoma and the profession she left behind. "What jumped off the page to me was that this character had sort of PTSD, really," Edgar-Jones says of Kate. "But she's trying what she can to move past it in order to help other people. I found it very interesting that throughout the script, there's this idea of taming a tornado. Storms can be such a great metaphor for inner turmoil, and I think Kate is trying to tame both."

Then there's Tyler, established in the movie's first trailer as an arrogant influencer who sells merch with his face on it. "I understand that when my function within the movie is fun, I get to be a wild, rowdy cowboy," says Powell. "While everyone else is driving as quickly away from a tornado as they possibly can, I'm the guy driving directly into it. It was just a blast to play. Tyler is who everyone wants to be, the guy that's hollering and screaming and laughing when the chaos is happening."

But, unlike the original film, Twisters gets cloudy when it comes to who you're rooting for. Kate and Javi? Tyler? Tyler and Kate? Even visually, things are inverted — with Tyler's ragtag team of chasers (played by Brandon Perea, Sasha Lane, Tunde Adebimpe, and Katy O'Brian) much more akin to Hunt and Paxton's band of misfits, and Javi's crew uniformed and well-funded like the group led by Cary Elwes' arrogant Jonas in Twister.

"I found those dynamics of shifts in characters and allegiances very refreshing because I feel like, culturally, we're at a moment where we often look at each other as black-and-white antagonists, that we are polar opposites of other people," says Chung. "We often don't look at the gray zone that all of us are in. But what I like about Mark's script is that he's portraying people in their complexity, with this idea that all of us have good and bad — and the hope is that we find a way to come together, especially in the context of greater societal issues, such as the fact that storms are intensifying in this country."

According to Chung, the closest thing to a Jonas character in the new film is Javi's business partner Scott (played by James Gunn's new Superman star David Corenswet). And stepping into the fish-out-of-water (cow-in-the-air?) role filled by Jami Gertz in Twister is Downton Abbey and The Crown actor Harry Hadden-Paton as Ben, a risk-averse British journalist writing a profile on Tyler.

"This is an incredible ensemble, so many amazing actors who have been the lead of their own movies," Powell says of the cast, which also includes Maura Tierney, Kiernan Shipka, Daryl McCormack, and Nik Dodani. "I wouldn't say that this movie's like a normal movie in the way that you know who's going to end up in a tornado and who's going to end up on the ground because everybody's a star in their own right. The fact that Lee Isaac Chung was able to bring this group of people together, I think, is really going to keep the audience on the edge of their seat to see who makes it to the end."

Where the wind comes sweepin’ down the plane

Back at Universal, our cover stars have moved to the backlot, taking photos on a street Desperate Housewives fans would recognize as Wisteria Lane. (Powell says it’s also where, early in his career, he'd wander after auditions elsewhere on the lot to snag free Housewives craft services, sneaking past security guards by pretending to be on a very important phone call.)

Enchanted by a retro Super 8 camera being used to capture behind-the-scenes footage, Powell asks to take the reins, grabbing shots of his costars — Edgar-Jones dancing barefoot as a rare-but-on-theme April shower begins to fall (perhaps the first time an EW photo director has hoped for rain). The camaraderie between the trio is clear, as is their tolerance for withstanding the elements after months spent dirty and wet, facing jet-engine-level winds often produced by actual jet engines.

Twisters will feature plenty of CGI effects from visual effects supervisor Ben Snow (who started his career at Industrial Light & Magic working on the 1996 movie, just one of many creative team members who returned). But Chung was determined to film with as many practical effects as possible on location in Oklahoma — shortening production to just 60 days instead of shooting in more budget-friendly Georgia. "There was a perfect window of time that it would work to film it during tornado season," says the director. "So, in a way, it just kind of felt like we were chasing a tornado."

"It made a big difference being on set in Oklahoma," adds Ramos. "I'm talking in the middle of small, small towns in Oklahoma. In spots where they're like, 'Yo, there's a tornado that just hit 30 minutes away.' And you're like, 'Oh s---.' They're like, 'We got to stop filming,' or, 'We got to go to the trailers [for safety].'"

The irony of storms interrupting fake storms is not lost on the Twisters team. "There was a [scene] where this farmers' market is supposed to get blown down the street," says Powell. "And right before we were going to start shooting, getting blown down the street by jet engines, a real windstorm — it was 80 miles an hour, or something like that — just took the entire market. And so we were just chilling inside while they had to rebuild a farmers' market so we could destroy it again."

And if it wasn't the wind, it was the heat. "Some days, the rain was genuinely steaming off of us. Every time they doused us with water, they had to keep doing it because we dried so quickly," says Edgar-Jones. "Nothing can prepare you for a shoot like this, being pelted with rain and chunks of ice and wind. I can imagine what being tumble-dried feels like. I think I slept so well after every day of work."

When they weren't counting cows in their sleep, the cast enjoyed nights of line dancing, fried chicken, and even a screening of Twister at a theater in Oklahoma City. One evening, they braved a torrential downpour and windstorm as they left a bar. "We were running through the streets totally covered in rain," says Edgar-Jones. "Stuff like that really bonds you." But they also took their roles seriously, tackling character homework from Chung (who assigned Edgar-Jones and Powell to watch Fire of Love, the Oscar-nominated documentary about a volcanologist couple, to inspire Kate and Tyler's flirtation dynamic) as well as studying the science behind their characters' passions by training with real-life storm chasers and meteorology professors.

The cast also pulled from their own experiences with severe weather. Powell recalled an early memory of taking shelter in a carpet shop with his aunt and cousins as an F5 tornado blew through his native Texas. Ramos thought back to the two days he spent sheltering in place after Hurricane Sandy in 2012 or when he traveled to Puerto Rico and helped clear out an elderly man’s home in the wake of Hurricane Maria in 2017. "It really just gives you a different perspective on life," Ramos says of witnessing the destruction as well as the perseverance.

Growing up in London, Edgar-Jones had no similar memories to pull from ("We're so excited if there's a little bit of snow or wind," she says with a laugh), but a recent trip to New Orleans gave her something to work with. "I think it was my second night there, and I woke up to a tornado alert on my phone. I'd only gotten alerts for things like crimes before, so I was like, 'Oh, what do I do? Do I get under the bed?' I had no idea what to do. I just assumed that meant that it was upon me. I was just like, 'Well, there you go. Just got here, and I'm not going to survive this thing.'" The incident stuck with Edgar-Jones so much that it inspired a pitch she made to Chung: "I had an idea that when we were in the rodeo [scene], what if everybody in the audience's phone goes off and that's what alerts them first. And he was like, 'Yeah, cool, it's in the film,'" she says of what became a prominent moment in the movie’s second trailer. "Isaac was so flexible and relaxed and really open to ideas like that the entire time."

Well, at least he seemed relaxed. "It was really daunting," Chung says of building an entire rodeo in an empty field, his crew going as far as mixing sand and paint to get the grounds their desired color.
"That was one of our North Star scenes. I kept telling the crew that the rodeo itself represents a lot of what that region of America is about. It is a sport that honors the work of farming and ranching," continues Chung, who chose the setting instead of the baseball game Smith wrote in his script. "I wanted us to portray it with a lot of beauty so we could better help audiences get a sense of the things that we might lose if we don't do something. In other words: In a disaster movie, things are going to get destroyed — but we need to care about the things that are being destroyed."

Chung says they were in the middle of filming the complex sequence (with both "stunt and rodeo animals and riders, and incredible wind machines and car crashes — everything we could think of") when production shut down in July 2023 with just three weeks left to film. For all the concern about lightning strikes, it was the Screen Actors Guild strike that paused production for months.

The film's July 17, 2024, release date loomed closer and closer as the strike progressed, but Chung chose to focus on the positive as the weeks turned into months. "I did feel like the time away was very helpful for me to catch my breath because it did feel like a sprint," he says. "I could just step back and look at the story, look at what we had, and figure out if there were scenes that I didn't need anymore or if there were scenes and shots that I absolutely did need. Oftentimes, when you're making movies like this, you just have to be in it and work by instinct day in and day out. It becomes difficult to step back and take a look at the bigger picture, so I felt like the strike was very helpful in that regard."

What wasn't helpful was the change of weather by the time the strike ended in early November. "It was just absolutely freezing, and I was in shorts," laments Edgar-Jones. It was so cold the actors could see their breath, which didn't work for selling Oklahoma in the summertime. Production "was like, 'Can you suck on these ice cubes so we can stop the [condensation] from coming out when you guys speak?'" Ramos recalls. "That was brutal. But we survived."

"If you were a prima donna or high maintenance, this was not the set for you," adds Powell. "This was a set where you were going to get dusty; you were going to get hit in the face with hay and dirt and ice cubes and rocks and furniture. And if you were not patient and if you were not down to believe in [the team's] vision, it could have been a pretty torturous process. But we really had a great team. We had a really great cast. Everybody had a great attitude and was down for the cause, so it made getting hit in the face with things quite fun."

When the wind comes right behind the rain

It's fairly common for stars to have what’s referred to as a "hard out" at the end of a photo shoot — meaning they must be out the door at a certain time because of another commitment. Usually, it's because they're due back on set for their current project or have a live interview across town. But as the sun lowers on Wisteria Lane, Powell and Edgar-Jones have a flight to Oklahoma to catch — not for reshoots or press, but to go on an experience that evaded them last summer during filming due to insurance concerns: a ride-along with the storm chasers who served as consultants on the movie (some of them also on Twister).

"We started our trip at the National Weather Center in one of these really great storm-chasing vehicles," Powell tells EW a few weeks later over Zoom. The actor was humbled to see the center had a Flying Cow Cafe, a signed Twister poster, and a model of the "Dorothy" devices from the 1996 film. "You see all these references, and what you realize is how much a movie like this really defines a community," he says. "It gives a language to a community, and they take ownership over it. And when you do it right, there's nothing more powerful than to give people a face to the world and to help them explain their passion to people. That's really what I think this movie's going to do."

After about eight hours, the stars ended their day without a tornado touchdown. "But there was a serious mesocyclone with a real hook, so we were moments away," Powell says excitedly. "We had that sort of electric moment where we saw something descending and were like, 'Come on, come on, come on...'" Adds Edgar-Jones: "It was such a rush. I really want to see one. I cannot have made this film and not have seen a tornado, so I'm so determined. I am desperate to go back."

Does that sentiment stand for returning for another Twisters as well? "I feel like there's more to this story," says Edgar-Jones, echoing responses from her castmates and director. "We were thinking it would be cool if the next one was Twisterss, and they just keep adding an 's' for every new film."

Sure, but 2wisters is just sitting right there...

Please consider assisting the American Red Cross in helping people affected by disasters like tornadoes, fires, and countless other crises by making a gift to American Red Cross Disaster Relief.

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Directed by Alison Wild + Kristen Harding

Photography by Beau Grealy

Motion - DP: Zafer Ülkücü; 1st AC: Luis Salgado; Lighting Designer: Max Bingham; Gaffer: Joel Camacho; Key Grip: Miguel Escalona; Dolly Grip: Mark Armenta; G&E Swing: Andrew Moldanado

Production - Producers: Johnny North, Mandy Philp/Glass Engine; Associate Producer: Shannon Segura; Production Manager: Tim Cronin; Set Dresser: Gia Carley 

Photo - 1st Assistant: Sam Rivera; 2nd Assistant: Andrew Gerry; Digital Tech: AJ Wilson

Post-Production - Color Correction: Nate Seymour/TRAFIK; VFX: Carlos Morales/Forager; Design: Chuck Kerr; GFX: Hannah Namnoum; Sound Design: Bobb Barito

Behind-the-Cover Video Interview - DP: Eric Longden; Cam Op: Justice Ott; Sound: Patrick Hurley; Super 8 Videographer: Matilda Montgomery; Video Producer: Louis Leuci; Editor: David Rice

EW Creative - Photo Director: Alison Wild; Head of Video: Kristen Harding; Creative Director: Chuck Kerr

Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly.