The Academy Award-nominated filmmaker behind that bittersweet and semi-autobiographical portrait of South Korean immigrant dynamics in rural Arkansas is now the director of “Twisters” — not a reboot, not a sequel, but an extension of the territory built (and destroyed) Done) through the 1996 Twister blockbuster. Here, a team of science-loving storm chasers led by Daisy Edgar-Jones and Anthony Ramos become rivals to a group of scrappy mystery seekers led by Glen Powell in this summer’s hottest blockbuster spectacle — and put to use most of it. Strong arguments enjoy the big screen.
However, back to that barn-burning thing that got its director so drunk. In “Minari”, Jacob (Steven Yeun) watches as flames engulf his barn, later his wife’s mother (Yuh-jung Young) sets it on fire. The filming of that generation was the one-time top Chung has been following ever since, just like some of the storm chasers in “Twisters.” A realistic solution to those consequences, which involved a controlled burning of the barn, inspired at least two non-negotiables that entered the realm of Chung’s “Twister” IP: taking photographs on location in Oklahoma, and practical The balance of CGI results wanted a $200 million sequel.
“I’m very hard on myself as a filmmaker,” Chung told IndieWire in a latest interview to talk about “Twisters,” her first feature story since Minari and her second work following Big Name Wars. He directed one episode of Layout. “The Mandalorian.”
“When I worked on Lucasfilm projects (including the upcoming ‘Skeleton Crew’), I felt like I was really going through a learning curve. Those shows are very VFX-heavy, so in many ways, I was learning (how) to figure out what looks good and what makes me want to do it again later. Often, the shots that really excite me are always the ones that have a lot of the more practical effects in them,” he mentioned. “The final anchor for me was the shot I did in ‘Minari’ of the barn going up in flames, which was completely practical. It was much bigger than I expected. And it just endures because it’s real, the fact that we created that thing and let it go. I am following him a lot now.
However, “Twisters” co-producers Common Pictures and Amblin weren’t following the Cannes-winning director of humanitarian dramas like the Rwandan genocide picture “Munyurangabo,” a retelling of Jan de Bont’s 1996 film. Nor were the stakeholders interested in the voices of some of the newest stars, Helen Hunt, some of the “all black and brown” crew of Storm Chasers, who they handed over, according to the actor.
Lee Isaac Chung has not spoken to Hunt (whom he calls “a screaming genius”) or De Bont (who recently claimed he had not heard of “Twisters” before the trailer collision).
Chung noted, “I don’t know what (Hunt’s) version was, and unfortunately, I haven’t been able to talk to him, nor to Jan de Bont, nor to any of the cast in the film.” “We have a few people on our team who worked on the original. When I read the script (by Mark L. Smith with a story by Joseph Kosinski), I really liked his vision, that it would be a new story, with new characters and a completely new science project… I I really think Helen Hunt is a brilliant person and I would love to work with her. However, this option was never a part of my joining.”
Chung’s sudden move from “Minari” to “Twisters” became something of a head: Why turn to IP so soon after Oscar luck with a latest, personal project? Well, “Twisters” is still personal, as the second-generation South Korean-American filmmaker grew up in Arkansas, after all, in the Twister street scene. However, Chung was acutely aware of the population’s wariness over his perceived surprising change in the franchise dimension.
“My sister is very good at telling me what people are saying,” he said. “There was some kind of meme. James Cameron, when he was pitching ‘Aliens’, he created a dollar sign at the end and put ‘Alien$’ with the dollar sign. People were saying so. Various family members were asking me, ‘When you proposed this project, did you put a dollar sign after “Twister”?’ I have to tell them that I did not do this kind of thing. Before I came into this film, I didn’t know much about it, but there were some friends in the industry who were advising me, they would often say, ‘People will think this is strange,’ they would often advise me. Used to say, ‘Forget all this. If you really want to do this, go for it.”
“I would love to break down this image that people have of me that I wouldn’t do anything like that,” Chung said.
Like many people who grew up in unexpectedly climate-ridden playgrounds like Oklahoma (where “Twisters”) And “Twister” each shot on location. According to his administrators) or Arkansas, Chung never actually saw a tornado with his personal optic, but only heard of them from the safety of shelters.
“I had a similar experience with hiding and running away from one, but … by the time I was in high school, I can’t even remember tornado alarms, sirens and all those things, because it just became part of it.” It’s about the nature of life there,” Chung said. “It’s like these things are happening in Southern California, but on a day-to-day level, you’re aware of it. Know, but it is not causing you to live in panic.
Post-“Minari,” ex-“Twisters” head gets severed, filming on location in Oklahoma filled the movie with a different feeling, as Chung’s request took up a portion of the shooting days .
Chung said, “I’ve adopted this mindset that, in many ways, some of the scenes we’ll film, we’ll just go to a location and be very loose in the way we film the scenes and react to what we find on location ” mentioned. “I felt like it would speed up our timeline a lot more than people realize… If we were trying to mimic Oklahoma, the magic trick of actually allowing that to happen would be more than just allowing us to be in that location. If we were filming in Georgia, we would have to find locations where there was a clear horizon or a lot of VFX. Which has its own budget issues. It was kind of a gamble, and as soon as we got into it, we were definitely proving that it was speeding up our production and helping us with the budget. .
In line with the pivotal barn burning incident on “Minari” that first influenced him on the playground, Chung also offered tangible, tactile storytelling in the significant CGI substructure of “Twisters.” “I think about it in terms of layers, where the last layer, the background layer, is going into the tornado within any given frame, and I knew that had to be CGI because there’s really no way to capture that moment. ,” Chung mentioned. However, “all the layers between the whirlwind and the actors and the camera… needed to be as practical as possible. What makes that background layer feel real is what it’s doing to the very tangible things in the foreground. Often, those little things, those details in the foreground, are the things that make the background real.
Chung noted, “It meant throwing a lot of things at the actors. It meant little, weird details that we were introducing, like the way the Coke machine pulls into a pool, little things that we were doing to make you feel immersed in this gorgeous space where this crazy thing is happening right here. Coming to you.
One symbol to remember is about the characters taking shelter in a movie theater during what appears to be an apocalyptic storm. Cyclonic winds tear the silver covering from the theater wall, spilling out of the screen-shaped hollow into the dangerous outside world. Chung was fascinated by the metaphorical possibilities of this layout for theaters at a tremendous rate of deceleration and how it would make moviegoers suddenly aware of themselves.
“From the very beginning, the design of that theater, and the size of the screen, and the special effects, and the stunts that happen in that sequence, I had in mind that people would be sitting on the edge of their seats watching all of this,” Chung outlined. And sending out a rally to demand cinemas was somehow part of his motive for making the film.
“In my life, I find that I’m spending a lot of time looking at small screens and it’s making my brain smaller,” Chung said. “There’s something about shared experiences of things that are much bigger than us and I think it opens our minds a lot. I was thinking about those issues and how the movie theater experience is an amazing art form that we have for people, and how much more we need to invest in the art of creating awe for people. When the script for ‘Twisters’ arrived in my inbox, it checked every box I was already thinking about. …Now that I was working on a much larger scale than ‘Minari,’ I knew there were a lot of jobs dependent on the success of the film, the film, and I knew there was some weakness there just by going to the theater. Those thoughts came to my mind a lot, and they carried over into the theater scene at the end of this film. I included some of those ideas in that order.
He said, “It is our responsibility as filmmakers to prove why this art form is good and should be protected. I’m going to work really hard to make that happen.
‘Twisters’ will be released in theaters on Friday, July 19.
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