Tornado Watch

How Lee Isaac Chung reimagined Twister, one of the biggest climate-disaster thrillers of all time

- Shirley Li

Lee Isaac Chung was a junior in high school in 1996 when he and his father walked into a theater in Fayetteville, Arkansas, to watch a movie about tornadoes. Chung was skeptical of the premise. How could you make a whole movie about this? he wondered. If a tornado comes, you just run and hide.

Throughout his childhood, when tornado season descended upon rural Arkansas, Chung would head outside to gaze at approaching storms. He found the buildup irresistible—the darkening skies, the shifting temperatures, the way the air itself seemed to change. “I would stay out there until it started raining,” he told me recently. “The adults are grabbing all the stuff, and I’m just standing out there, like …” He demonstrated: neck craned upward, eyes open wide, arms outstretched as if ready to catch the clouds.

Generally, though, a tornado warning meant boredom more than thrills. The first time his family heeded one, they piled into his father’s pickup truck at two in the morning, ready to leap out and duck into a ditch if a twister got too close. Waiting inside the truck, Chung fell asleep. The funnel never arrived. Hours later, he woke up and asked his sister if the whole experience had been a dream.

But that day in 1996, the movie Twister mesmerized him. He watched a vortex tear apart a drivein theater and a cow get lifted into the air, mooing mournfully as it soared. More than anything, Chung was compelled by the movie’s storm-chaser heroes. Like his boyhood self, they were awestruck by the uncontrollable forces before them. Unlike his family, they rushed toward the danger.

Twister captivated America, too. It was the second- highest-grossing movie of the year (behind Independence Day) and helped launch a series of climatecentric movies—The Perfect Storm, The Day After Tomorrow, 2012—that swallowed fishing boats, leveled cities, and demolished landmarks.