Director Lee Isaac Chung Talks Glenn Powell and Tornadoes 5

Lee Isaac Chung is barely settled in a café chair parked on this South Pasadena sidewalk when he begins our conversation with the question he’s most expecting: “So how did I go from Minari to this?”

He laughs about it now, but this late June meeting is on the eve of a global Twisters media tour during which he’ll likely be asked this more times than he can count. Box office tracking is promising ahead of the July 18 domestic release. Test screenings have gone well. Golden boy Glen Powell’s smile is all over the trailer. And Universal Pictures, the film’s studio, is hardly the only conglomerate in town holding its breath in hopes that this spiritual sequel to a 1996 mega-hit will put bodies in theaters at home and abroad. Yet its success is ultimately riding on the unassuming 45-year-old indie filmmaker — one who not long ago considered quitting the business after a string of art house projects that never quite broke through.

That was until his quiet, semi-autobiographical 2020 feature rode its festival darling status all the way to the Academy Awards. His best director and original screenplay Oscar nominations for Minari opened dozens of doors for Chung, and, surprising everyone but himself, this is the one he stepped through. “When people saw the headline that I was doing Twisters, it didn’t make sense to them,” says Chung, who lives nearby with his wife and 10-year-old daughter. “It will once they see the movie.”

By your own admission, few expected this as your Minari follow-up. What were the other offers like?

There were a lot of scripts, and I quickly got the sense that people assumed I wanted to keep making things about the Korean American experience. It was a lot of intimate family dramas that felt like covering the same ground — stuff that I got out of my system with that movie.

Was it also a conscious decision to run in the opposite direction of the personal? I imagine rehashing the autobiographical elements of that film was draining. 

Very draining. When you make a film, you live in that emotional space for three years, so this one was just a lot of fun. I got to live in the thrill of what’s going on in the story. And I needed to live in something like that after Minari, which was deeply personal and, really, painful to work through. I didn’t want to go through that again. 

Did you have anxieties about being another award-winning indie director to tackle a blockbuster? The track record for folks who make that transition isn’t great, often getting noted to death or outright booted during production. 

I have a lot of willful naivete. So, when I took this on, I chose to be optimistic. Like, “I was made to make this project.” There was a learning curve to navigate all of elements that came with it. There’s obviously more notes on a film like this, but I knew why it was happening. I never thought it was detrimental to the project. 

What was the biggest learning curve? 

All the filming days that we had, I didn’t realize the work would be as intense as an indie film that’s shooting for only 25 days. Minari was 25 days, and I was sprinting with all of my energy, every moment of it. I had this assumption that a bigger film, a director does not feel that way — that you’d have time to think. No, it’s just more days of sprinting. 

Is there some kind of introductory PowerPoint presentation on how to tackle VFX and the very different postproduction process on a film of this scale?

I did an episode of The Mandalorian with Jon Favreau. When I came on board, he told me, “This is a bit of an academy where you can learn VFX and all the technology,” and I learned so much from him on that front. The car work, that was also a learning curve. I’d never filmed so much car stuff.

Now that you mention it, Twisters is almost as car-heavy as a George  Miller movie. 

So car-heavy! I didn’t realize that until we were in it and I was like, “Uh, this is a road movie!” I watched a lot of George Miller just to figure out how they’re rigging the cars. It was a lot of time spent in a follow van on dirt roads. 

There were a lot of hats in the ring for this job. What do you think differentiated your pitch?

I talked a lot about how I’d execute the technical aspects, but also about character and themes and how to tell this story. That part of the discussion resonated the most with Steven Spielberg, who was instrumental in bringing me board. He told me I’d be fine with the technical stuff, that I’d get it. Having a handle on character stuff is what he really dug into.

You cast Glen Powell on the eve of him becoming a bona fide movie star. Do you have any take on why Hollywood seems to be minting fewer of those?

Audiences wanting to spend time with an actor is ultimately what makes them a star. Right now, that only works if an actor feels authentic. Private life is public life. Glen is so charismatic and a good actor. It just makes sense. But we’re not giving enough actors opportunities to take charge in movies of this size. I am very happy that our executives took a gamble in tasking younger actors to refresh this IP. 

Are you concerned about people not seeing the movie in theaters because the very thing you’re depicting has already killed dozens of Americans this year?

The hardest element of this project was how to balance everything tonally and respectfully. Even now, I have to process this crazy year. We weren’t anticipating that this would be one of the worst years on record for tornado outbreaks. So I’m just trying to be sober about that and whether people want to turn out for it. There’s a contradictory element to tornadoes. They’re so destructive, yet we all want to see them.

In speaking with real storm chasers, did you find that people were influenced by the original movie? 

There were countless people who listed Twister as their origin story for how they got into weather. There was one meteorologist who even sent us pictures of her Twister-themed wedding. Our science adviser told us that enrollment at the University of Oklahoma’s meteorology program tripled after that film. 

What was the most grueling day?

Anything that we shot outside in El Reno, Oklahoma. We had 50 mile-per-hour winds destroy our set. We got shut down by lightning. When we were filming, a lot of those scenes were in a 106-degree heat wave. There was a jet engine on set that you could barely talk over. And in order to create the feeling of a storm-like sky, we needed a key light so bright and so hot, it felt like the actual sun. I still feel tired. 

What’s the most alarming conversation you’ve recently had with an executive? 

The hardest conversations are actually with the people who I worked with on this movie — people who are looking for jobs. It’s tough out there. Not only have things slowed down, productions have been moving overseas. I prefer it when people are able to work in places closer to their families. That’s become such a strain on people in the industry. I don’t know if there’s a way that we can bring more productions back to California, but I would love that.

It’s wild when you look at the statistics of how little shoots around L.A. anymore.

When I was working at LucasFilm, that was one of the conversations we often had on set — just how great it was to be working on projects of that scale close to home. There’s so much pressure for these projects to go elsewhere. I understand it, financially, because you end up getting 20 percent savings elsewhere. Studios are going to protect their bottom line. But, in certain situations, filmmakers are able to bring projects home or to places where they believe they needs to be set if they make the math work. Creators ought to be thinking about the impact of that location choice.

You were originally supposed to shoot Twisters outside Atlanta, but you took cuts elsewhere to shoot in Oklahoma, right?

And it was a sprint! We had fewer shoot days. We had fewer storm sequences. But when a filmmaker knows a place, that’s a leg up. I grew up around there, so I said, “Trust me, we’re going to save some time just because of that.” And we got the visuals I wanted.

Minari came out when Hollywood was investing in more Asian and Asian American stories after decades ignoring them. Do you feel like the effort has sustained? 

The number of scripts, short stories and books about Asian American characters I’ve received from executives who are not Asian tells me they still want to get those stories made. It’s not the obstacle that it felt like for me when I was younger. 

Your wife’s a therapist, who, I imagine, is aware of the bleak state of the entertainment industry. What do you think she’d say to the many people mulling new careers? 

She is very wise, and wise people look at the bigger picture. Some good advice that she’d give is to not let this job be your identity. That is something I take to heart. 

This story also appears in the July 22 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.