We Rewatched Twister And It's Completely Different Now

Don't breathe ... don't look back ... because you might miss out on "Twisters," the summer blockbuster event that Looper's review called a "charming, admirable update on a classic." Coming nearly 30 years after the original "Twister" hit theaters in 1996, the Daisy Edgar-Jones and Glen Powell-led reboot-sequel has somehow managed to chase down all that excitement to deliver fans one more ride they'll never forget.

That said, if you're like us, 30 years is a bit long to go without a rewatch to refresh our memories of what happened in the first film. Featuring Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton as storm chasers (the former of whom almost didn't star in the film), "Twister" became one of the biggest hits of the '90s, raking in nearly $500 million at the worldwide box office. As you relive that experience while rewatching the film at home, you're sure to notice your perspective on certain moments has changed dramatically.

For our part, we can't help but see it in the context of all the wild behind-the-scenes stories that have come out since its release. From hepatitis vaccines and physical altercations to imaginative effects and real-life tornadoes, we've funneled all this info into one article so you can go into your own "Twister" rewatch with clear skies ahead.

Though disaster movies like "Twister" have existed at least since John Ford's 1937 drama "The Hurricane," the former still feels like a distinct and fresh chapter in the genre. This is largely thanks to director Jan de Bont, a Dutch filmmaker who was then best known for helming the 1994 Keanu Reeves action film "Speed." Before that, he enjoyed an extensive career as a cinematographer, shooting classics like "The Hunt for Red October," "Basic Instinct," and "Die Hard." But while "Speed" proved he had what it took to execute a major technical achievement, his follow-up project wasn't meant to be "Twister" at all — it was supposed to be the first American adaptation of "Godzilla."

De Bont worked on "Godzilla" for a significant amount of time before his version fell apart due to budget disagreements. With new advancements in technology, the director was eager to push the boundaries of visual effects in his next project. Fortunately, producer Steven Spielberg asked de Bont about doing "Twister." Perhaps because he had just left a creature feature, de Bont pitched a version of the film where the title storm wasn't just a force of nature, but a terrifying, fully characterized monster. "I was after a Grimm fairy tale where the monster comes out of dark clouds," he told The Philadelphia Inquirer. With this in mind, one can imagine Godzilla in a few "Twister" scenes now instead of a tornado.

Another creative voice lending a fantastical, creature-feature undertone to "Twister" was writer Michael Crichton, the acclaimed scribe behind "Jurassic Park" and "Westworld," who wrote the script with his then-wife, retired horror actor Anne-Marie Martin. But while Jan de Bont drew his inspiration from "Godzilla" and "The Wizard of Oz," Crichton and Martin found their way into the story through a romantic comedy.

After "Twister" became a success, there were actually multiple formal claims of plagiarism, all of which were dismissed during the multiple lawsuits that followed. What they did reveal, however, were bits and pieces about Crichton's writing process for the 1996 film. According to his testimony, he and Martin wanted to write a story centered around tornadoes after seeing an episode of the PBS television series "Nova" (it was likely Season 12, Episode 17, "Tornado!," which aired in 1985 and followed a team of storm chasers like those seen in "Twister").

The writing duo didn't have a breakthrough in their process until Martin suggested they think a few decades into the past, from the same era of filmmaking as "The Hurricane." But rather than borrow from that disaster flick, she wanted to riff on the romantic and occupational rivalry found in "His Girl Friday." This ultimately helped shape the film's subplots, and explains why people like star Helen Hunt insist "Twister" is secretly a rom-com.

The story's rom-com roots didn't make production on "Twister" a love story. In fact, based on reports coming out even at the time, the atmosphere on the set was less of a love story and more of a "Marriage Story" — in the sense that there was apparently a lot of screaming, some violence, and likely a few people thinking some unkind thoughts about Jan de Bont.

In an absolutely scathing 1995 report by Entertainment Weekly, it was revealed that between 20 and 40 members of the crew walked off set — led by cinematographer Don Burgess of "Forrest Gump" fame — due to alleged verbal and physical abuse from de Bont. He was known for shouting the phrase "f***ing hell s***" in fits of rage on set, and in one instance called Burgess's team "incompetent." It was also alleged that an angry de Bont pushed a camera assistant because they disrupted a take — which de Bont himself seemingly confirmed in a statement. "I cued action, and he [walked] right in the middle of the scene," he told EW. "We kept losing good performances because of stupid things like that."

Though Burgess didn't comment on these conditions at the time, he did ultimately quit the film and was replaced by Jack N. Green. In hindsight, it's amazing the film exists at all, much less that it's as cohesive as it wound up being.

It seems that Jan de Bont's frustrations with the crew were exacerbated by exterior logistical headaches, such as using loud wind machines and filming during inclement weather — including "genuine funnel clouds" and dangerous winds that were commonplace while filming in Oklahoma. "The weather was not only unpredictable, but incredible," he told Entertainment Weekly. "In the morning, it would rain; two hours later there would be sunshine. Then the hard winds would blow." But real-life tornadoes appeared to be just one of many hazards faced by those working on "Twister" — including and perhaps especially stars Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton.

When you watch the film and see their characters Jo and Bill Harding in sequences of peril, keep in mind that the actors probably were as well. For example, in the first action sequence which sees the pair crashing a truck into a muddy ditch while fleeing from a tornado, the murky standing water was apparently so suspicious that Hunt and Paxton had to be immunized for hepatitis. Then came the blindings.

In order to emulate the look of dangerous weather, the crew relied on lighting the actors with bright, 16,000-watt light bulbs that temporarily impaired the actors' eyesight afterward. If all that wasn't enough, Hunt was struck by a car door while filming a chase sequence that was rumored to have given her a concussion.

If you're the type that likes to visit the real-life locations where your favorite films were made, we have some bad news. While the iconic farmhouse seen in some scenes of "Twister" did actually exist, it has since been destroyed — ironically, by a real tornado.

During the spring of 2010, six tornadoes touched down in Oklahoma all at once, one of them finding the small Fairfax farm that was used in the film. J. Berry Harrison Sr. — the farm's owner — said that the real tornado even took a similar path to the film's tornado through his farm. It was one of nine buildings he lost during the storm, though he was grateful that no one in his family was hurt.

In a similarly harrowing instance of life imitating art, a Canadian drive-in movie theater was destroyed by a tornado around the same time "Twister" was released with a sequence of a tornado destroying a drive-in theater playing "The Shining." While rumors continue to persist, however, that the real theater was actually playing "Twister" when the cyclone struck, the reality is that the theater wasn't able to get any movie started due to the weather.

Though Michael Crichton and Anne-Marie Martin wrote the original screenplay for "Twister," the final product seen and heard in the film was the work of a few other writers (including Steven Zaillian, Jeff Nathanson, and Joss Whedon), while Helen Hunt helped revise some of the script's more potentially problematic elements.

Hunt revealed to Vulture in 2020 that earlier drafts of the script included a "catty" dynamic between her and her female co-stars — namely "Sixteen Candles" star Jami Gertz, who played Bill Harding's new fiancee Melissa Reeves. "I raised my hand and said, 'That's not gonna be fun to play or to watch. I'm not sure if I want to do that,'" Hunt recalled. She added that Jan de Bont encouraged a level of collaboration on set, which gave her the impetus to suggest a different angle for Jo and Melissa's relationship. 

Hunt couldn't remember who was responsible for what aspects of the script, due to how many writers were involved, but said that her decision to speak up shaped her friendship with Gertz and their dynamic on screen. "Both as characters and actors on set, we just kind of linked arms," she recalled. "I liked her a lot. She got pummeled, too."

Although Jan de Bont staged the action and destruction as though the tornado itself was a monster, the visuals only did half the work. To really sell it as a threatening beast, the sound design team infused the twister with sampled and edited soundbites from many different sources — including, rather infamously, a camel's moan.

If you listen closely in certain scenes — like the one we mentioned above that required Hunt and Paxton to get immunized for hepatitis — the tornado has an unidentifiable roar to it, a bit too throaty to be a lion. These are merely altered camel noises, pitched down by supervising sound editor Stephen Hunter Flick. According to the book "Twister: The Science of Tornadoes and the Making of a Natural Disaster Movie" by Keay Davidson, Flick took a strong liking to these moans because of their "cavernous" sound quality that "captured the eerie vastness of a tornado." He also hilariously described the sound as "wet and lugubrious and nasty."

Davidson also noted that the sound design team made car-mounted recording devices that consisted of a microphone being jammed in a box with chicken wire, which also helped capture tornado sounds used in the film. All their hard work paid off, as "Twister" was ultimately nominated for Best Sound Design at the 1997 Academy Awards.

Admittedly, the idea of making meteorologists seem like cool action heroes feels like a bit of a stretch — unless, of course, the meteorologist you're imagining in your head is a storm chaser played by Bill Paxton. In that case, it may have literally caused a measurable statistical bump in Oklahomans who decided to pursue meteorology careers.

In the five years after "Twister" arrived in theaters, Oklahoma University saw a 50% increase in interest in the field, with the size of its program doubling. One of those students was Jeff Snyder, who was a high school student when the film came out in 1996. Instantly transfixed, he began watching it once every month before devoting his life to studying tornadoes — which he eventually did as a full-time storm chaser and research scientist. Harold Brooks, a scientist who served as an advisor on the film, agreed that "Twister" made tornadoes and meteorology a popular interest among locals, but felt the movie may have left them with warped expectations. "Everybody wanted to be a chaser," he told The Oklahoman in 2016. "They thought chasing was part of the job."

When Paxton died at the age of 61 in 2017 due to complications from heart surgery, a network of storm chasers coordinated the use of data points to spell his initials across Kansas and Oklahoma, a fitting tribute that shows how much of an impact he had on the community.

Though "Twister" wound up being one of the highest-grossing films of the year, Bill Paxton was concerned while filming that the critical response would ruin his credibility in the entertainment industry. "I knew critically they (critics) were going to paint a bull's-eye on me when 'Twister' came out," the then 42-year-old actor said in a 1997 interview with Telegram and Gazette.

This concern wasn't particularly unfounded either. Given how chaotic the environment was on set, it isn't hard to imagine Paxton felt uneasy about his ability to create a credible character within a film so unruly. Currently, "Twister" has a "fresh" Rotten Tomatoes score of 64%, with a dour audience score of 58%. "I see so many actors, they get to a certain prominence and then their next couple of movies are panned, and the next thing you know, they're out the door," he shared, specifically citing his friend Rob Lowe. "And it's really sad."

In reaction to this anxiety, Paxton began producing his next film, "Traveller," while shooting "Twister," even using his position to give cinematographer Jack N. Green his directorial debut. He also followed that up with another disaster film noted at the time to be a risky career choice — James Cameron's "Titanic."

Part of what inspired Jan de Bont to sign onto films like "Twister" and "Godzilla" in the first place was the promise presented by advancements made in the field of visual effects. In the same 1996 interview with The Philadelphia Inquirer, the director marveled, "Anything in your imagination can be made real now. Things that were impossible two or three years ago, you can do." But these days, de Bont wonders whether or not this attitude has changed the way that films like "Twister" are made — and not necessarily for the better.

Speaking with Inverse after "Twisters" had been announced and put into production without his involvement, the director lamented how different the new film would be due to the studios' reliance on CGI effects. "When things fell from the sky, there were real things falling from a helicopter," he said about the original. "If you film a car escaping a tornado in a hail storm, it was real ice that came at us. It's a movie that cannot be remade ... That would never, ever happen again."

Indeed, rewatching "Twister" today does feel like revisiting a bygone era of filmmaking that isn't too far in the past yet as to be out of reach. In fact, it's likely that today's rising filmmakers like "Twisters" director Lee Isaac Chung feel like storm chasers themselves, hoping against all odds for the cyclone to touch down once more.