‘Twister’ Director Jan de Bont on the Shot It Took Almost 30 Years to Finish

“Twister,” released in 1996, was a zeitgeist-capturing blockbuster that was a hit with audiences and critics (Entertainment Weekly critic Owen Gleiberman put it on his top 10 list that year, after “Breaking the Waves” and “Trainspotting” but before “Swingers” and “Tin Cup”). It was a movie whose visual effects, provided by Industrial Light & Magic, pushed against what was possible, and whose message, about the unpredictability of climate change and the importance of scientific research, still resonate today.

It became one of the most beloved movies of the decade and inspired a sequel, “Twisters,” opening this week.

But there’s still something that always bothered director Jan de Bont about “Twister.” And thanks to the new 4K UHD release, from Warner Bros. Home Video (out now), he’s finally been able to fix it.

There’s a moment early in the movie where Bill Paxton, as storm-chaser-turned-meteorologist Bill Harding, is about to go out on one last adventure. He takes a handful of dirt, and looks up at a sinister-looking sky, letting the dirt tumble out of his hand and watching the way the wind catches it as it falls. And while the original movie’s sky, dark and ominous, gets the job done, this scene wasn’t realized the way de Bont envisioned it. De Bont, you see, wanted the sky green .

De Bont had come across a photo at the Severe Weather Institute in Oklahoma, where they were filming. He saw a photo with a green sky and asked, “What is that sky?” A docent answered, “That is an atmospheric condition that happens sometimes around tornadoes. It doesn’t happen all the time. But it happens at when all those conditions are right.” De Bont immediately asked to see more photos.

“I’d never even heard of that,” de Bont told TheWrap during an interview tied to the 4K release. “It really is eerie, because it really has a surreal quality, where it’s a little bit like the Northern Lights, where something starts to happen and then disappears very quickly again.” The green-hued sky, de Bont pointed out, happens when a tornado is approaching and notes “it’s definitely a true thing.”

Of course, getting that green sky to film proved troublesome.

“We couldn’t figure it out at all,” de Bont said. Before de Bont directed “Speed” he was a highly sought-after cinematographer, having lensed John McTiernan’s “Die Hard” and Ridley Scott’s “Black Rain,” among many others. Having worked on color corrections for so long, he found that there was a “very limited amount of filtration you can do,” and he and the team “never got it right” when it came to “Twister’s” pre-tornado green sky.

Finally getting it right

That all changed when he was working on the 4K release of the film. “Now you can do those things completely independently from everything around them,” de Bont said. “You can do it without making the whole image green. And that was so fantastic. I was happy to finally do that.”

De Bont pointed to a line of dialogue where Paxton’s Harding says, “Goin’ green.” Philip Seymour Hoffman’s wily storm-chaser Dusty responds, “Greenage.” “Everybody said, What are they talking about ?” de Bont recalled with a laugh. “Now I can finally show it.”

While working on the transfer, a producer was in the room and saw the green sky. She didn’t believe it actually existed. De Bont told her to look it up, which she quickly did and “immediately got pictures of greenness.” Finally, she conceded, that it was “a real thing that actually happens.”

When we asked if he was worried that people would be confused by this version of the film, having watched “Twister” one way for nearly 30 years, de Bont said he wasn’t worried about it. All of the tornadoes that are in the movie are based on tornadoes that somebody actually caught on film, which helped Industrial Light & Magic greatly. The green sky is the same thing – a reproduction of a real phenomenon.

When de Bont was brought the project, he admits that he too “didn’t know s–t about storm chasers.” Instead, he was drawn to the movie’s themes of “wildness and the power of nature” (de Bont was famously scalped by a lion on the set of 1981’s “Roar”), which was “integrated with a subplot that came right out of ‘His Girl Friday.’”

“I thought it was a perfect combo because it wasn’t too heavy, there was light hearted moments that I really liked and then there was a basic script, but then we started to really change it quite a bit because we had to make it look real,” de Bont said.

Making “Twister”

Describing the process of making “Twister,” it sounded like one trial after the other – making sure ILM could handle the movie’s complex visual effects, filming (mostly in the day) on location, where they had “to constantly move from one place to the other to find something that matches the first week of production,” even though entire seasons had gone by. “It really became a nightmare,” de Bont admitted.

Tractors were getting stuck in the mud. Traffic cops had to be hired to make sure they could shoot on certain roads. De Bont said that what was deemed difficult at first became designed as “impossible.” Making matters more unhinged was the fact that de Bont insisted on “practical effects and real landscapes.” Fully computerized effects weren’t just impractical at the time; they didn’t exist at all. And de Bont didn’t want to work that way anyway. “The actors have to be able to see what they are responding too. And I wanted to create a world in which they could really respond to the wind or hail or all the things that fly in the air caused by tornadoes,” de Bont said.

It should be noted that de Bont shrugged off the famous stories of the cast not getting along, in particular Paxton and Helen Hunt, who played his estranged wife and fellow storm-chaser. “That’s a good thing,” de Bont said. “They didn’t get along well, and then the next day they got along well again.” (They ultimately did not end up getting along well, by most accounts. When it came time to shoot the queue video for a Universal Studios attraction based on “Twister,” Paxton and Hunt filmed their parts separately.)

Still, de Bont thrived in the open environments of Oklahoma and admitted that his next film “The Haunting,” once again for “Twister” producer Steven Spielberg, suffered from being shot entirely on a soundstage. “I wish that original script had a different story – a little bit more locations, and maybe something on a boat or something part of it would play somewhere else,” he said. “Why couldn’t this be on a field between hunting lions or something?” Still the movie was a hit, “because I still see checks on it,” de Bont said with a laugh.

Incredibly, de Bont hasn’t directed a movie since 2003’s video game sequel “Lara Croft: Tomb Raider – The Cradle of Life,” and while he has flirted with other projects, including a “Twister” sequel (“about 15 years ago”), he has yet to commit to a new project. He hasn’t even directed any television, a refuge for many working filmmakers.

When TheWrap pushed him about a return to the big screen, de Bont said, “I’m still interested. I really like the type of movies like ‘Speed’ or ‘Twister’ that has that high energy, but with real people in it. I don’t want a star movie, I want something that regular movie theater goers can identify with,” de Bont said. “If that is at all still possible.” There’s only one way to find out.

“Twister,” with the newly color-corrected scene, is on 4K UHD right now.

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