Twisters Director Intended For The Movie To Be A Sequel To An A24 Dramedy

Lee Isaac Chung's "Minari" is a film of quiet power that draws from the filmmaker's experience growing up on a farm in rural Arkansas. It's a film that gently immerses you in the lives of a Korean-American family attempting to start a farm; it is wise and funny and sad, and, in the end, profound in unexpected ways. "Minari" stays with you. It's what you would call a "grower" (one that was patiently guided to modest box office success and six Academy Award nominations by A24).

"Twisters," Chung's follow up to "Minari," is not what anyone would call a "grower." It's a gargantuan studio tentpole tricked out with the best CGI and sound f/x a $155 million budget can buy. If you see "Twisters" in the right environment, it will stay with you, too –- if only because your ears will be ringing from its intense depiction of very bad weather.

"Twisters" might represent a giant step up in scale for Chung, but he didn't approach it as a for-hire blockbuster errand. There's no selling out here. Chung wanted to make this movie, and used "Minari," which earned him an Oscar nomination for Best Director, to demonstrate his suitability for the gig. In fact, he cut together a pitch that insinuated "Twisters" could be viewed as a sequel of sorts to "Minari."

In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Chung discussed how he cut together a pitch reel that spliced the tornado watch scene from "Minari" together with footage from Jan de Bont's "Twister." Given that executive producer Steven Spielberg was in the room for this presentation, this personal flourish (which likely called to mind the tornado sequence in Spielberg's semi-autobiographical "The Fabelmans") proved to be something of a creative coup.

As Chung told THR:

"When I pitched to them, I put that scene into my pitch to show that 'Twisters' is actually a sequel to 'Minari.' But I don't actually think they ever picked up on that. Ashley Jay Sandberg at Kennedy/Marshall was specifically looking for a filmmaker who is from the region and could understand the sense of place. So I think that was what they were looking at."

That Chung had also worked with another of the film's executive producers, Kathleen Kennedy, on "The Mandalorian" probably went a long way toward helping him land the job as well.

Whatever your wind up thinking of "Twisters," it's at least heartening to know that Spielberg, Kennedy and producer Frank Marshall didn't treat this as a cynical, Easter egg-laden cash grab (replete with a shoehorned-in flying cow). 28 years after the original, they wanted to imbue their 800-pound gorilla with the heart of a little Korean-American kid who grew up in a strange land called Arkansas. This approach will hopefully set "Twisters" apart from the mindless sturm-und-drang of its blockbuster competition.

"Twisters" is currently playing in theaters.