From left: Daisy Edgar-Jones, Anthony Ramos and Glen Powell in “Twisters.”
Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures/Warner Bros. Pictures/Amblin Entertainment
(This story contains spoilers for “Twisters.”)
Missed the flying cows in “Twisters”? Lots of people did. Director Lee Isaac Chung said he wasn’t initially aware of the homage to the original series.
“Oh my god, everyone wanted a cow in this movie,” Chung told The Hollywood Reporter in a recent interview. He was skeptical of including a literally outlandish scene like the cow that gets caught in a tornado and slowly drifts in front of a car in the 1996 film, so his VFX team took matters into their own hands.
During the film’s climax, as an F5 tornado is on a collision course for the town of El Reno, Oklahoma, there’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it shot of a cow caught in the storm… or so it seems. “It’s the hardest thing to find,” Chung explains. “I only managed to find it because there was a piece of flying debris that had a weird pattern on it. I said, ‘Can you freeze that frame?’ I was looking at the shot frame-by-frame when we were doing the VFX review, and sure enough, there was a cow on that piece of debris.”
Though it may not be what audiences were expecting, debris depicting a flying cow does appear in the film’s final act — and it’s a much more animal-friendly, and arguably more realistic, scene than Twister. In Jan de Bont’s original, the CGI cow passes in front of the windshield of a truck carrying stars Helen Hunt, Jami Gertz, and the late Bill Paxton, enough for Gertz’s character to finish a conversation on her comically large cell phone.
Sending actual cows — or rather VFX-rendered cows — into a cyclone was always going to be too much for a spiritual sequel. Chung aimed for as much scientific accuracy as possible in a film starring Daisy Edgar-Jones, Glen Powell and Anthony Ramos. “All of the scientific elements of the tornado, we tried to get as accurate as possible,” he says. “We pushed ourselves. There are sci-fi elements. The idea of the experiment of what Kate (Edgar-Jones) is trying to do with the tornado is very speculative, but it’s based in theoretical science.”
The experiment in question, in which Edgar Jones’ character tries to quell a tornado with a kind of green chemical bomb, is science fiction at this point, Chong points out, but what about the formation of the tornado, its effect on the film’s landscape, and the weather story? Apparently that’s a lot more accurate.
As for the ending, in which Edgar Jones’ character Kate finally seems ready to make peace with her traumatic past and resume her storm-chasing life, the Oscar-nominated “Minari” director says he hopes audiences can relate to it.
“What I want audiences to take away from this film is one of fear, and equally anxiety and trauma, which is something you hear a lot about,” Chung said. “I’ve felt a lot of fear in my work and in my career, and I felt a lot of fear moving into this from Minari. So I hope audiences can take something away from this film through Kate’s struggle with fear and her overcoming that fear.”
Twisters, which features a cameo from a winking cow, is in theaters now.
