Twister is a 1996 American disaster film directed by Jan de Bont and written by Michael Crichton and Anne-Marie Martin. The film stars an ensemble cast that includes Helen Hunt, Bill Paxton, Jami Gertz, and Cary Elwes. Lois Smith, Alan Ruck, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Jeremy Davies, Todd Field, Zach Grenier, Nicholas Sadler, Abraham Benrubi, Jake Busey, and Scott Thomson also star in supporting roles. Its plot follows a group of storm chasers trying to deploy a tornado research device during a severe outbreak in Oklahoma.
Amblin Entertainment co-founder Steven Spielberg was initially attached to direct, and several directors were in talks to direct before De Bont signed on after leaving Godzilla; Spielberg would executive-produce the film with Walter F. Parkes, Laurie MacDonald, and Gerald R. Molen. Filming was done across Oklahoma, with several key sequences filmed in Fairfax, Ralston, Maysville, Guthrie, and Stillwater. Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) handled the visual effects and animation of the tornadoes, with the Dynamotion software being used to develop the basis of the digital tornadoes.
Twister premiered in Westwood, Los Angeles, on May 8, 1996, and was theatrically released on May 10, 1996, in the United States and Canada by Warner Bros. Pictures, and internationally by Universal Pictures through United International Pictures. The film grossed over $499 million worldwide, becoming the second-highest-grossing film of 1996, and selling an estimated 54.7 million tickets in the United States. It received generally positive reviews from critics and Academy Award nominations for Best Visual Effects and Best Sound. It is also notable for being among the first films to be released on DVD in the United States. A standalone sequel, Twisters, was released in 2024.
Plot
On an Oklahoma farm in 1969, young Jo Thornton and her parents take shelter from an F5 tornado that destroys their farm and kills Jo's father. Twenty-seven years later, Jo is a tornado-obsessed meteorologist leading a storm chaser team. Her estranged husband, Bill Harding, an ex-storm chaser turned TV weatherman, travels to Oklahoma with his fiancée Melissa to obtain Jo's signature on their divorce papers.
Jo shows Bill the realized "Dorothy", a device containing hundreds of small weather sensors that Bill conceptualized. Dorothy could revolutionize tornado research and potentially provide an earlier storm-warning system, but the device must be deployed dangerously close to a tornado to work. Jo's team rushes off to chase a developing storm, forcing Bill and Melissa to follow.
Jonas Miller, a rival storm chaser with corporate funding, stole Bill's idea for his own Dorothy-like device, Dot3. Bill agrees to accompany Jo and the team for one day to launch Dorothy. As the team pursues a rope tornado, Jo's truck runs into a ditch attempting to intercept it. Jo and Bill take shelter under a bridge, but the truck and one of the four Dorothy prototypes are destroyed. Bill leads the team in his own truck, chasing another tornado. They chase the tornado, now a waterspout, onto Kaw Lake that is accompanied by another with multiple vortices. The waterspout thrashes the truck around, leaving them unharmed, but Melissa is traumatized.
The team visits Jo's Aunt Meg in nearby Wakita for rest and food. The team then scrambles to chase a developing twister. Jo and Bill intercept a tornado with unpredictable movements. It knocks over power lines that crush Dorothy II. With the truck damaged, Bill forces them to retreat. Jo rants about her father's death. Bill admits his feelings for Jo, unaware that Melissa is overhearing them through the CB radio.
The team overnights in Fairview and Jo signs the divorce papers. A nocturnal tornado forces the team and others into a garage pit for protection. The tornado destroys the garage, two team vehicles, and injures several people before proceeding toward Wakita. Before the team rushes there, Melissa ends her and Bill's engagement, and encourages him to reunite with Jo.
The tornado leaves Wakita in ruins and flattens Aunt Meg's house. The team rescues Aunt Meg, who only has minor injuries. The National Severe Storms Laboratory forecasts that a potentially record-breaking tornado will form the next day. Inspired by Aunt Meg's wind-vane sculptures, Bill and Jo add aluminum "wings" to the last two Dorothy prototype sensors, making them more aerodynamic.
True to the forecast, a mile-wide F5 tornado forms the next day. Bill and Jo attempt to place Dorothy III in its path; however, the device is knocked over and destroyed by an airborne tree. Meanwhile, Jonas attempts to deploy Dot3, ignoring Bill and Jo's warnings that the tornado is changing direction and headed straight at him, as well as that Dot3's packaging is too light and needs to be anchored down. The tornado sweeps Jonas's truck away, killing him and his driver, as well as destroying Dot3. With the last remaining Dorothy, Bill and Jo drive directly at the tornado, then jump out, sacrificing the truck to launch the probes. Dorothy IV's probes provide immediate scientific data, but without their truck, Jo and Bill have to run as the tornado shifts toward them. Inside a nearby farm pumphouse, they strap themselves to deep pipes. As the building rips away, the F5's core passes over them and they are inverted in the vortex. After the tornado dissipates, the team celebrates their success while Jo and Bill reconcile.
Cast
Production Development and writing Twister was produced by Steven Spielberg's Amblin Entertainment, with financial backing from Warner Bros. and Universal Pictures. In return, Warner Bros. was given the North American distribution rights, while Universal's joint-venture distribution company, United International Pictures (UIP), obtained international distribution rights. The pitch was not a script, but a proof of concept clip of the visual effects by Industrial Light & Magic, done entirely in computer-generated imagery and featuring a pickup truck driving towards a tornado pulling up a tractor, with one of its tires snapping off and smashing through the truck's windshield. ILM assigned Stefen Fangmeier to be the effects supervisor for his experience with tornadoes, having helped create simulations while working with storm chasers in the National Center for Supercomputing Applications.
Spielberg himself was originally attached to direct the project, and directors such as James Cameron, John Badham, Tim Burton, and Robert Zemeckis were also in talks to helm the film before Jan de Bont signed on to Twister after leaving Godzilla due to creative differences. De Bont was invited by Spielberg after the success of directorial debut Speed, which was released in 1994, following a long career as a director of photography, and described the project as "a Grimm fairy tale where the monster comes out of dark clouds". Michael Crichton and his wife and co-author, Anne-Marie Martin, were paid $2.5 million for a screenplay, which started being written in January 1994. Crichton said the two bases for the script were a PBS documentary about storm chasers and the plot of romantic comedy His Girl Friday, where a newspaper editor and his ex who is engaged to another man do one last job together. Two screenwriters would later sue the studios claiming Twister was taken from their ideas: Daniel Perkins, whose script Tornado Chasers dealt with the military harnessing tornadoes as weapons and settled for an undisclosed amount; and Stephen B. Kessler, author of a script about storm chasers in Oklahoma called Catch the Wind, and whose case was eventually dismissed. Dorothy was inspired by TOTO, an instrumented barrel-shaped device used to research tornadoes in the 1980s. De Bont pushed to make the dialogue "very energized" to reflect the excitement experienced by storm chasers, adding that the dialogue "gets very stilted very quickly" if it is not "moving forward and energized in the same pattern as the action", while encouraging the cast to improvise their lines. He also attempted to reduce the amount of establishing scenes and exposition "that makes a movie almost immediately less interesting" while feeling that "things will explain themselves as you keep watching", but the studio insisted on it. For the explanatory moments there was a focus on the character of Melissa, serving as an audience surrogate given she had no experience with storm chasing.
Helen Hunt was de Bont's first choice to play Jo Harding, and while the studio was reluctant because of her lack of big movie roles, he insisted, considering her a good actress who could deliver the physical demands of the role. Hunt initially was uninterested, declaring that "I just didn't know what I could really contribute acting-wise", but changed her mind after having lunch with de Bont and Spielberg at Amblin's offices. The casting of Hunt involved her dropping out of Broken Arrow. Tom Hanks read for the part of Bill Harding, but passed on the film. While on the set of Apollo 13, he recommended Bill Paxton to try for the role. De Bont wanted the storm chaser crew to resemble the ones he met during pre-production, a team of University of Oklahoma grad students. The National Severe Storms Laboratory (NSSL) in Norman, Oklahoma worked closely with the production, training the crew on weather safety, allowing the actors to visit their facilities and go along on a tornado chase, and providing consultations on the script that included discarding an impossible tornado that would last a day and a half to instead go for an outbreak of tornadoes, which could strike at any place at any time, in any location, and with different magnitudes.
Filming The production was troubled with problems; Joss Whedon was brought in to rewrite the script through the early spring of 1994. When Whedon contracted bronchitis, Steven Zaillian was brought in to work on revisions. Whedon later returned and worked on revisions through the start of shooting in May 1995, then left the project after he got married. Two weeks into production, Jeff Nathanson was flown to the set and worked on the script until principal photography ended. Among the changes, Hunt complained that Jo and Melissa's interactions were "sort of catty with each other", prompting her to tell the producers "That's not gonna be fun to play or to watch. I'm not sure if I want to do that." After the Oklahoma City bombing occurred on April 19, 1995, filming of Twister was suspended while the cast and crew worked with relief efforts.
Filming was to originally take place in California, but De Bont insisted the film be shot on location in Oklahoma. Shooting occurred all over the state; several scenes, including the opening scene where the characters meet each other, and the first tornado chase in the Jeep pickup, were filmed in Fairfax and Ralston, Oklahoma. The scene at the automotive repair shop was filmed in Maysville and Norman. The waterspout scenes were filmed on Kaw Lake near Kaw City. The drive-in scene was filmed at a real drive-in theater in Guthrie, though some of the scene, such as Melissa's hotel room, was filmed in Stillwater near the Oklahoma State University campus. Stanley Kubrick's 1980 film The Shining was played during the sequence.