SOMEWHERE, over the rainbow, way up high, the honchos in the Emerald City set their sights on Tornado Alley. If Steven Spielberg can resurrect the Mesozoic period, and George Lucas can bring us the stars, why oh why can't Hollywood capture those great whirling dervishes of air?
Five months of production, one neighbourhood in Oklahoma, 10 Wizard Of Oz references and $75 million later, Twister is winding its way through cinemas, the No 1 movie in the US after a record-setting $41 million in its first weekend there.
An eye-popping special-effects triumph, Twister is the latest product from visual-wizard-of-the-moment Jan De Bont, the adrenalin junkie whose 1994 directorial debut, Speed, set new standards for big-screen illusion. Yes, Helen Hunt, a TV actor well known in the US, and Bill Paxton "of Apollo 13 are listed as the movie's leads, but the true star is De Bont's seamless blend of digital technology, mechanical construction and stunt action, which makes churning cyclones appear as close and authentic as Speilberg's velociraptors.
As the man behind the curtain, De Bont performed the following miracles during last summer's Twister shoot: tumbling a tractor along a highway, dropping a house from on high, creating a hailstorm out of the blue, planting a fully-grown cornfield and destroying a neighbourhood in Wakita, Oklahoma, that had been built for the movie. For these and other reasons, De Bont is perceived among the Twister cast and crew as an uncompromising director who will go to any lengths to achieve realism. Amid intense summer heat, the five-month production was a physical test for all involved, particularly Hunt and Paxton, who performed almost all of their own stunts.
The Dutch-born director, who speaks with a strong accent, says he likes movie-making as battlefield, and recalls Francis Ford Coppola's infamous drive to get Apocalypse Now made in the 1970s: "I don't mind going into the trenches and creating a feeling of authenticity, and the actors have to be willing to cooperate and do most of their own stunts.
want to show the audience that the characters are really there, not stunt doubles. You need the type of actor who's physical and willing to get mud thrown at them, and be hailed on, and have trees flying around their heads and tractors dropping around them."
All of which happened to Bill Paxton, who plays one of the ragtag group of tornado chasers in the movie. Paxton rubs his eyes just thinking of the wind machine. A veteran of a number of effects movies such as Aliens and True Lies he now says the Twister shoot was the roughest he has known - rougher even than Ron Howard's Apollo 13 "vomit comet": "When you have a jet engine blowing debris at you, that is not a precise science. Neither is 400-lb blocks of ice going into diesel-engine-powered grinders and shooting hailstones up over us." He says he had to draw the line for De Bont one day, urging the director to use doubles for a tricky truck-driving scene: "Being one of the leaders of the case, I said Jan, we love you, but dammit, let's go to lunch. He's got that Leni Riefenstahl Triumph Of The Will thing happening."
Hunt, who plays another storm-chaser and Paxton's estranged wife, says she kept a sly eye on De Bont while creating her character: "I watched Jan a lot, the way he stormed around trying to get this movie made, and I borrowed that from him."
Many of the impossible-looking Twister shots were supplemented by computer graphics from Industrial Light And Magic, the company that grafted images on to effects classics such as Jurassic Park, Forrest Gump and Terminator 2. Actual tornado footage was intensified by computer, and in most cases, entire tornadoes were drawn in later, while the actors performed to a man holding a post marked "X" as debris flew over their heads.
De Bont and his crew were frequently tripped up by shifty Mid-western weather conditions, which would turn excellent just when the movie plot called for a storm. As a result, some of the cloudy and threatening skies in the finished Twister were added afterwards, forcing the actors to feign reaction to greenish pre-tornado clouds while standing in the bright Midwestern heat. One of the movie's knockdown, drag-out destruction scenes is set in a drive-in cinema, where Stanley Kubrick's The Shining is playing on the huge screen when a twister hits. Industrial Light And Magic added the clips from The Shining long after De Bont and company were back home in LA.
Like Ridley Scott and Kubrick, who is De Bont's idol, De Bont spent his pre-directorial career as a cinematographer, with a curriculum vitae that includes films such as Die Hard, The Hunt For Red October and Basic Instinct. A visual fanatic, he says he was captivated by the terrible beauty of twisters grazing the Midwestern landscape and tried to bring this sense of awe into his movie. "The first time you see a tornado," he says, "it's magical. It so much fits into the countryside, it just belongs there, and we don't." By fashioning images of cows and tractors swirling upwards into the sky, De Bont, who grew up in The Netherlands, hopes Twister is also a homage to the classic American Westerns he loved as a child. His cinematographer, Jack N. Green, was familiar with the American grain, having directed photography for Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven and The Bridges Of Madison County.
In his long, distinguished career behind the camera, which shot has given Jan De Bont the most trouble? "Between the legs of the jokes, referring to the controversial interrogation scene of Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct. While the actor claims she didn't know De Bont and director Paul Verhoeven were going to fully reveal her body, De Bont says she was fully aware. "I'll tell you, if I put a camera between your legs, do you believe that you don't know what I'm doing? Of course she knew. She is playing very coy. She has totally imagined not to know: `Of course I'm not seeing anything. I've closed my eyes!'"
While there is a love triangle in Twister, between Paxton. Hunt and Jami Gertz, the new fiancee of Paxton's character, the movie is definitely not about character development. Like Speed, it hops from one high-tech sequence to the next. Paxton and Hunt play a separated couple thrown together for a last big adventure, but we don't learn any facts about their failed marriage. "I don't like to hammer my audiences over the head with back stories because basically they become very pedestrian," De Bont says. "We've all grown up and we understand the story very quickly. You don't have to have an IQ of 150 to understand what's going on."
Paxton says he doesn't mind acting second fiddle to high technology. "I make no bones about it: the star of this movie is Twister. That's the title character. I'm just here to service the twister. We're archetypal characters, and we want the audience to grab hold of them quickly so we don't have to spend a lot of time developing them.
In casting the movie De Bont was typically headstrong. He would have no one but Helen Hunt as the woman obsessed with twisters, despite resistance from both Warner Bros, which wanted a big-name movie star, and NBC, which needed Hunt back for her TV series, Mad About You. "This movie is all about reality and nature," De Bont says, "and Helen looks like a really down-to-earth persona. When I read the screen-play I thought about her right away, and it never occurred to me to think about anyone else." NBC and Paul Reiser finally postponed Hunt's schedule for several weeks last September, which freed her to take the role. This gave her a week off before starting the movie, and only a day off before returning to Mad About You.
Hunt says De Bont was "relentless" in negotiating for her. "I would get messages on my answering machine from my agent saying: `Forget it, it's not going to work, you have to begin to let it go. And the next message would be from Jan saying `It's going to work, I don't know how but you're going to be in this movie.' And he made it happen."
De Bont could have pursued more well-known actors for her part for the film, which was hacked by Michael Crichton, who co-wrote and produced, and Steven Spielberg, the executive producer. But he says he thinks it's more important to find an actor to fit the part than one who might sell tickets. "It's hard for me to see a big movie star trying to portray somebody else. I like actors and actresses I don't necessarily recognise who look like real people."
Twister, with Hunt's prominent role, adds to De Bont's reputation as an action director interested in creating strong parts for women. In Speed he refused to let Sandra Bullock's role rely on cliche and he made Bullock into a huge star in the process. "I like strong women who know what they want and can boss somebody around," he says. "I like the emotional quality Helen can portray. that incredible dramatic way she has. I hate wimpy women, women who have to be helped all the time, damsels in distress. I like to put them in the foreground."
When Speed took off unexpectedly, De Bont was suddenly in competition for scripts with directors he'd only recently worked for as a cinematographer. Now, he feels some pressure to beat the Speed grosses with Twister. "You're always under pressure the moment you make something successful," he says. "Everybody else puts you under pressure, it's not yourself. The problem is, the more you think about it, the higher the pressure gets. And especially if you have big-name producers behind you who are very established; it doesn't make it any easier. And it makes it even more difficult when they predict it's going to be the biggest movie of the season."
NEXT for De Bont is Speed 2. While the action of Speed 2 will not take place in a bus, De Bont refuses to supply details of the plot except to say that "it will be funnier this time". After the sequel, he's hoping to remake the apocalyptic sci-fi movie The Day The Earth Caught Fire from a script by Christopher Hampton. He says Tom Hanks has shown some interest in the project.
Wouldn't De Bont like to direct a movie less dependent on special effects and more character-driven? "I definitely will, at some point," he says. "But right now, this is what Hollywood wants from me.