Twister (1996 Film) - Production

Production

Twister was a joint production between Warner Bros. and Universal Pictures. Both studios had often collaborated with Amblin Entertainment prior to this film.

The original concept and 10-page tornado-chaser story were presented to Amblin Entertainment in 1992 by motion picture business consultant and award-winning screenwriter Jeffrey Hilton. Steven Spielberg then presented the concept to writer Michael Crichton.

After spending more than half a year on pre-production on Godzilla, director Jan De Bont left after a dispute over the budget and quickly signed on for Twister. The production was plagued with numerous problems. Crichton and his wife, Anne-Marie Martin, were paid a reported $2.5 million to write the screenplay. Joss Whedon was brought in to do rewrites through the early spring of 1995. When he got bronchitis, Steve Zaillian was brought in. Whedon returned and worked on revisions right through the start of shooting in May 1995. He left the project after getting married and two weeks into production, Jeff Nathanson was flown in to the set and worked on the script until principal photography ended.

Halfway through filming both Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt were temporarily blinded by bright electronic lamps used to get the exposure down to make the sky behind the two actors look dark and stormy. Paxton remembers that "these things literally sunburned our eyeballs. I got back to my room, I couldn't see". To solve the problem, a Plexiglas filter was placed in front of the beams. The actors took eye drops and wore special glasses for a few days to recuperate. After filming in a ditch that contained bacteria, Hunt and Paxton had to have hepatitis shots. During the same scene, she repeatedly hit her head on a low wooden bridge because she was so exhausted from the demanding shoot that she forgot not to stand up so quickly. Hunt did one stunt in which she opened the door of a vehicle that was speeding through a cornfield, stood up on the passenger side and was hit by the door on the side of her head when she let it go momentarily. As a result, some sources claim that Hunt got a concussion. De Bont said, "I love Helen to death, but you know, she can be also a little bit clumsy." She responded, "Clumsy? The guy burned my retinas, but I'm clumsy ... I thought I was a good sport. I don't know ultimately if Jan chalks me up as that or not, but one would hope so".

Some crew members felt De Bont was "out of control" and left five weeks into filming. The camera crew led by Don Burgess left the production after five weeks, claiming that De Bont "didn't know what he wanted till he saw it. He would shoot one direction, with all the equipment behind the view of the camera, and then he'd want to shoot in the other direction right away and we'd have to move and he'd get angry that we took too long ... and it was always everybody else's fault, never his". De Bont claims that they had to make schedules for at least three different scenes every day because the weather changed so often that "Don had trouble adjusting to that". When De Bont knocked over a camera assistant who had missed a cue, Burgess and his crew left, much to the shock of the cast. Burgess and his crew stayed on one more week until a replacement was found in Jack N. Green. Just before the end of the shoot, Green was injured when a hydraulic house set, designed to collapse on cue, was mistakenly activated with him inside it. A rigged ceiling hit him in the head and he injured his back and had to go to the hospital. Green missed the last two days of principal photography and De Bont took over as his own director of photography.

De Bont had to shoot many of the film's tornado-chasing scenes in bright sunlight when they could not get overcast skies and asked Industrial Light & Magic to more than double its original plan for 150 "digital sky-replacement" shots. Principal photography had a time limit because Hunt had to return to film another season of Mad About You but Paul Reiser was willing to delay it for two-and-a-half weeks when the Twister shoot was extended. De Bont insisted on using multiple cameras and this led to the exposure of 1.3 million feet of raw film (most films use no more than 300,000 feet).

De Bont claims that Twister cost close to $70 million with $2–3 million going to the director. It was speculated that last-minute re-shoots in March and April 1996 (to clarify a scene about Jo as a child) and overtime requirements in post-production and at ILM, raised the budget to $90 million. Warner Bros. moved up the film's release date from May 17 to May 10 in order to give it two weekends before Mission: Impossible opened.