Tornado film whips up a storm
The team behind Into the Storm were whipped up by their desire to make the tornado movie a stunner, writes Kavita Daswani
Afilm featuring the "biggest tornado in history", one with wind speeds of more than 320 kilometre per hour, can seem like a far-fetched idea, but one that's perfect for movie mayhem. The thought of a gargantuan, more than 3km-long vortex of violent winds rotating in a corkscrew whirl, coming out of nowhere and whipping up everything in its wake - people, houses, 18-tonne trucks - can be pretty terrifying, after all.
Yet such a scenario isn't purely fictional. Indeed, soon after shooting finished on Into the Storm, a real-life tornado that was even larger than the massive EF5 tornado (the highest point on the Enhanced Fujita Scale used to rate tornadoes in the US and Canada) in the movie hit Oklahoma.
People are fascinated with the things that terrify them the most. It's just something about human nature
"The first person I gave [the script] to read about these different tornadoes and fire tornadoes, and said, 'This is so stupid, you are literally an idiot'," Into the Storm screenwriter John Swetnam recalls. "But the next time I sent it out, I included pictures from YouTube of these real things, and then it was, like, 'Oh … okay!'"
The new disaster thriller has inevitably been compared to Twister, the 1996 film starring Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt that famously features a cow sent flying by the strong winds. Twenty-five years on, Swetnam - Into the Storm is his first big studio film - wanted to make a disaster drama that encompassed modern-day elements such as "found footage", in an age where everything can be recorded on a phone.
The movie also fits into the growing genre of "cli-fi" films revolving around natural disasters and climatic perversions, and the people they affect.
"Everything happened really fast," says Swetnam, who wrote the first draft of the script in four days. "I knew exactly what the film was supposed to be. The challenge comes afterwards, when you have a movie that's actually going to be made, constantly working with the director, studio people, producers, giving everyone what they want but also doing your own thing."