Lee Isaac Chung on the Frankenstein Tornado, Cut Kiss Scene – MASHAHER

SPOILER WARNING: This story contains spoilers for “Twisters,” now playing in theaters.

“Twisters” director Lee Isaac Chung was well aware that people might be upset about the ending of the disaster thriller — namely the fact that its hero Kate Cooper (Daisy Edgar-Jones) and her tornado-wrangling knight in tight Levi’s, Tyler Owens (Glen Powell) don’t kiss at the end of the movie.

“If you talk to my 13-year-old niece, her uncle made a huge mistake,” Chung tells Variety.

Indeed, for more than an hour and a half of the film’s two-hour runtime, the tension builds between Kate and Tyler. From the first tip of his cowboy hat and their early verbal jabs (he nicknames her “city girl” and she pokes fun at him putting his face on a t-shirt), their chemistry is evident.

Then, after the pair go to the rodeo and survive the massive nighttime tornado that destroys it, Tyler shows up at Kate’s childhood home — charming her mother (Maura Tierney) and ultimately convincing Kate to chase tornadoes together for scientific sport. (The filmmakers nicknamed their first chase the “Datenado.”) The action culminates with Kate single-handedly saving everyone from the film’s fiercest tornado by driving directly into the storm and releasing the redesigned polymer compound into the storm, causing it to die down. She barely survives the mission – with Tyler and Javi’s (Anthony Ramos as Kate’s college friend, who makes up the other leg of the sort-of love triangle) slo-mo run underlining just how harrowing the whole ordeal was.

And that’s it for Kate and Oklahoma. She’s got a ticket back to New York, where she’ll present the crew’s research in hopes of getting more funding. Javi drives her to the airport fulfilling his promise of getting her back to work after a week back home and Tyler’s there too, with his tricked-out truck. He blows his first shot at convincing Kate to stay, then chases her into the airport where she’s checking the flight monitor.

Then, just when audiences think Kate and Tyler are finally going to kiss … they don’t. A voice comes over the loudspeaker to announce flight delays due to impending storms. So, Kate and Tyler turn around and walk off in pursuit of more tornadoes. The internet is well aware of this fact: behind-the-scenes footage of Kate and Tyler’s kiss circulated on social media all weekend long, while “Twisters” spun up an impressive $80.5 million domestic opening and audiences spun out over the idea that a “kiss cut” exists.

“Why did they cut the kiss from Twisters?” users lamented. Well, Chung — the filmmaker best known for best picture Oscar nominee “Minari” — stands by his call.

“I filmed both versions, and I even tested both versions,” he says. “It’s a very polarizing decision. There are people who have felt I should have kept it, and then there are execs who feel like we did a good job of removing it.”

The filmmaker’s decision was driven by his feelings about Kate and what her “ultimate reward” should be at the end of the movie. “I didn’t feel it should be a kiss,” he explains. “I felt like what she has earned and led up to is having community and having a sense of love for what she does again. She’s still active at the very end, and she’s going out and chasing another storm. So, for her to have regained all of that, that’s who she is, and that’s what I wanted to leave people with.”

And Edgar-Jones was all for it too. “I love that they don’t kiss at the end, personally,” she told Variety for a recent profile. “They’re such equals, and it’s really cool that there’s this flirty friendship potential. Who knows? It feels like it’s open and it’s an energized ending, where they walk toward more storms. She’s still developing.”

In an interview with Collider, Edgar-Jones and Powell attributed the suggestion to executive producer Steven Spielberg. (“It is a good Spielberg note. It’s why that kid is still in this game,” Powell joked.) Honestly, who are we to question Spielberg?

Alright, now that we’ve covered the romantic drama, let’s get back to the action — the twisters.

All the tornadoes in “Twisters” were inspired by at least one real-life tornado and created for the film using a combination of practical special effects and digital visual effects. As mentioned, Chung and the filmmakers have names for each of the movie’s six tornado sequences.

“T1, I just call ‘T1.’ T2, I call that ‘Fireworks.’ T3 is ‘Twins.’ T4 is the ‘Rodeo Tornado’. T5 is the ‘Datenado’ and then the last one is ‘The Monster,’” he shares. And building the characterization of each tornado was almost as important as casting the right ensemble of actors.

“We spent a lot of time in post refining each of our tornadoes, making sure they’re all unique, and knowing that we have to hold back for that final one. That final one will need to be the one that is the real capper,” Chung says, referring to his collaboration with editor Terilyn A. Shropshire. “That shot of the tornado, when Kate turns to it, is perhaps the most epic shot for me. What Industrial Light and Magic delivered with that shot is just incredible to me. You should have seen my reaction when I first saw it — I lost my mind.”

To be fair, the first tornado is nearly as massive as “The Monster,” and its role in the film’s prologue is to act as a boogeyman, looming over Kate’s journey. The 14-minute-long sequence introduces Kate, Javi and their college chasing team as they attempt a scientific experiment that will “tame” a tornado, but it all goes horrifically wrong when “T1” turns out to be an EF-5, the highest rating on the Fujita scale. At one point in the sequence, according to the film’s production notes, wind speeds reach 296 mph.

“I wanted to willfully make that sequence feel a little bit childlike and innocent and naive, and to let the horror of what happens come out of that childlike sense of innocence,” Chung says. “Each of those actors needed to be individuals, people who we fall in love with and understand their history and relationships together in a very short amount of time. I loved working with each of them to inject little moments to define who they are — and to make it feel like we’re going to spend a lot of time with them in this movie.”

Edgar-Jones told Variety that the prologue was one of her favorites in the film because it was so unexpected and shocking.

“Kate’s got a lot of PTSD and numbness, this guilt, and that was an interesting thing to play. Of all the characters she’s the most hesitant to chase,” Edgar-Jones explained. “I was excited to get back to the part of Kate where she’s ready to go again because that’s what I really enjoyed about the original. It’s so much fun watching people be passionate about something. Kate was so passionate at the beginning, and her passion is still there, she’s just so fearful of what it could mean — or losing people.”

The prologue was shot during the second week of production and filming out in the open roads of Oklahoma helped the reality of making a movie about twisters, on location, during tornado season sink in — quickly.

“We had all kinds of weather during that sequence,” Chung recalls. “When those guys were running towards the overpass, there was an actual storm that was coming in — a supercell. After we got our shot and cleared out of there, it produced a tornado. I remember thinking, ‘We are in a hell of a place to be making this movie.’”

Production was also affected by the SAG-AFTRA strike, which took the actors out of commission from July to December. In the meantime, Chung and Shropshire got to work on assembling the movie. Each tornado had to be a force of nature unto itself — building in scope and in relation to Kate’s journey. They focused on crafting the T1 sequence first (in part because it was the only action scene that had been fully filmed).

“So much of the challenge of this project from an editing perspective was building the dynamics of big spectacle — moments of intensity and then allowing the audience enough time to process before the next one,” Shropshire says. “It’s always a balance between the storytelling, the character building and the spectacle of these amazing pieces of work that were created.”

“The Monster” is a massive EF-5 that begins as a supercell thunderstorm, gets supercharged after rolling through an oil refinery and catching fire, and turns to terrorize the small town of El Reno — topping the town’s water tower, destroying the local farmer’s market and shredding the movie theater, where “Frankenstein” is playing.

The choice of movie is no coincidence: “I thought of this film in many ways as a monster movie. Universal has had quite a history of monster films, in which Frankenstein is probably the key,” Chung explains. “Once I had that in mind, I also thought about the way that tornado is born and formed — even the refinery is meant to mirror what happens in ‘Frankenstein.’”

The tornado itself is based on three separate events — a wedge-shaped tornado that rolled through Kansas in 2023, captured on film by the storm chasers employed by the production; a tornado that struck Mayfield, Kentucky, in December 2021, killing 76 people; and a tornado that touched down in El Reno, Oklahoma in 2013 and evolved into a violent, multi-vortex twister killing nine people, including four storm chasers (three professional and one amateur). The production shot in the real El Reno, adding extra gravity to the situation.

“That tornado was very unpredictable in the way that it behaved, and that was the reason why someone who is such a veteran of storm chasing was caught up in it,” Chung says, sharing that “The Man Who Caught the Storm” — the biography of legendary tornado chaser Tim Samaras, who died in the tornado — was one of the first books he read to begin researching for the film.

Solemnly, he adds: “I didn’t want to exploit that and use his life, but there is, internally, a nod to that event within that choice to make this El Reno. Tornadoes can be very dangerous for people who are researching and studying them, so I do want to put out a disclaimer to people not to go out and chase.”

In terms of filmmaking, everything about the sequence was challenging — from designing the visual of this tremendous EF-5 tornado (which Chung points out “has rarely been caught in chaser footage, for obvious reasons”) and nailing the physics of how it would operate. But there was also the storytelling element to consider, with Shropshire tasked with intercutting the action in the movie theater with Kate’s drive into the tornado and striking the right balance so that every character gets a hero moment.

“Ultimately, what is anchoring that whole thing is Kate doing that drive,” Chung says. “Filming that sequence, we were in a field and Daisy was reading this book on Greek mythology in between takes. I remember looking at the monitor and I just thought, ‘Oh, this is the scene where she really becomes like a Greek god. She’s contending with weather and she’s takes charge of being a hero.’”

Edgar-Jones relished the opportunity to be the one with “the grit and the resilience and the bravery to do that.” She said: “It’s a real ‘Don’t try this at home’ type thing, but it’s fun to see a female lead who is the one at the end to save the day on her own and not be saved.”

Shropshire agrees: “I love the way that Daisy played that. Even at her most heroic, she can also be her most vulnerable, and stay true to who she was at the beginning of the movie — just as a more mature woman who’s been through a lot and has still got a long way to go.”

While filming “Twisters,” Chung found that he related to Kate’s story quite a lot. He was inspired by the way she triumphed over her fear, anxiety and trauma to become this bold, fierce and powerful person. Likewise, the filmmaker had always dreamed of making a big summer blockbuster and after his soul-excavating experience of making “Minari,” he finally got that chance to step into the full range of his abilities.

“This project felt like I was chasing a tornado,” Chung says. “But on the flip side, what Kate is doing is pretty much what it’s like to be a filmmaker: to chase after something and to go through difficulties, then come back to it, and then ultimately, to find joy in it. I certainly had a lot of joy making this movie.”

Jazz Tangcay and Ellise Shafer contributed to this story.