50 Fun Facts About Twister Movie

Who directed the 1996 film Twister?

It was only his second film as director; he had spent decades as a cinematographer on movies like Die Hard and Basic Instinct.

Which best-selling novelist co-wrote the Twister screenplay with his wife, Anne-Marie Martin?

The couple were paid $2.5 million for the script, which they began writing in January 1994.

Who plays Jo Harding, the tornado-obsessed meteorologist leading the storm-chasing team?

She was the director's first choice, and the studio only relented after he insisted she could handle the physical demands of the role.

Who plays Jo's estranged husband, an ex-storm chaser turned television weatherman?

He came to the part after another actor read for it, passed, and recommended him from the set of Apollo 13.

Which future Best Actor Oscar winner plays Dusty Davis, the team's loudest chaser?

Nine years later he won the Academy Award for playing Truman Capote.

Who plays Jonas Miller, the corporately funded rival storm chaser?

His character dies in the finale when the F5 sweeps his truck away.

Jonas Miller's copycat sensor device, stolen from Bill's idea, is called what?

It fails in the finale because its casing is too light and was never anchored down.

The team's barrel-shaped sensor package, Dorothy, was inspired by which 1980s NOAA instrument?

The real barrel weighed up to 350 pounds and had to be rolled out of a pickup in about thirty seconds.

Who plays Aunt Meg, whose wind-vane sculptures inspire the aerodynamic fix for the sensors?

The collapsing model of her house later injured the cinematographer when it was triggered with him inside.

What is the name of Aunt Meg's dog, rescued from her flattened house?

Jo's own childhood dog in the 1969 prologue is Toby.

Aunt Meg lives in which real Oklahoma town, which was partly demolished for the film?

Scouts picked the town after spotting debris still left over from a major 1993 hailstorm.

What Fujita rating does the film give the mile-wide tornado of the finale?

The prologue's 1969 tornado is also called an F5, two years before the Fujita scale even existed.

How do Jo and Bill survive the tornado at the film's climax?

The shot of them hanging inside the vortex was filmed on a gimbal with the set turned upside down and the footage flipped.

Which film is playing at the drive-in when a nocturnal tornado tears the screen apart?

Two weeks after Twister opened, a real tornado destroyed a drive-in screen in Ontario that was scheduled to show Twister that night.

The tornado roar mixed lion roars, tiger growls, jet engines and the moans of which animal?

The Universal Studios ride later reused a similar recipe, adding backward human screams.

The famous flying cow was a CGI model recycled from which animal in the 1995 film Jumanji?

Industrial Light & Magic built the tornadoes themselves from millions of particles the effects team compared to packed scoops of ice cream.

Which 1994 hit was the director's debut, prompting Steven Spielberg to hire him for Twister?

He signed on after leaving a Godzilla project over creative differences.

Alongside Warner Bros. and Universal, which company produced Twister?

The pitch was not a script but an ILM effects test of a truck driving toward a tornado while a tractor tire smashed through its windshield.

Which actor read for the part of Bill Harding, passed, and recommended his Apollo 13 co-star instead?

The recommendation happened on the Apollo 13 set, where the two were playing astronauts together.

The MPAA gave Twister a PG-13 rating for what memorably worded reason?

The certificate has become a small piece of ratings-board folklore.

Warner Bros. moved Twister up a week to May 10, 1996, to avoid which rival blockbuster?

The move paid off: Twister opened at number one and set a new record for a May opening weekend.

Twister was the second-highest-grossing film of 1996 worldwide. Which film beat it?

At the time Twister was the tenth-highest-grossing film ever made and Warner Bros.' biggest release, ahead of Batman.

Roughly how much did Twister gross worldwide during its theatrical run?

About half of that came from outside North America, a much bigger international share than the 2024 sequel managed.

Twister earned two Academy Award nominations. One was for Sound; what was the other?

It lost both, but the effects team did win the equivalent BAFTA.

Twister was one of the first US feature films released on which home-video format?

The disc arrived in March 1997, eleven days before the film's HBO debut.

Who composed Twister's orchestral score?

The score sat alongside a rock soundtrack featuring an instrumental theme by Eddie and Alex Van Halen.

Chrysler beat Ford's bid to supply the hero vehicle. Which truck does the team drive?

Five trucks were supplied, one a prototype reserved for scenes of heavy damage, and they went through 20 windshields.

Filming was suspended in April 1995 so cast and crew could help with relief after which event?

The bombing happened on April 19, 1995, while the production was shooting in the state.

What injury did the two leads suffer from the lamps used to make the sky look stormy?

A Plexiglas filter was added to the beams afterward, and both actors spent days on eye drops and special glasses.

After the replacement cinematographer was hospitalized by a collapsing set, who shot the remaining footage?

The original camera crew had already walked off the set weeks earlier after the director shoved an assistant into a ditch.

Oklahoma's landscape changed with the seasons, so the F5 finale was shot mostly where?

The cornfield the characters run through was near Ames.

How did storm chasers pay tribute after the death of the film's male lead in February 2017?

Hundreds of chasers said the film was what got them into storm chasing and meteorology in the first place.

The Universal Studios Florida attraction Twister...Ride It Out closed in 2015 to make way for which ride?

The replacement's window displays include a stapler labelled 'B. Paxton' as a nod to the old ride's host.

The writers based the plot on a PBS storm-chaser documentary and which 1940 screwball comedy?

Both stories hinge on an ex who is engaged to someone new agreeing to one last job with a former partner.

Who directed the 2024 standalone sequel Twisters?

He came to the blockbuster straight from the $2 million indie drama Minari, which was also shot in Oklahoma.

In Twisters, Glen Powell's YouTube-famous storm chaser goes by what nickname?

The character was written as a glory hound but turns out to fund tornado relief with his merchandise sales.

What is the name of Daisy Edgar-Jones's meteorologist in Twisters?

The character was partly modelled on Dorothy Gale from The Wizard of Oz.

Twisters' $81.3 million debut beat which 2004 film's record for a natural disaster movie?

A record $2.1 million of that opening came from 4DX screenings.

The film's 1969 prologue uses the Fujita tornado scale two years early. In which year was it introduced?

Ted Fujita of the University of Chicago devised it with Allen Pearson, and it was applied retroactively to older tornadoes.

Ted Fujita expected nothing above F5 to be used, yet he described an F6. What did he call it?

No tornado has ever received an official F6 rating, though Fujita gave the 1974 Xenia tornado a preliminary F6 plus or minus one.

'Tornado Alley' was first used in 1952 as the title of a project by two meteorologists from which organization?

The National Weather Service has never officially defined the region's boundaries.

Which US state records the most tornadoes overall in a typical year?

Per unit of area, Kansas and Oklahoma rank higher, and Florida's many waterspouts push it up the per-area table too.

The VORTEX field projects that helped inspire the film take their name from what phrase?

The first campaign, in 1994 and 1995, was the first time scientists documented a tornado's entire life cycle with instruments.

In which 1999 tornado did a Doppler on Wheels radar measure a record 321 mph wind speed?

Its severity prompted the National Weather Service's first-ever tornado emergency statement.

The National Severe Storms Laboratory, which advised the film, is based in which Oklahoma city?

The lab also talked the writers out of a single tornado lasting a day and a half in favor of an outbreak of many.

The real instrument barrel that inspired Dorothy is displayed at the National Weather Center on which campus?

It was retired after 1987 because it was simply too cumbersome to get in front of a tornado safely.

Twister's waterspout sequence, with the truck thrashed by a tornado, was filmed on which Oklahoma lake?

The scene leaves the team unharmed but sends Melissa into shock.

Twister was Warner Bros.' highest-grossing film ever until which film overtook it in 2001?

Twister had itself taken the studio record from 1989's Batman.

Which cast member received a 1997 Golden Raspberry nomination for Worst Supporting Actress?

She plays Melissa, the fiancée written as the audience's stand-in; the film itself won the Razzie for Worst Written Film Grossing Over $100 Million.

How much per day were residents of the town playing Aunt Meg's hometown paid as extras?

The town later opened a museum of the film's memorabilia and built a park with bricks from buildings demolished for the shoot.