48 Fun Facts About Twister Movie

Who directed the 1996 film Twister?

Jan de Bont. He had spent more than half a year preparing a Godzilla film, quit when the studio would not meet his budget and jumped straight into Twister.

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

Michael Crichton. A writer who claimed the film copied his own storm-chaser script took the Jurassic Park author to trial in 1998, and the jury sided with Crichton.

Who plays Jo Harding, the tornado-obsessed meteorologist who leads the storm chasers in Twister?

Helen Hunt. When the shoot overran, her sitcom Mad About You is said to have held up its new season until she was free.

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

Bill Paxton. The shoot was rough on him: after a day spent filming in a filthy roadside ditch, he and his co-star both had to be given hepatitis shots.

Who plays Dusty Davis, the loudest of Jo's storm chasers in Twister?

Philip Seymour Hoffman. He went on to win the Best Actor Oscar for Capote, yet when People asked fans in 2014 to name their favourite of his films, the runaway answer was Twister.

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

Cary Elwes. The English actor loved as the gallant Westley in The Princess Bride plays against type here, as a rival who brushes off a warning and is swept away with his truck.

In Twister, Jonas Miller's copycat of the Dorothy sensor device goes by what name?

Dot3. Jonas tells a TV crew it is the answer to tornado warnings, but the pack is too light to stay put, exactly as Jo and Bill try to tell him over the radio.

Twister's barrel of tornado sensors was based on which real 1980s instrument?

TOTO. The real barrel, named after Dorothy's dog, never got its direct hit: on its closest try, in 1984, the edge of a weak tornado simply knocked it over.

Which machine did Twister's crew use to blast its actors with storm-force wind?

A Boeing 707 jet engine. Trucks also drove alongside the cast spitting out chunks of ice for hail, and the director admitted that some of the bigger pieces hit his leading man.

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

Mose. As she is helped out of the wreckage of her home, Meg asks her rescuers to grab the dog for her, saying he must be a little shaken up.

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

Wakita. Location scouts chose it because debris from a big 1993 hailstorm was still lying around, and the town opened its own Twister museum months before the film came out.

In Twister, what Fujita rating does the mile-wide tornado of the finale carry?

F5. Earlier in the film, when Melissa asks what one would be like, a chaser answers 'the finger of God', and it turns out only one of the team has ever seen one.

How do Jo and Bill survive the final tornado in Twister?

Strapped to pipes in a pumphouse. To show them dangling inside the funnel, the crew rolled the whole set upside down with the actors hanging from a bar, then flipped the footage.

In Twister, which film is playing at the drive-in when a tornado tears the screen apart?

The Shining. Life copied the scene later that month, when a real tornado wrecked a drive-in screen in Ontario hours before it was due to show Twister.

Twister's tornado roar mixed lion roars, tiger growls and the moans of which animal?

Camel. The director said most people who live through a tornado talk first about its noise, so he had real sounds, animal cries among them, morphed into the roar.

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

Zebra. ILM's artists then spun the reskinned animal through funnel clouds built from millions of digital particles, using software that could steer every one of them.

Twister's director landed the job on the strength of which 1994 hit, his debut?

Speed. Its star Keanu Reeves protested during the shoot that he was no action hero, and the first-time director later said that reluctance was exactly why he had cast him.

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

Amblin Entertainment. Steven Spielberg's company sold the studios on the film before a script existed, with a computer-made test clip in which a flying tractor's tire smashes through a truck's windshield.

Which star read the Twister script, passed on it, and recommended a castmate from his current film for the lead?

Tom Hanks. He told his castmate 'you'd be great for it' while the two were travelling to a shoot, then went a step further and recommended him to the film's producers.

The MPAA rated Twister PG-13, giving which official reason?

Intense depiction of very bad weather. Newsweek ran the wording as a curiosity before the film had even opened, and its leading man called the result 'traumatic fun for the whole family'.

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

Mission: Impossible. Moving up from 17 May gave Twister two weekends to itself, and it set a record for a May opening before the Tom Cruise film arrived to take first place.

Which film beat Twister to become the highest-grossing release of 1996 worldwide?

Independence Day. Its director, Roland Emmerich, went on to make the very Godzilla film that Twister's own director had walked away from to chase tornadoes.

Which writer did uncredited rewrites on Twister's script, with a break when he came down with bronchitis?

Joss Whedon. He had quietly overhauled the director's previous hit as well, and he turned in his last Twister pages on his wedding day before leaving for his honeymoon.

Twister earned Oscar nominations for Sound and in which other category?

Visual Effects. It went home from the Oscars with nothing, but a month later the same tornado-makers won the British Academy's award for the year's best effects.

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.

Which pickup truck do Jo and Bill drive for most of Twister?

Dodge Ram 2500. Bill's red pickup takes over once Jo's Jeep is wrecked, and is finally sacrificed to send Dorothy into the tornado.

In Twister, what does Bill's fiancée Melissa do for a living?

Reproductive therapist. She counsels clients by mobile phone in the middle of chases, and she is the one who ends the engagement, saying she cannot compete.

What injury did Twister's two leads suffer from the lamps used to make the sky behind them look stormy?

Temporary blindness. One of them said the lamps 'literally sunburned our eyeballs'; a Plexiglas filter was fitted afterwards, and both spent days on eye drops and special glasses.

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

The director himself. A cinematographer by trade, he had already lost his first camera crew, who walked out after he knocked over an assistant, so he shot the final two days personally.

Oklahoma's landscape changed with the seasons, so Twister's finale was shot mostly in which state?

Iowa. The growing season kept spoiling the match between shots: one morning the corn had sprouted tassels overnight, and a producer from ILM recalled that nothing was going to match.

How did storm chasers honor Twister's late leading man in 2017?

Spelled his initials on a GPS map. Hundreds of chasers moved their Spotter Network markers into two giant letters across Kansas and Oklahoma, the heart of Tornado Alley.

Universal Orlando closed Twister...Ride It Out in 2015 to build which ride?

Race Through New York Starring Jimmy Fallon. Fallon broke the news himself on The Tonight Show, and fans gathered days later to watch the old attraction whip up its final storm.

Twister's writers based its plot on a PBS storm-chaser documentary and which 1940 screwball comedy?

His Girl Friday. In both, an ex who is about to remarry is pulled into one last job with a former partner, a debt one of the writers confirmed under oath in a plagiarism trial.

Who directed the 2024 standalone sequel Twisters?

Lee Isaac Chung. The Minari director grew up on a small farm in rural Arkansas, where sheltering from tornadoes was so routine that he says he stopped noticing the sirens.

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

The Tornado Wrangler. The heroine writes him off as a glory hound hawking T-shirts and mugs, then learns the merchandise money buys free food and water for storm victims.

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

Kate Carter. She gives up chasing after her experiment to choke a tornado with the absorbent polymer used in diapers goes wrong and three of her friends are killed.

Twisters' opening weekend passed which film's, widely counted the previous best for a natural disaster movie?

The Day After Tomorrow. Forecasts had Twisters opening near $50 million in North America; it took over $80 million, arguably the best start a natural disaster film had ever had.

In Twister's 1969 prologue, who is torn away by the tornado as young Jo's family shelters in a storm cellar?

Her father. He is pulled into the storm while trying to hold the cellar door shut, the loss that sends the grown-up Jo chasing tornadoes in search of a better warning system.

In Twister, which phrase does Dusty teach Melissa, admitting it is not the technical term?

The suck zone. Roger Ebert borrowed the phrase for his review, and the 2024 sequel Twisters brings it back as its own chasers pull on harnesses to drive into a storm.

The name 'Tornado Alley' is usually traced to a 1952 study by two forecasters from which military service?

The U.S. Air Force. The same two officers had issued the first successful tornado forecast in 1948, hours before the second twister in five days struck their own base.

Twister is set in Oklahoma, but which state records the most tornadoes in an average year?

Texas. Its size helps: counted per square mile, Florida comes out on top, partly because the hurricanes that come ashore there spin off tornadoes of their own.

Twister's cast visited Oklahoma's storm laboratory in 1995 while which real tornado experiment was in the field?

VORTEX. Short for Verification of the Origins of Rotation in Tornadoes Experiment, it ran in 1994 and 1995, and its scientists took the film's actors out on a real chase.

In which 1999 tornado did a Doppler on Wheels radar clock winds above 300 mph, the fastest then measured on Earth?

Bridge Creek–Moore, Oklahoma. With the funnel bearing down on the state's biggest city, forecasters issued a warning of a new kind: the first 'tornado emergency'.

The National Severe Storms Laboratory, which advised Twister's makers, is based in which Oklahoma city?

Norman. A scientist there got out a map to show the filmmakers that the script's tornado lasting a day and a half could never happen, and suggested an outbreak of many instead.

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

University of Oklahoma. The barrel was retired because it was too heavy and awkward to set down safely in a tornado's path, and it now stands in the weather center's ground-floor atrium.

Which Ferris Bueller's Day Off actor plays Rabbit, the navigator of Jo's storm-chasing team in Twister?

Alan Ruck. A decade after playing the anxious Cameron, he is the chaser who insists that maps be rolled, never folded, because a crease has already ruined Kansas near Wichita.

Twister stood as Warner Bros.' biggest worldwide earner until which film passed it?

The first Harry Potter. At home Twister never beat 1989's Batman; it was the overseas takings, from a release Universal handled, that made it the studio's biggest until late 2001.

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

Jami Gertz. She lost to Melanie Griffith, but the film did 'win' a Razzie of its own that night, for the worst-written movie to gross over $100 million.