Lee Isaac Chung had a hard time filming Twisters in Oklahoma… because of all the twisters

If there was one major takeaway from the original 1996 Twister, it was that there’s a lot of damn twisters in Oklahoma. If there’s one major takeaway from Lee Isaac Chung’s just-released sequel, it’s that there’s a lot of damn twisters in Oklahoma! Still, the twisters seem to have gotten the last laugh because despite, you know, making an entire movie about it, Chung still had a leopards eating his face moment when he discovered that it was actually pretty tough to film an entire movie in the middle of an open field in Oklahoma because they kept having to run from—you guessed it—all the twisters. Twisters 3 really writes itself.

Chung felt prepared for the on-location shoot because he grew up in Arkansas’ tornado country. “It just ended up being a fact of life for me, and I think for everybody I knew growing up there,” he told Vanity Fair. The fact that the original movie “felt like a hometown film in many ways” also inspired him to want to capture the magnitude of Oklahoma’s storm-scarred skies without relying too much on VFX. “I heard they had quite a long stretch of sunny weather when they really needed clouds and a sense of storminess. So I felt this deep conviction that we should be filming during tornado season,” he said. “I was very naive with that decision.”

Everyone on set quickly came to understand the massive power of these storms for themselves—no acting required. While they were able to capture some real cloudbursts on film (the larger vortexes were digitally generated), Chung “wasn’t fully thinking about how much we would be shut down by weather. It was just a constant thing for us.” The shoot experienced lighting delay after lighting delay—so much that the team wasn’t allowed to say the word “lightning,” as if they were invoking Macbeth in a theater. 

But it wasn’t just the lightning. On Anthony Ramos’ first day on set, an EF-3 tornado (a medium impact storm on scale from 1 to 5) touched down in a neighboring town and the team had to shelter there and wait it out for a couple of hours. During a scene where Daisy Edgar-Jones and her college friends run away from a tornado, the team also had to run away from a tornado. 

Still, the film somehow finished on schedule and Chung says the constant delays actually helped the team to bond while they sheltered and just talked about life. It also gave them some valuable real-life design inspiration. In one scene where a tornado destroys a farmer’s market, for example, a real tornado destroyed the set they had built for the farmer’s market. The catch? The team hadn’t actually filmed the “before” sequences yet and were obviously underground while it happened. “We had to come out and rebuild that set—then destroy it again,” the director said. “But we took pictures of the destruction so we’d know how to make the destruction look based on reality.”

While the results are beautiful, Chung isn’t about to become a storm chaser. “I wouldn’t take the gamble and say, ‘Let’s film there next tornado season,’” he said. “You never know what’s going to happen.”

Twisters is out in theaters now.