As a boy growing up in Holland, Jan De Bont fell in love with westerns. He was enthralled by the sweep of the American terrain and enchanted by the myths documented by such filmmakers as John Ford and Howard Hawks.
As director of the blockbuster “Twister”–and, by now, a longtime resident of the United States–De Bont may have created an entirely new cinematic genre: the midwestern.
“I was very inspired by westerns in my childhood and I tried to give a little bit back in this movie,” he observed, while grabbing a quick lunch in his suite at the Four Seasons Hotel here. “There’s nothing more impressive to a young European filmmaker than those vistas.
“In a way, this movie is sort of like a western. There’s no horses, but there are trucks, and the cowboys are the storm chasers.”
The rolling farmland of Iowa never will be confused with Ford’s Monument Valley, nor will Oklahoma’s dusty plains ever make anyone forget their first visit to Yellowstone. Still, for the harrowing confrontations with nature in “Twister,” the nation’s heartland couldn’t have provided a more appropriate stage.
Indeed, where else but in Tornado Alley could one attempt an airborne bovine ballet?
“The flying cows were based on reality,” said De Bont, who made his directorial debut two years ago in “Speed.” “There was a man in Texas who was driving a car during a storm and actually saw flying cows.”
It sounded crazy, but, “Where are they going to run to, and how do you show it? I didn’t want to use real cows because I would have been killed by animal-rights activists.”
But the depiction did prompt one reporter in New York to ask if actual cows were used. So, for those easily fooled, “We had to put something at the end of the credits from the Humane Society to say no animals were harmed.”
Thanks to the technological innovations that have revolutionized the way Hollywood makes films, De Bont was able not only to add Holsteins to the computer-enhanced maelstrom but also careening tanker trucks and flyaway houses. Ultimately, his $70 million blockbuster became an exercise in digital dexterity that is challenging audiences to guess which images of mayhem are real and which can be credited to software surrealists.
“The line between reality and non-reality is very, very thin,” said the 52-year-old director. “I guarantee you that many times when you think a tornado is real, it is absolutely not real, and vice versa. This is where digital technology has brought us.
“This movie could not have been made two years ago,” De Bont continued, as he spoke of the wizards at LucasFilm’s Industrial Light & Magic studio. “We are capable of producing effects that are very photorealistic and three-dimensional, in which there is interaction between background and foreground.
“It used to be that you would put actors in the foreground and things would happen behind them. It was never possible to have something come out and go around the actors, then fly past them toward the camera.”
Certainly not everything that occurs on screen is the result of some technician’s sleight-of-hand on a computer keyboard. The film’s stars, Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton, had to endure months of exhausting work to dramatize the activities of storm chasers.
For the scene in which a gasoline tanker tumbles out of the funnel cloud, a life-size semi was shot swinging in midair from a crane on a crystal-clear day. Back at the studio, this movement was superimposed on a cloudy-sky background and a computer-enhanced tornado was added to footage that included Hunt and Paxton’s characters.
While technicians could manipulate footage of actual tornadoes and their computer-animated counterparts, it wasn’t possible to fake the intensity of an onrushing storm.
“The velocity of the wind is something you can’t re-create in a computer because it is very interactive (for the actors).” De Bont said. “I brought in a couple of jet engines and put them on flatbed trailers.
“To create hail, we shoved big blocks of ice into a meat grinder, had an electric motor spit out the chips and the jet engines would push the ice toward the camera and actors. Debris was thrown toward the cameras from another big tractor-trailer.”
The debris added legitimacy to the storm scenes, but the actors found it difficult to emote while being pelted with twigs and leaves. If De Bont’s set was proving to be more unpleasant than most, this, perhaps, was because he intended the experience to be authentically nightmarish.
He even tweaked the “voice” of his Force-5 twister to make it more suitably horrific.
“I asked a lot of people in Oklahoma and Kansas what a tornado sounded like, and they would all say it sounded like a freight train coming at you, or a jet engine,” De Bont explained. “I think what they meant is that it seemed alive, it had a voice. When you have Mother Nature (as) a lead character, you better give it a voice.
“I wanted it to become even more alive, so I added lion roars and tiger snarls to the soundtrack, all those things and more, to make it like a Grimm’s fairy tale monster.”
If the tornado actually did develop a tangible persona, perhaps it was because De Bont had been able to accomplish similar feats on films he had worked on as director of photography.
“I tried to make inanimate objects come alive,” he said. “In `Die Hard,’ it was a building; in `Hunt for Red October,’ I made the submarine a character. . . . It was never there in the screenplay.”
Neither was the signature scene in “Speed,” the one in which a bus hurdled from one segment of an elevated highway to another.
“I added a lot of sequences to that movie,” said De Bont. “When I read the screenplay, everybody said this was a tiny little movie, what can you do with a bus?”
Plenty as it turned out. Fans of that hit film will be happy to know that De Bont already is in pre-production for “Speed 2.”
For “Twister,” the director said that he added the night scene outside the drive-in theater.
“I made it up because it was scarier to me to show the tornado at night,” he said. “I had a vision of seeing this drive-in with `The Shining’ on the screen.
“I wanted to show the incredible power Jack Nicholson displayed in that movie when he was attacking that door, and I wanted to juxtapose it with the power of nature. That, I thought, was the key scene to the movie.”
