Chasing ‘Twisters’ and collaborating with ‘tornado fanatic’ Steven Spielberg

Growing up in the Midwest, filmmaker Lee Isaac Chung developed both a healthy fear of tornadoes and a reverence for Jan de Bont’s 1996 disaster film “Twister.” He saw the movie in the theater with his family when he was a teenager.

“I remember thinking, ‘I didn’t know you could chase after these things,’” Chung said. “That, to me, was very mind-blowing.”

These were forces of nature he and his schoolmates in rural Arkansas, near the Oklahoma border, were being taught how to safely hide from. And here’s Helen Hunt, Bill Paxton, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Alan Ruck driving towards them. Intentionally.