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Kevin Kelleher, Brandon Perea, Ashley Jay Sandberg, Lee Isaac Chung, Shawn Waugh, and Jacqueline Corley attended the Hollywood Climate Summit on June 26.
Chelsea Lauren at the Hollywood Climate Summit/Shutterstock
At the Hollywood Climate Summit on Wednesday, Twister Director Lee Isaac Chung, executive producer Ashley Jay Sandberg and actor Brandon Perea, along with real-life tornado experts, discussed how science and climate change are woven into the film.
The new film is an update of the 1996 project of the same name, which follows storm chasers in a desperate fight as multiple tornadoes cluster across central Oklahoma. Kevin Kelleher, a technical advisor at the National Severe Storms Laboratory who worked on both the original and the new film, acknowledges that from a scientific standpoint, the 1996 version had many inaccuracies.
“Fast forward 30 years, now everybody has a cell phone. They have access to a lot of the data that we have access to, they have radar, they have all sorts of stuff. And if you’ve ever been to the Midwest or you live in the Midwest, you know that everybody is pretty weather-sensitive,” Kelleher said at the panel, held at the Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Beverly Hills. “So if we don’t get it right this time, it’s going to be a big problem. And I don’t want a lot of people who know about this to start saying negative things about it.” [the movie]”It’s going to be a lot of people’s attention and I’m really hopeful that we can get it as right as possible.”
However, he acknowledged that the storyline had a few Hollywood embellishments and some sci-fi elements, and also warned about storm chasing, “It’s really dangerous to go out and do this… Don’t do it.”
Tornado consultant Shawn Waugh also joined the conversation, saying, “This is a really unique opportunity to share and have to give examples of what the actual science behind a lot of this is. I mean, when the first film came out 30 years ago, undergraduate meteorology enrollments nationwide tripled over the next 20 years.” Waugh said there’s been a bit of a drop off since then, but “I guarantee you’ll see the same from this film.”
The panel also discussed Universal’s implementation of its GreenerLight sustainability program into the production and the film’s portrayal of the impacts of climate change on the weather.
“Climate change is a very real issue that we all have to deal with and its effects are being seen in Tornado Alley, where tornadoes are concentrated across the United States. There’s been talk recently of Tornado Alley expanding,” Waugh explained, noting that while the total number of tornadoes hasn’t changed much, “we’re seeing a trend where the number of days that they occur is going down, but the number of days that they occur is going up. So the tornadoes that do occur are bigger and occur longer apart.”
These storms mostly affect the southeastern U.S. and can devastate small towns, “but they don’t get the attention or the emergency response systems that many of the larger towns that are affected have,” he continued. “I’ve been to towns that have just been destroyed, and the people that are supposed to be doing rescue work are digging through the rubble, and I’m like, ‘How are we going to deal with that?’ And I think through efforts like this, we have a really good way to start those conversations and bring awareness to that fact.”
The Hollywood Climate Summit is an annual environmental conference aimed at raising climate awareness in the media by educating and connecting professionals from the fields of film, television, games, marketing, advertising and journalism. This year’s event runs from June 25-28 and will feature Jane Fonda, Patty Jenkins, Shailene Woodley, Connie Britton and Bill Nighy, among others.
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