Daisy Edgar-Jones Explains the Making Of 'Twisters'

At the beginning of every scene,

would shout, Wind up, rain up, debris

and then these big fans would come on

and make this crazy sound and the rain would come,

the debris and I was like,

That's a wild way to start a day of work.

♪ Steal my daughter ♪

[clapboard clacks]

Hi there, I'm Daisy Edgar-Jones

and I play Kate Cooper in the movie Twisters.

Now the film's been out a little while,

I'm gonna share some behind-the-scenes details

of the making of the movie.

Hello, Sky, play Twisters.

[dramatic music]

[characters shouting]

We had shot most of the film in the summer,

which was some of the hottest days of my life,

but we had to stand down because of the actor strike,

so we actually came back and filmed this in December.

It got very, very, very cold,

but we were still in tank tops and shorts most of the time.

This was probably about 3 AM.

There's actual pain in my eyes

because it was absolutely freezing,

but I think it added to the scene.

Designing this whole world,

it felt like stepping into a big epic Spielbergian movie

and I think Isaac, our filmmaker,

really wanted it to feel that way.

It wanted to feel like an old classic.

It's shot on film, which gives it this nostalgic,

grainy feel to it.

I met Spielberg at a party a month before I started filming

and my agent was like, It's Spielberg. Go say hello.

And I was like, No, no I can't.

But I ended up going, Hello Mr. Spielberg,

and he was so lovely.

I was with my friend who was quite starstruck, as was I,

and she had been vegetarian for a decade,

but at that said party,

they were handing out In-N-Out burgers

and Spielberg said, Oh, you must try an In-N-Out burger,

and my friend went, Okay,

having not eaten meat for 10 years,

ate a full burger just 'cause Steven Spielberger said,

Steven Spielberger,

Steven Spielberg said to try it.

So anyway, she now eats meat.

Go!

Go, go, go, go, go, go, go!

I have actually have a quite a famously bad run.

I was teased quite badly at school for my run.

I remember being a bit daunted

by the amount of running I had to do,

you know, once I have a cool action run like Tom Cruise,

I'm not sure I achieved it, but, yeah,

I did stay quite fit. Get in the car!

Go, go, go, go, go!

A little side note, this movie is a bugger if you pause it

'cause you just, you think you look cool

and then you realize you don't.

[metal crunching]

Something lovely about this scene is

the character who gets in the car

and flies off is James Paxton,

who's Bill Paxton's son who obviously was the lead

of the original Twister.

And so it was really great to meet James

and hear about Bill's stories from the first movie.

Go, go! [metal crunching]

I heard rumor that the CGI guys snuck in,

in the deep background, a cow.

There was quite a few nods to Wizard of Oz,

which is obviously the kind of most iconic tornado film,

I suppose, of them all.

And, obviously, the original movie,

they use a device called Dorothy to measure the tornadoes

and we have our own Dorothy

in this movie too at the beginning,

but also all the storm park cars are called Lion,

Tin Man, Wizard, et cetera.

So they've all got kind of,

yeah, they've all got little nods to Wizard of Oz,

which is really cool.

And there's a few Easter eggs in the movie actually,

especially if you're a big fan of the original.

I didn't really notice this until today,

but the little girl in the scene

has got a kind of Dorothy nod in her costume.

She's got like her little dungarees

and her blue gingham shirt, which is really cool,

and her shoes were ruby red.

[metal clanking] No!

Isaac really wanted it to feel

as close to what it is like to experience a tornado.

He wanted the sound to really match what it was.

You know, often people say it sounds like a freight train.

[metal clanking]

I think what's great about watching out at home

and on this TV,

you're still enjoying the big scale epic moments

because it sounds so good,

it's, you know, got beautiful visuals.

It feels like not much is lost, which is good.

An EF1, perfect conditions, run your experiments.

A lot of weather jargon coming up,

a lot of science jargon and a lot of pain.

It's a 450,000 kilos precipitation

loaded into our water-filled polymer

to load the up the updraft.

Glen and I actually got the giggles,

I remember, doing the set

because we couldn't get the words out

because it was quite complicated and they kept changing

and the measurements and all that.

It was really bad.

It was like when you shouldn't be laughing

because we don't have enough time and then you can't stop

'cause it's naughty and you shouldn't be doing it.

In theory, this should have worked.

I love trying to understand something

and learn about something that I otherwise

probably wouldn't have explored.

And, for me, my favorite part of geography

was always weather and clouds.

And so I actually, when I was a kid,

I wrote a book on clouds, like, different types of clouds,

what they meant 'cause I wanted to be able to be like,

That's a cumulonimbus.

We had a lot of weather consultants on set

to try and guide us and help us when we'd be like,

What is a wind shear.

And, you know, What does a dry ridge mean?

And how do we sort of make it sound

like it's rolling off the tongue?

It was cool to meet actual meteorologists

who often actually draw storms on paper.

They track them with colored pencils and paper

and that's still what they do today

even though they have all the tech,

but it's an easier way to track the storms,

through drawing them,

which I thought was really interesting

and then they kind of talked us through the history

of tornadoes in Oklahoma and what it means to that community

and actually everyone I met

who is from there has has their own story

and understands the weather and meteorology in a way

that you only can when you've grown up in that place.

Okay, so 1,500 kilos of polymer

absorbing 300 times its weight.

Kate's accent was interesting

because she obviously she grew up in Oklahoma,

but she's lived in New York for a long time.

But it wasn't an EF1 that day.

I mean, we never had a chance.

Throughout the movie Tyler calls her city girl,

so, obviously, she can't come in with a very strong accent

otherwise he'll know immediately that she's from Sapulpa.

So trying to find this kind of balance

between edges of it but also not so strong

that he'd immediately know where she was from.

♪ Girl, you stole my heart ♪

♪ Steal my daughter ♪

[Tyler laughing] You don't have to drive-

Growing up in London,

I didn't experience extreme weather quite like this.

As extreme as it got was usually a snow day.

So it was really exciting to be able

to actually film in Oklahoma where the movie's set

and we also filmed during tornado season.

We filmed so much out in the sticks.

We were out in the fields like on the red dirt

driving under the big sky.

Like, we weren't with a green screen,

we weren't in a studio very often.

I think my most extreme weather experience was on this job.

There was a lot of days where we had scenes shut down

because of lightning strikes or potential tornadoes,

as we were filming this massive, massive of cyclone cloud,

which is a big tornado cloud,

which they sometimes called the mothership

because it looks like a spaceship,

it's the most gnarly looking cloud

I've ever seen in my life,

began to form behind us,

so we looked like two of the worst storm chasers

you've ever seen 'cause we were sort of like,

Where is it?

And it was like genuinely a real one behind us

and we had to close down filming, leave

and the cloud eventually turned into a tornado,

which I think our director chased and saw

with some of the consultants on the show.

Hold on. Oh, Tyler, this is dumb.

Hold on. This is really dumb.

All right, we got this, Kate.

Here comes the kick. Oh, God!

That was one of the biggest challenges

of trying to make sure we were both looking

at the same thing because obviously, like,

we'd had no idea really of how big the tornado was gonna be,

where it was moving.

So a lot of the time it was just our director shouting like,

12 o'clock, 1 o'clock, 2 o'clock.

And we were sort of like, Ah!

Just trying to figure out what time of the day it was.

It was really quite an interesting thing

to then be able to watch it and posted me like,

Oh, that's what I looked like.

That's where it was.

Hello, Sky, volume up.

♪ What you say we go ahead and lock the doors ♪

Oh, look this thing's raining for EF-

Oh, shit!

We got extra weight on the chassis.

So epic.

It's so cool.

One thing I will say,

I think this movie has such a good soundtrack.

It's so good.

It's like all the heavy hitters of the country scene.

My mom was a film editor so I've always been fascinated

by the power of an edit and how much you can change with it

and music and adding that.

♪ Mississippi road ♪ All right, slow down!

♪ Some will say my silver ♪

It's really cool to see on the TV.

I mean, you get all of the kind of layers and textures

of the soundscape, which is really cool,

'cause, I mean, they were so intentional with building it.

You can kind of hear that freight train,

like, [imitating freight train]

thing which is, like, quite chilling.

[Tyler] Oh!

All right, slow down!

♪ Don't stop ♪ Now!

[explosion banging]

That's the polyacrylate.

Let's hope it's active.

The size and the scale and the effect of the tornado

was a really helpful way for me to track my character's arc

because each tornado represents

kind of a different thing for Kate.

The first one is this big marker of a shift in her life

because it takes a lot from her.

As the tornadoes go, they each represent a different thing.

So the first one is kind of her first experience back in it.

It's unpredictable and she gets scared

and, you know, this one we're a bit further along

and it's her beginning to come back

to the joyful part of chasing that she loved,

this kind of fascination, this wonder of chasing,

which Tyler has an abundance,

he's got that kind of childlike joy,

which is really infectious.

We don't have to drive into it, it's really dangerous!

This was an entire half a year later,

we came back to finish this sequence,

this part we shot in the studio, which was really,

if you zoomed out a bit further,

you just see two blokes with planks of wood

just, like, levering the car so that we were kind of moving,

but it looks better like this.

[indistinct country music]

♪ Take me away like the Mississippi ♪

Some of the crew got to go to Noah

and the National Weather Center

and meet a bunch of meteorologists

and this really great guy called Sean,

who was our sort of main storm chaser consultant

who also helped rig up all the trucks

that you see in the movie.

We saw his real truck,

which was the coolest thing I've ever seen.

It had like mad hail dents in it and cages on it

and he had an ax in the back.

I'm not sure what that was for.

We had a great first AD as well

who had a brilliant energy who would kind of,

at the beginning of every scene would shout,

Wind up, rain up!

And then, Debris!

And then these big fans would come on

and make this crazy sound and the rain would come,

the debris.

And it was like, that's a wild way to start a day of work.

But he was so involved and he would sit,

he would stand in front of the fan,

so his face would be going like that

and he'd be shouting directions.

Oh, God!

So much of filming for screen is like acting in a vacuum

because you are often giving, like, emotional dialogue

to a mark on a mapbox or you are filming up here

and below is just, you know, an apple box

with thing props on it and you have to hit your mark

and it's very controlled

and it's hard to feel that kind of, like, freedom.

So, for me, filming those stunt sequences were

so, so freeing because it's not much you can control

when you're throwing debris at somebody.

So, you know, we were actually there

with the wind in our face and we were there with the rain

and not being able to open your eyes

and so it was so much easier to act

because it was happening.

♪ And I know ♪ Here it comes!

♪ Girl, you stole my heart ♪

Thanks for watching.

I hope you enjoyed this exclusive look

behind the scenes of Twisters.