Riding the wind
DIRECTOR LEE ISAAC CHUNG ON HIS WHIRLWIND CHANGE-UP FROM MINARI TO TWISTERS
WORDS CHRIS HEWITT
LEE ISAAC CHUNG must feel like he’s not in Kansas anymore. Just six years ago, he had effectively turned his back on a filmmaking career that began with 2007’s Munyurangabo, taking up a position teaching film in South Korea. “I was an ‘easy A’ professor,” he laughs. “Which the other professors were more pissed off [with] than the administrators.”
Chung had been frustrated with life as an independent filmmaker, struggling to get projects off the ground. And then everything changed in an instant. Minari, a deeply personal project about a South Korean family in America which he had written before leaving for Incheon, got picked up. More than that, it made a huge impact when it was released in 2020, becoming a serious player in the Oscar race; Chung himself got nominated for Best Director and Best Original Screenplay. Since then, the career whirlwind hasn’t stopped whizzing. First, he stepped up a budget level or ten by directing an episode of The Mandalorian’s third season. Next, he surprised pretty much all observers by deciding to stay firmly in the commercial realm with his next move: not a small, personal, independent project, but Twisters, the VFX-heavy follow-up to a 1996 blockbuster.
For Chung, who grew up in the twister-tastic Arkansas, it was a move that made perfect sense, and paid off in spades. Not only is Twisters a hugely entertaining romp that arguably improves upon the original movie, but it’s one of the biggest films of the year, pulling in the punters particularly in the US, where destructive weather has become part of the daily conversation. Empire spoke with Chung over Zoom in October, and there was only one place to start: the eye of the storm.