Growing up in the southern state of Arkansas, Lee Isaac Chung was familiar with tornadoes. ‘At school, that was always the drill that we had to practise: the tornado drill,’ he tells Total Film. One of his earliest memories is as a four-year-old, three weeks into living on the Arkansas farm in a trailer home, when his parents called out, ‘There’s a tornado coming.’
‘We didn’t have any storm shelter,’ recalls Chung. ‘So we were immediately looking for a place where we could hide it out.’ The family were unscathed, but it made a huge impression. It also meant that the 1996 blockbuster Twister resonated with the young Chung when he saw it at the cinema with his dad and sister. The opening scene in particular. ‘It was a family on a farm, and it’s night-time, and they had to run from a tornado... It was like, “Oh, I understand this feeling.”’