Bring On the Debris

A dissatisfied frown on his face, “Twister” director Jan De Bont watches a half-finished special-effects shot from his new film. “I think we need something else flying across the road,” he says as the brief shot is projected over and over on a big movie screen here at Industrial Light & Magic headquarters. “It looks a little bare.”

“Maybe some corrugated metal?” asks Stefen Fangmeier, the ILM visual effects supervisor on the movie. De Bont shakes his head. “What about a piece of fence?” the director wonders. “Or a metal gate? We need more debris.”

Not to make light of De Bont’s concerns, but when you see this shot in the finished version of “Twister,” which opened Friday, you’re not going to be distracted by some gate flying across the road. Your eyes are going to be glued to something bigger: an awesomely nasty, skyscraper-size tornado that shreds cornfields and tears up farmhouses like the Jolly Green Giant on a bender.

Eager to wipe that frown off De Bont’s face, Fangmeier suggests inserting a lawn chair. “What about a mailbox?” De Bont wonders. “Could we have a mailbox flying by?”

Fangmeier shrugs. “What about a color TV?”

Here at ILM, anything seems possible--you’re at the crossroads where the movies meet our imagination. This is the new frontier of digital cinema, where a host of young computer-animation wizards is inventing many of the captivating images that will thrill audiences this summer. Since September, not long after he finished shooting the $75-million film, De Bont has been commuting from Los Angeles to ILM’s low-profile Marin County headquarters, where the George Lucas-owned firm has been creating “Twister’s” 320 separate special-effects shots.

Using an electronic pointer that allows him to project a white arrow on the theater screen, the 52-year-old Dutch-born director focuses on a shot in which the tornado races toward co-stars Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt, flexing its muscles by sending a powerboat careening past their heads.

“We’re working on the age of the boat--it still looks a little too new,” says Fangmeier, who heads a 70-person ILM team assigned to the film. “How about the hail--you like the way it’s hitting the ground?” “Yes,” says De Bont, running a hand through his unruly mop of gray hair. “It has a nice splash.”

The next shot shows the tornado’s winds whipping a row of trees along the road. De Bont says he likes the way the trees bend in the wind. It seems such an odd remark that I ask an ILM techie seated next to me, “Don’t all trees bend in the wind?”

“Those are our trees,” he explains helpfully. “Totally computer-generated.”

De Bont takes a second to study the panoramic expanse of dark, brooding sky surrounding the tornado. “They did all the sky too,” he says. “When I shot that scene last summer, it was completely blue--not a cloud in the sky.”

One day as De Bont is leaving ILM, he stops to admire a “Twister” poster tacked on the door of a production office. The faces of Paxton and Hunt, the ostensible stars of the film, are nowhere to be seen. The poster is dominated by a fearsome tornado, set against a black sky, its funnel cloud reaching down to wreak havoc on an unsuspecting landscape.

De Bont points to the tornado--”the star of our movie.”

Not that Arnold Schwarzenegger has anything to worry about, at least not for a couple more years, but the new stars of Hollywood’s high-roller summer movies are the special effects. Ever since the digital dinosaurs of “Jurassic Park” exploded at the box office, studio executives have been packing their summer film slates with the kind of big-bang action or fantasy films that have just as much appeal overseas as in the United States. And just as “Jurassic Park,” “Casper” and “Toy Story” passed the $100-million mark without relying on any A-list movie stars on screen, this summer offers more films, including “Twister,” “Independence Day” and “The Frighteners,” whose buzz comes more from splashy digital effects than from movie stars.

With so much riding on special effects, companies such as ILM and Digital Domain have become key players in the filmmaking process. In fact, when De Bont and his Amblin Entertainment production team finished shooting “Twister” last summer after 98 days in the tornado belt of Oklahoma and Iowa, their work was barely half done. An equally complex part of the film’s production has been unfolding on computer screens here the past seven months.

Once known for its CIA-like secrecy (with offices concealed in a nondescript building still bearing the sign of its long-departed previous owner, the Kerner Optical Co.), ILM has a relaxed, college-dorm atmosphere. The bathrooms are unisex, lunch is takeout sushi. The largely thirtysomething techies wear jeans, T-shirts and work boots.

They labor at computer-equipped workstations, where everyone has a specialty--in one room you’ll find a gang of “tornado guys,” down the hall “sky replacement guys” and “barn explosion” teams. (The effects staff is about 3 to 1 male to female.) Enthusiasm runs high. In the screening room, when De Bont gives final approval to an effects shot, everyone breaks into applause.

In the main office, a wall is covered with photos of digital-effects shots, each coded with different color dots signifying the effect--orange for tornado debris, blue for sky replacement, dark green for hail. Nearby is a scorecard that, as of early April, gave a snapshot of ILM’s progress.

Total number of shots: 320. Number of shots to go: 80. Number of weeks to go: Three.

Although the staff has a brash beat-the-clock attitude about the approaching deadline, you can feel tension in the air.

“The emotion is definitely running high around here,” says Kim Bromley, the project’s visual-effects producer. “Along with ‘Casper,’ this is probably the largest group of people ever assembled to do a computer-effects film. It’s not uncommon for us to be finished only two weeks before the film’s out, so it gets a lot like ‘Broadcast News.’ ”

She flashes a thin smile. “I’m always reminding everyone to breathe.”

It’s no wonder everyone at ILM seems in perpetual motion--in the world of computer effects, change is happening at a dizzying pace. As recently as a year ago, it would have been impossible to make “Twister.”

“You couldn’t do our tornado without the kind of three-dimensional animation we use,” says De Bont, a veteran cinematographer who became a top action director after making the runaway hit “Speed.” “Until now, all you had was two dimensions. The tornado would’ve been flat, like a cartoon. You need the layers, the debris rotating at different speeds and in dimensional spheres to make it look real.”

De Bont even has a nickname for the tornado: “the monster.” During filming last summer, his actors would sprint across cornfields, pretending to be evading its deadly winds. To make sure they looked appropriately terror-stricken, De Bont installed tiny radio hookups in their ears so they could hear him yelling, “The monster’s coming! The monster’s right behind you!”

Here at ILM, the monster is taking shape on computer screens, growing darker or taller or more laden with debris, all depending on De Bont’s fancy. It’s a revolutionary new brand of filmmaking in which the director can completely alter the look of his film six months after he finished shooting it.

Watching a shot in which the tornado shreds a farmhouse and its neighboring barn, De Bont decides that the barn’s roof should be ripped away in pieces rather than all at once. “Let’s have it go from left to right, to give a sense of movement. And the roof shouldn’t come off till the windows blow out. Boom! Then boom again!”

Later, De Bont watches a scene in which a tornado sends a ladder crashing through a truck windshield, then catapults the truck high into the air, carrying it across the sky, then sending it crashing back to earth, where it explodes in a huge fireball.

“I filmed the explosion on location,” he explains. “The ladder crashing through the truck’s windshield, the truck being swept up in the air, twisting around and then flying back to the ground--they’ve done that all here.”

Fangmeier playfully asks, “Why couldn’t you just drop the truck from a helicopter?”

“Because it would have fallen straight down,” De Bont replies. “That’s not as exciting as having it twist and turn in the air and come down at an angle, with the force of the tornado behind it. I could never do that. That’s your department.”

One day I sit with De Bont as he views one of the film’s most spectacular special-effects shots. Paxton’s truck weaves down the highway, dodging immense combines and tractors that the tornado has flung into the air and hurled to the ground.

As I rave excitedly about the incredible realism of the effects, De Bont starts to laugh. I’ve been fooled.

“The combines are real,” he says in his no-nonsense deadpan. “We dropped them from helicopters.”

It took days to complete the sequence, with helicopters first dropping sandbags so the film’s stunt coordinators could gauge where the real combines would fall, to ensure that none of them demolished Paxton’s truck. But if it’s better to have an ILM-created twister pick up a truck and drop it in one scene, why is it better to risk flattening Paxton’s pickup truck by dropping a combine for real in another?

“They don’t crash well,” De Bont explains. “It’s the one thing you can’t really duplicate with effects--the impact. It just doesn’t look real, not yet.” (Which is why the ILM-created truck that drops out of the sky doesn’t crash--it explodes.)

As a child, growing up in the Dutch town of Eindhoven, De Bont was enthralled by films dominated by lots of crashes--war movies. At 7, he started making movies with an 8-millimeter camera. As a teenager, he rented a local theater and charged his friends admission to see films. His favorites were the war films.

“They were very dramatic, emotional and exciting, all in one,” he recalls. “It was the ultimate high for me.”

After college, De Bont went to film academy, where he graduated one year behind Paul Verhoeven. After directing TV documentaries and a show that featured German-language versions of Monty Python sketches, De Bont began working as a director of photography, shooting most of Verhoeven’s Dutch films.

Like Verhoeven, he was fascinated with Hollywood films. At his first opportunity, De Bont came to the United States, where he had a lengthy career as a cinematographer, specializing in thrillers and action films like Verhoeven’s “Basic Instinct,” “The Hunt for Red October,” “Die Hard” and “Lethal Weapon 3.”

In America, action films are roundly ignored at Oscar time, dismissed as mechanical wonders. In Europe, they are held in higher esteem.

“The first image we ever saw in a movie was a train coming right at our heads--that is what’s exciting about film,” De Bont says. “But the academy doesn’t see action films as serious enough. They think we’re playing with emotions that are too simple. But to me, putting energy into every frame of film or building suspense without a line of dialogue is what real movie-making is about.”

For De Bont, one of the joys of making “Twister” was being on the flat, open terrain of Oklahoma--it reminded him of his favorite westerns.

“I always loved the epic scale of Hollywood movies,” he explains. “To us, westerns were pieces of art, with their incredible landscapes. That openness and space doesn’t exist in Europe anymore. If you look at the old Dutch painters, they showed these great landscapes, with vast sky and trees, but that’s all gone now. It only exists in America.”

Especially in the movies. After the huge success of “Speed,” De Bont wanted to make a film with an oversize character. His first choice was “Godzilla,” a TriStar project featuring the legendary Japanese monster that collapsed, De Bont says, when the film’s computer-effects budget alone hit the $60-million mark. De Bont then turned to “Twister,” which features a script written by high-concept novelist (and “Jurassic Park” creator) Michael Crichton and his wife, Anne-Marie Martin.

The film concerns two rival teams of tornado-tracking scientists racing across Oklahoma back roads, devouring junk food, blasting rock music and spouting storm-chaser slang that’s at least as impenetrable as anything you’ve ever heard on “ER,” the Crichton-created TV hit. The low-tech squad of scientists is headed by Hunt, who is reluctantly joined by her soon-to-be-ex-husband, Paxton, an equally fearless storm chaser. He is accompanied by a girlfriend, Jami Gertz, who is woefully unprepared for the tornado trackers’ death-defying antics.

The outcome of this romantic triangle is predictable, but De Bont says it gives the film a layer of emotional turbulence to go with the stormy weather. Filming the movie was stormy itself, marred by losses of equipment, flared tempers, crew firings and unimaginably bad weather.

“I told the actors how tough it was going to be,” De Bont insists. “I said, ‘There’s going to be hail and mud and wind and terrible conditions--the restaurants are horrible in Oklahoma.’

“But no matter how awful I told them it was going to be, it was worse than even I imagined. It was a nightmare.”

The biggest problems came out of De Bont’s insistence on going where the bad weather was. ILM could create all of the rain and hail shots “Twister” needed, but any scenes De Bont could shoot with authentic bad weather or dark skies would help trim the effects budget. Even though the film hired meteorologists with satellite hookups and computer tracking devices, the weather was so volatile that by the time the film company arrived at a suitably stormy location, the sun was often shining again.

“We’d start a scene in the sunshine, 20 minutes later it would be raining, then it would start hailing, and then before you knew it, there would be blue sky again,” De Bont recalls. “As a director, it would drive you crazy because it was never what you wanted. If we’d scheduled a hailstorm scene, it was 100 degrees and a spotless blue sky.”

To provide wind, De Bont used a pair of Boeing jet engines, mounted on trucks, that could blow debris past his actors. To generate hail, an enormous truck fed blocks of ice into a grinder.

De Bont taps his skull. “I got hit in the head so many times I finally gave up and let the second-unit directors do it.”

The biggest rains came when the filmmakers were on tiny dirt roads, trying to chase a big storm. Soon the transport trucks were mired in mud, leaving De Bont fuming. “We had to use bulldozers, even helicopters, to pull our trucks out of ditches. I was so desperate that I started yelling at the meteorologist, saying, ‘When is it going to stop raining?’ ”

Apparently De Bont did a lot of yelling. Although he is polite and good-natured with the ILM staff, several crew members who were on location accused the director of autocratic behavior.

“When something would go wrong, Jan would just go nuts,” one crew member said. “He yelled, he used obscenities. Once when he got angry he shoved one of the members of the camera crew. He was a [jerk] to the crew. Put it this way--I worked on ‘Waterworld,’ and it was a piece of cake compared to ‘Twister.’ ”

Crew members were also critical of De Bont’s handling of safety issues.

“He pushed it way beyond what he needed to,” another crewman said. “When we had a lightning storm, he ignored the electrician’s warnings to stop shooting and just kept going, yelling at him, ‘Don’t tell me when [expletive] to stop!’ ”

De Bont shrugged off the criticisms.

“I don’t care if I’m popular with the crew,” he says. “Everyone knew the movie was going to be rough, and they’re all paid well for doing hard work. I didn’t ask them to do anything I wasn’t willing to do myself.”

He insisted that he didn’t ignore safety concerns: “We had a meteorologist on the set, and if he said a storm was too close, we shut down. You can’t have crew people taking it into their own initiative to make a decision or worry about lightning. Someone has to be in charge--you can’t stop shooting just because there’s a storm 30 miles away.”

After repeated clashes with De Bont over many issues, noted cinematographer Don Burgess (an Oscar nominee for “Forrest Gump”) left the film a month into filming, taking a 30-person camera and support crew with him. De Bont replaced him with Jack Green, a longtime director of photography for Clint Eastwood.

“We had to improvise constantly because of the weather and we were shooting with four or five cameras at once,” De Bont says. “The camera crew was overwhelmed--they couldn’t react fast enough.”

Burgess would not comment on his departure. But crew members say the blame for the film falling behind schedule lies not with Burgess’ camera crew, but with poor preparation, a multitude of script rewrites and bad weather.

De Bont didn’t stand on ceremony. The stills from the movie are full of photos of the director operating a hand-held camera himself, not a sight you normally see on a major film. He estimates that six cameras were wrecked during filming. “But that’s what it takes to make it exciting. Cameras are just a tool, like a pair of pliers.”

De Bont’s attitude is pretty clear: When you’re making a big summer movie, you take no prisoners.

“You need incredible inner discipline, you can never relax or expect someone else will take care of a problem,” he says. “So you tell your body, ‘It’s only 95 days.’ And when it’s over you totally fall apart, because it’s the hardest 95 days your body will ever go through.”

Compared with the rigors of location shooting, spending days at ILM critiquing computer effects must seem like vacation time. But for a perfectionist director, all this dazzling new technology simply presents a new set of problems to be solved.

“The effects people are always asking you, ‘How big an explosion do you want?’ ” De Bont says. “And what do you tell them--as big as a house? As high as the sky? There’s never a correct answer. It’s all in your mind.”

One day De Bont and his ILM crew watch a shot in which Paxton and Hunt, crouched in a demolished truck, reach out to hug each other after surviving a tornado assault.

“What is he doing there?” says a young techie, squinting at the screen. “He’s touching her breast, that’s all,” De Bont says. “We don’t need any effects for that.”