Funnels and fun: Helen Hunt shares memories from her 'Twister' experiences (2024)

You’ve heard of suffering for your art?

That happened on the set of “Twister.”

Helen Hunt, for instance, endured hepatitis shots, vision impairment and a concussion. But, 28 years after the release of the blockbuster motion picture, she wants you to know about the fun times she experienced during the making of the film.

There are “Twister” fans all over the globe, but Oklahomans especially love the film because it was shot here. For some Okies, “Twister” is their “Citizen Kane.” Dorothy > Rosebud?

Hunt and Bill Paxton, who died in 2017, were the lead actors in “Twister.“ If you’re a “Twister” enthusiast and you are interested in what she has to say about the film, you’re in luck.

Hunt will be among guests at Fan Expo Dallas, a major pop culture convention scheduled Friday, June 7, through Sunday, June 9, at Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center in downtown Dallas.

The Emmy- and Oscar-winning actress will be a Saturday-only guest and will take part in a panel discussion about her film and TV career at 2:15 p.m. Fan Expo panels are free with the price of admission, but autographs and photo ops come at an additional charge.

In conjunction with Fan Expo Dallas, Hunt will appear at an 8 p.m. Saturday special screening of “Twister” at Cinemark Dallas XD and IMAX, 11819 Webb Chapel Road. The screening will include a live Q&A.

For tickets and information about the convention, plus a complete list of Fan Expo Dallas guests, go to fanexpohq.com and navigate to Fan Expo Dallas. Click on the special events tab for tickets to the “Twister” screening.

“I’m excited to see it again with everybody,” Hunt said.

A phone interview with Hunt was arranged for the Tulsa World prior to the Dallas trip. Because the phone interview was with an Oklahoma media outlet, Hunt said, “I hear there’s a museum to the destruction we brought there.”

That would be the Twister the Movie Museum in Wakita. Home of “Twister” breakfast maestro Aunt Meg (Lois Smith), Wakita is a tiny Grant County town (population 300-plus) that was ravaged by a tornado in the film. Wakita was faux damaged for the shoot.

How was shooting in Oklahoma?

“This was not like getting pampered every day and having your lipstick touched up and getting your feet rubbed,” Hunt said. “We were — it looked like we were pummeled with crap all day because we were and we had jet engines and fire hoses and human beings whose only job was to throw junk at you. So, at the end of the day, you took quite a shower.”

Truth: The shoot was physically grueling.

“But what saved us is all the actors had so much fun together,” Hunt said.

“We had an ongoing, like, four-month card game that went on and on and on and into the night. We worked all night, so we would start playing cards at 8 and finish at sun-up, interrupted occasionally by coming to the shoot. But mostly movies like this are people setting up and then they call the actors in at the last minute.”

So, camaraderie was developed, according to Hunt.

“Plus, when you’re away from home and you’re in your 20s or 30s, shooting is fun. You hang out and there’s nothing else to do everybody gets really close and that definitely happened on this movie.”

Hunt and Paxton got hepatitis shots after they had been crawling through mud, according to Hunt. “And when you’re staring at a giant tornado, or pretending to, probably your mouth is hanging open,” she said, “We all looked at each other and (said) ‘I wonder what’s in that water?’”

The vision impairment they sustained has been described as temporary blindness.

“We had a bright, sunny day and that was before it was really easy to just change the color of the sky (with effects),” Hunt said. “You had to change the color of the whole image. So if you want to make it dark (behind the actors), everything has to be dark. So they had to pump us full of extra light. The next day, Bill and I looked at each other and said he said, ‘Are you seeing OK?’ I said, ‘Not great.’”

Their corneas got some rest for a few days and they emerged from the shoot minus serious injuries.

“But it was not for the faint of heart,” Hunt said.

At least the actors and film crew didn’t have to dodge real tornadic storms while in Oklahoma. Hunt said they shot during a “pretty sunny spring,” but there was one time when the sky turned green and that creepy feeling arrived when the barometric pressure was changing. Eek.

“It confirmed what I know, which is I am not a born storm chaser,” she said. “I am a run-away-from-the-storms kind of person.”

During a 2019 appearance at a pop culture convention in Tulsa, “Twister” cast member Cary Elwes said he did some storm-chasing in preparation for his role. He said he took one of the film’s advisers (a weather person) along for the ride and they pursued a tornado.

“I got pretty close to that,” Elwes said. “I don’t know how you guys do it. It’s pretty scary stuff. I did it one time and that was fine by me.”

Hunt, asked if she had any other highlights she wanted to mention from her Oklahoma experiences, again mentioned the people. She adored the people who were there. She is glad she got to spend time with folks like Alan Ruck, later to be in “Succession,” and Jeremy Davies (“who has been in some of the best indies around”) and Joey Slotnick, a “world-class theater and film actor.”

“Not only am I impressed by them, but they are fun people to hang out with and they’re like me,” she said. “They liked the same things as me and it was a ton of humor and it really was the bonding with the people was the thing that you take away.”

The sad development is some actors from the 1996 film, including Paxton and Philip Seymour Hoffman, are no longer with us.

“I can’t even bear it,” Hunt said. “I wish they were meeting me there (in Dallas).”

The interview began with Hunt being asked why people still love “Twister.” Her response: “I think it’s good.”

“And I say that not as a filmmaker, so I can have some humility about it,” she said. “My daughter had never seen it just because I just hadn’t shown her a lot of the things I had been in when she was growing up. And then, during COVID, a bunch of us thought ‘let’s get together outside on the lawn and look at it.’ So we did that. And we all looked at each other and said this is a really fun movie.”

Hunt said “Twister” holds up because it had “really good” writers and director Jan de Bont shows not just action heroes but real actors — everybody all the way down the line on both tornado “teams.”

“Todd Field, who is one of the great American directors we have, was one of the tornado chasers,” Hunt said.

“Phil Hoffman and Bill Paxton, nobody was better than the two of them, and so (de Bont) had great writing and great directing and he knows how to move the camera and create suspense. He could see that he didn’t want there to be weapons in the movie, and that’s rare in an action movie. There’s not a single gun in the movie. And at one point, there was a scene where Bill pulls out a knife to cut one of the straps on the machine in the back of the truck and he was like ‘I don’t want to do that.’ So I think he could sense that he was after a tone that was exciting and scary, but it had some amount of innocence to it. That’s exactly what a filmmaker does is he keeps an eye on things like that and he did.”

What did Hunt’s daughter think after seeing the film?

“She thought it was great,” Hunt said. “There’s kind of no way — I mean, maybe some people don’t like it, but I’ve never met them. It’s a pretty fun movie. It never stops and never let up. Jami Gertz was an unsung hero of that movie because she had the job of having to ask all the questions so that the audience could learn all the science of it. So and she and I got along great and spent a lot of time together. So it was fun.”

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