In an interview with “Bullz-Eye” about the new season of Big Love, Bill Paxton talked about how much he’d like to revisit Twister.
The inspiration came to him from a trip he took with his Twister co-star Scott Thomson when they flew to St. Louis and drove through Missouri.
“[W]e started tracking the trail of the most famous tornado that ever hit the country, which was the Tri-State Tornado of 1925. It still holds all of the records. It was called the Tri-State because it was a mile wide when it came down from the sky on the afternoon of March 16, 1925, and it was a rural area, but, boy, before it was through, it crossed the Mississippi, it cut across southern Illinois, where it hit a lot of towns. The biggest one was Murphysboro, which was…it literally looked like Hiroshima after it hit. And then it went across the Wabash, into Indiana, staying on the ground three and a half hours and cutting a damage path 219 miles long, killing about 700 people. There’s actually footage that I found in Murphysboro at their historical society. They had footage from a biplane that the government sent down, just to do aerial footage of all of the destruction and the damage. So we just did that to kind of get some ideas, and from that I kind of extrapolated an idea for a sequel. And I kind of put that together into a format, and now we’re kind of waiting to see if that’s going to move forward.That would need Steven Spielberg’s blessing, ultimately, and they probably won’t take it to him ‘til there’s real studio interest, but I think the 3D applications of that could obviously be pretty amazing.”
You know what? Sounds like a prequel piece to me. Who wouldn’t want to see Bill Paxton in 1920’s garb, flying a biplane and trying to warn people about this massive tornado?
The Tri-State tornado really was something else- the description doesn’t do anything to give you the idea of how insane this thing was.
I’m not exactly the biggest fan of Twister (Have you seen it lately? Doesn’t exactly hold up.) but a sequel does seem like the perfect kind of film to shoot in 3D.
“I think you’d still want to have a lot of the dark humor and all of that, with the flying cows and everything,” he said, with a laugh. “I think you could kind of intrigue people more by getting into a little more of the lore and really understanding. I just think there’s a lot more to explore there. When I researched the first film when I was getting ready to do it, I just found so much stuff. Ultimately, I was happy with ‘Twister,’ but I also had thought that it could’ve gotten a little deeper into it.”
It’s headed right for us on the messageboards.