GO BIG OR GO HOME

With Twisters, Lee Isaac Chung illustrates the promise and pitfalls of indie directors making blockbusters

- STEPHANIE ZACHAREK

NO ONE MAKES A MOVIE IN A VACUUM. Even filmmakers working with the most micro of microbudgets want their films to be seen; movies are, after all, a mode of communication, a way of celebrating shared experiences or locating common ground amid differences. It's no wonder filmmakers who make a big splash with a small film often want to stretch their horizons by working on a larger canvas, with a fatter budget and flashier stars, all in the service of speaking to us.

One of the surprise indie hits of 2020 was Lee Isaac Chung's Minari, an intimate, semiautobiographical drama about a Korean American family struggling to establish a farm in rural Arkansas. Minari earned six Academy Award nominations; one of its stars, Youn Yuh-jungas a swearing, card-playing Korean grandmawon for Best Supporting Actress. And its success brought Chung a golden opportunity: this summer sees the release of Twisters, his reimagining of Jan de Bont's nature-gone-wild thriller Twister, from 1996. In Twisters, Daisy EdgarJones and Glen Powell play rival storm chasers tearing through Oklahoma's Tornado Alley though it turns out that even though she's a serious-minded researcher and he's a YouTube star, they have more in common than they think.

Twisters is a movie with a $200 million budget; Minari cost $2 million. That makes Chung just the latest in a long line of directors who have grabbed the chance to leap from low-key indie success to blockbuster attention grabber. More broadly, though, a big swing like this is a test of how we moviegoers feel about filmmakers as artists. Everyone loves an underdog hero. But what happens when a filmmaker sets their sights on a bigger project, one designed to reach a wider audience and, ideally, to net a handsome payoff? Is that selling out or stepping up? And in a climate where movies designed to be viewed on the big screen face an uncertain future, is it an act of hope or an exercise in futility?