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How Twisters' Composer Captured the Musical Equivalent of a Tornado for Long-Awaited Sequel
"It was really important to do something completely unique for this movie, but still respect the origins," the veteran composer tells NBC Insider.
Benjamin Wallfisch has dreamed of working on a Steven Spielberg joint ever since he first watched E.T., the Extra-Terrestrial as a child. "I remember ... being so mesmerized, but also bewildered, and this urgency of needing to understand why it had that effect on me, musically and emotionally," the veteran composer told NBC Insider over Zoom. "That led me down the path I'm on now."
The opportunity to bask in the glow of the honored filmmaker and his legendary Amblin Entertainment banner arrived a little over a year ago when Wallfisch accepted the job of scoring Twisters (now in theaters everywhere). Executive-produced by Spielberg and directed by Lee Isaac Chung — the Academy Award-nominated director behind 2020's Minari — the movie serves as a long-awaited spiritual sequel to the 1996 classic Twister, in which a group of determined storm chasers risk their own lives to test an early warning system. The sequel follows a similar narrative path, although the groundbreaking scientific innovation at the heart of Twisters is potentially capable of stopping a cow-lifting vortex dead in its tracks.
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The project was a perfect fit for Chung, who actually grew up on a farm in Oklahoma, where both movies take place. "Isaac is quite an extraordinary filmmaker," Wallfisch said. "He's someone who creates this wonderfully benevolent feeling among all of his departments, where we are not only inspired, but given all this freedom to do our own thing, [albeit] within this very strong and powerful vision that he has ... It was just an incredible honor to finally get to actually work on an Amblin movie and interpret the legacy of that through the lens of Isaac's vision."
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Rather than deliver a retread of Mark Mancina's memorable work on the original, Wallfisch hoped "to do something completely unique for this movie, but still respect the origins" of what had come before. "It was just more about finding a way to celebrate the larger-than-life approach that ’90s scoring embraced," he added. "Make it a love letter to that style, but also do it in our own way."
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Naturally, he hoped to capture a modicum of the tonal alchemy moviegoers have enjoyed from the dynamic duo of Steven Spielberg and John Williams for the last 50 years.
"There is something so uniquely benevolent and awe-inspiring in the most truly emotive and beautiful way," he said. "For me, that was, ‘How can I do my own version of that, or at least attempt to get close to it?’ Because no one can really get that close to it — even if you try."
The opening track (entitled "Nature's Masterpiece") perfectly channels the old Williams magic, with just a dash of Miyazaki-esque wonder.
"It's the idea that this is a work of art that nature creates. It’s terrifying and devastating and dangerous, but it's still beautiful," he mused. "The key thing was ... to capture the wonderment and sense of mystery. I've never seen a tornado with my own eyes, but the way they recreated it in this movie is absolutely extraordinary."
Capturing the Chaos and Beauty of a Tornado with Twisters' Music
From his very first meeting with Chung, Wallfisch came out swinging, pitching the director on a number of radical ideas "about how we could use spiral formations in accompanying musical textures to create controlled chaos, which is what can occur inside a tornado," the composer explained. "We geeked out a bit over those potential approaches."
His conduit into the score was the main protagonist, Kate Cooper (played by Daisy Edgar-Jones), a storm-chaser with an "almost mystical ability to predict the weather’s movements and behaviors," Wallfisch said. "She's always one step ahead of the most advanced science and instruments. She uses her own instincts and lifelong passion for the weather. That was the starting point. I needed needed to capture that sixth sense she has."
He continued: "I just went to the piano and started to improvise some figures where the hands were kind of interlocked. You quite randomly play with different arpeggio figures there, just to create that sense of something which doesn't have anything that repeats. There’s this natural randomization. I started developing that and experimented with what might happen if you go in circles with it. You create a spiral. Every time it repeats, it actually repeats upside down, so it becomes like an inverted spiral. And what happens if you it the same time backwards? Then you can have two spirals going against each other and before you know it, you have a musical analog to the interior of a tornado — or what I would imagine it it is. That became Kate's motif."
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Following in the footsteps of its 1996 predecessor, Twisters boasts an entire second soundtrack of original music, curated specifically for the movie by contemporary country icons such as Luke Combs and Jelly Roll. Wallfisch simply bolstered those tracks with a few folk-inspired cues of his own as a way to ground the viewer in the wide-open tornado country that is Oklahoma. "Early on, we employ a lot of fiddle and banjo and guitars ... to create that sense of optimism," he said.
While he didn't have any direct interactions with Spielberg, Wallfisch said he "was incredibly honored" to receive constructive feedback from the Amblin producer, who recommended the composer dial back the folksy cues at a key moment later in the runtime. "One of Spielberg's notes was, ‘We’re now past that. We’re too far into the story. Now it just has to be fully about the narrative.’ That was a very brilliant note and definitely improved things."
Twisters is now in theaters. Click here for tickets!
