Twister (1996 film)

Twister

Theatrical poster
Directed by Jan de Bont
Produced by Ian Bryce
Michael Crichton
Kathleen Kennedy
Written by Michael Crichton
Anne-Marie Martin
Starring Helen Hunt
Bill Paxton
Jami Gertz
Cary Elwes
Philip Seymour Hoffman
Alan Ruck
Zach Grenier
Music by Mark Mancina
Cinematography Jack N. Green
Editing by Michael Kahn
Studio Amblin Entertainment
Distributed by USA/Canada
Warner Bros.
International
Universal Studios
Release date(s) May 17, 1996 (1996-05-17)
Running time 113 minutes
Country United States
Language English
Budget $92 million
Gross revenue $495,471,524

Twister is a 1996 American disaster film starring Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton as "storm chasers" researching tornadoes. It was directed by Jan de Bont. The film was based upon a script by Michael Crichton and Anne-Marie Martin. Its executive producers were Steven Spielberg, Walter Parkes, Laurie MacDonald and Gerald R. Molen. Twister was the second-highest grossing film of 1996 domestically, with an estimated 55 million tickets sold in the US.

In the film, a team of storm chasers try to perfect a data-gathering instrument, designed to be released into the funnel of a tornado, while competing with another better-funded team with a similar device during a tornado outbreak across Oklahoma. The plot is a dramatized view of research projects like VORTEX of the NOAA and the device, called Dorothy, is copied from TOTO used in the 1980's by NSSL.

Twister is notable for being both the first Hollywood feature film to be released on DVD format[1] and the last to be released on HD DVD.[2] Twister has since been released on Blu-ray disc. It was nominated for two Academy Awards for Best Visual Effects and Best Sound in 1997. It also won the Golden Raspberry Award for "Worst Written Film Grossing Over $100,000,000".

Over the last decade and a half, Twister has become widely popular among Meteorologists and Meteorology students.

The film's tagline is The Dark Side of Nature.

Contents

Plot

In June 1969, a young Jo watches her father get sucked into a tornado after trying to hold a storm cellar door shut to keep his family safe. Decades later, meteorologists at the National Severe Storms Laboratory (NSSL) are discussing a building storm system over Oklahoma which could produce a record outbreak of tornadoes. Meanwhile, retired storm chaser Bill Harding (Bill Paxton) and his fiancée Dr. Melissa Reeves (Jami Gertz) are heading out to meet Bill’s former storm-chasing team to get the final divorce papers from Bill’s ex-wife, Dr. Jo Harding (Helen Hunt), who, since the day her father died, has sworn to hunt down as many tornadoes as possible, not wanting the same fate to happen to someone else. Besides Jo, the team consists of the eccentric Dusty Davis (Philip Seymour Hoffman), Robert “Rabbit” Nurick (Alan Ruck) navigator, Laurence (Jeremy Davies) photographer, Joey (Joey Slotnick), Alan Sanders (Sean Whalen) Rabbit’s driver, Tim "Beltzer" Lewis (Todd Field), Haynes (Wendle Jospeher) who rides with Beltzer, and Jason "Preacher" Rowe (Scott Thomson).

Jo, who is still in love with Bill, tries to stall because she does not want the marriage to end. Jo then tells Bill she wanted him out on the field because his idea for a tornado-analyzing device has been built. Called Dorothy, they will put it in the path of a tornado to measure it from inside. Four of the so-called "Dorothy" weather machines have been built. Haynes tells them of storm activity, and they head out. Bill’s rival team shows up, led by Dr. Jonas Miller (Cary Elwes) with his assistant Eddie (Zach Grenier). According to Bill, Jonas is in the storm-chasing business "for the money, not the science." While Jonas's team is passing Bill's team on the road, one of Jonas’s team members runs Bill off the road. They head to a tire shop to get Bill’s flat tire fixed, and Bill sees Jonas giving an interview to some local reporters. Bill finds out that Jonas has stolen his idea for the Dorothy weather machine. Bill accuses him of stealing his idea, but Jonas says it was an "unrealized idea." Everyone gets drinks at a local diner next door to the garage while Bill stays outside. Inside the diner, Melissa confronts Jo about her trying to keep together her failed marriage to Bill. Outside, Bill notices the sky is turning green, the sign of an approaching violent storm.

Bill's team heads out, as Bill and Jo talk in her truck. Bill and Jo have a frank discussion of their marriage and wrap it up. Beltzer notices a small tornado touching down in a nearby field and alerts the team. Jo and Bill go ahead. They drive into a ditch to get in front of it, but can’t get out of the ditch as the tornado closes in, destroying a farm. They crash into a small wooden bridge with a tractor on it, and take cover under the bridge. Jo wants to see the tornado up close, but Bill stops her just as the tornado lifts Jo's truck and the tractor off the ground. Jo's truck falls in front of Melissa in Bill's truck. She drives around it, narrowly missing a collision. Bill comforts her as Jo inspects the damage and takes some of the sensors from the destroyed Dorothy 1 machine. Jonas’s team shows up, but they are too late to see the storm, and keep driving.

Bill's team heads out again as Bill, Jo, and Melissa ride in his truck. Another tornado has touched down, and both Bill's team and Jonas's team are heading to intercept it. Bill believes the tornado will shift its track, and his team heads off on a back road. Jo, Bill, and Melissa head out onto a small two-lane bridge over a lake with three waterspouts coming at them from two directions. Realizing that the waterspouts are moving erratically, Bill tries to drive ahead of the core, but his truck is caught in the waterspouts. They twist the car around but dissipate up into the clouds as the rest of the team drives up. Bill comforts Melissa as the rest of the team convinces Jo against her wishes to visit her aunt, Meg Greene (Lois Smith), in the nearby town of Wakita, Oklahoma, to eat chunky steaks with gravy, eggs and mashed potato. Melissa asks for an explanation of the Fujita Scale, as the latest tornado was an F2, and the one they first encountered was an F1. Bill jokes with the team about possibly seeing some F4's later in the day, saying "an F4 will relocate your house fairly efficiently." Melissa asks if there is an F5, at which point the whole team becomes silent. Only Jo has ever seen an F5, as it was the one that took her father. Meg tells Jo in private that it was not her fault that the marriage failed but Bill’s, saying "He didn't keep his part of the bargain."

As the team is watching TV, it mentions an F3 tornado is active, and the team heads out. Bill and Jo drive together in his truck, and Melissa rides with Dusty. They almost crash into Jonas’s team in an attempt to beat them. Bill’s team then heads up a side road, while Jonas’s team continues without turning. Bill's team attempts to figure out where the tornado is, because according to their computers, it is heading towards them on the same road. Bill and Jo realize it is over a hill, and they go through a hailstorm to find it. Upon finding the tornado, Bill and Jo try to set up Dorothy 2, but run out of time. A power pole falls on the truck, ruining Dorothy 2 and tearing off the rear tailgate of the truck. The tornado then lifts back into the clouds. Bill's team can’t track the tornado because "the cone is silent," and they warn Bill and Jo to get out. Jo attempts to gather the scattered sensors, but Bill, realizing that the tornado hasn't dissipated but is simply back-building, pulls her into the truck as the tornado drops once more. They drive to a safe distance, where Jo jumps out of the truck and again attempts to gather the scattered sensors. Jo grows angry about Bill's attempt to stop her, saying "You've never seen it (a tornado) miss this house, and miss that house, and come after you!" Bill confronts her about her father’s death, and tells Jo she is obsessed to succeed with Dorothy to prevent what happened to her family from happening again. He tells Jo that she has to move forward from the past and realize what she has in the present: Bill. Melissa and Bill's whole team hear their conversation over the CB radio.

Bill's team heads to a drive-in theater. Jo signs the divorce papers, while Melissa is in a motel room across the road watching the weatherman on TV and fingering her engagement ring. Dusty is watching the radar. Both Melissa's TV and the TV at the concession stand lose their reception as Dusty warns Bill that an F4 tornado is heading right for them. Everyone takes shelter in the pit of a car mechanic's garage while Jo watches it approach, spellbound. Bill yells to get Jo's attention, and then Jo warns the employees in the concession stand to "get underground." The tornado obliterates the theater, destroying Rabbit's truck and Preacher's station wagon. Preacher is hurt when he is hit in the head by a flying hubcap. The tornado passes, and the team emerges to inspect the damage. Much of the theater is destroyed or damaged, but the concession stand is still standing. Beltzer comments to Melissa that the tornado only sideswiped the theater, meaning they have yet to see the full power of the tornado. Dusty looks at the radar to find that the same tornado is now heading directly for Wakita. Bill tells Melissa they are leaving to check on Aunt Meg, and Melissa peacefully breaks up with Bill, saying that she doesn't want to compete with his need to chase tornadoes and that she's not too upset about the breakup. She then wishes Bill good luck with his team before leaving.

At Wakita, they find the town is destroyed because they had no warning. Bill and Jo find Meg’s home on the verge of collapse. Upon entering, they find Meg pinned underneath a bookshelf. Jo and Bill rescue her and her dog Mose before the house collapses. Meg manages to escape the tornado with nothing more than "a bump on the head" and a broken wrist, though the paramedics decide to keep her overnight just to be safe. Dusty listens to the radio, which says it was an F4 that destroyed the drive-in and Wakita (the irony being Bill's joke about F4s while eating at Meg's still-intact house earlier that day), and has since dissipated. The current reports mention that there are now two supercells about to merge, and authorities are predicting rare F5 tornadoes. Meg tells Jo she has to make the warning system better. Jo comes up with a way to make Dorothy work while watching some wind chimes. She has Bill's team fabricate pinwheels out of aluminum cans, and attaches them to the sensors with screws to make them fly.

Bill and Jo come alongside a mile-wide F5 tornado in the countryside. They put Dorothy 3 on the road in front of the tornado and then back up, but the winds push Dorothy around, and then a tree knocks Dorothy 3 over, scattering the sensors. The storm turns toward Bill and Jo, and they attempt to drive away. They become stuck when a tree wedges underneath the back end of their truck. A tanker fuel truck is pushed along the road toward their truck by the tornado, and knocks them free before exploding. Bill drives around the wreckage through the fireball, narrowly avoiding catastrophe. Bill drives ahead of the tornado, dodging as it drops farm vehicles on the road in front of him. They end up driving through a small house that is rolled by the tornado onto the road.

As Bill and Jo drive away, Jonas and Eddie ride to intercept the tornado and place their DOT-3 pack. Jo radios Jonas to tell him he must "anchor the pack" because it is too light and the tornado will dump it before it can do its job. Bill suddenly has a bad feeling that the tornado is about to shift direction, and warns Jonas and Eddie to leave. Eddie wants to heed Bill's warning, but Jonas forces Eddie to continue with their plan as the tornado shifts. Eddie is impaled by a section of radio tower thrown by the tornado. All watch in horror as Jonas' truck is lifted up in the sky, then dropped to the ground, where it explodes, killing both Jonas and Eddie.

Bill and Jo, who saw their rival die, decide they now know what they must do. They head toward a new intercept point, turn on Dorothy 4 without releasing it from its moorings on the truckbed, and then drive the truck straight at the tornado. With the truck on cruise control they jump out, letting it drive into the center of the tornado where it successfully deploys Dorothy 4.

Haynes receives readings from Dorothy's sensors that indicate the tornado will shift its track again. Bill and Jo, now without radios, are at first unaware, and start running towards a nearby farm as the F5 heads right at them. They first take cover in a barn, but it is filled with sharp metal tools. They run out the other side to find the tornado bearing down. It destroys the barn, and they dodge debris as they run to take cover in a small outbuilding. They find metal pipes inside this shelter, and tie themselves to the pipes with leather belts. The tornado destroys the structure, and they are pulled upside while anchored to the pipes. They manage to see the inside of the F5 tornado as it passes over them. It is filled with lighting and a smaller tornado in the core. Seconds later, the entire storm dissipates, and the family from the farm comes out of their underground storm shelter. Bill and Jo debate who will run the lab and who will analyze the new data while the rest of the team arrives.

Main characters

Production

Twister was a joint production between Warner Bros. and Universal Studios. This fact is reflected on the marquee of a drive-in theater featured in the film: The Shining, a Warner Bros. release and Psycho, a Universal-owned production. Both studios had often collaborated with another of the film's production companies, Amblin Entertainment, prior to this film.

The original concept and 10-page tornado-chaser story were presented to Amblin Entertainment in 1992 by motion picture business consultant and award-winning screenwriter Jeffrey Hilton.[3] Spielberg then presented the concept to writer Michael Crichton.

After spending more than half a year on pre-production on Godzilla, director Jan De Bont left after a dispute over the budget and quickly signed on for Twister.[4] The production was plagued with numerous problems. Michael Crichton and his wife, Anne-Marie Martin, were paid a reported $2.5 million to write the screenplay. Joss Whedon was brought in to do rewrites through the early spring of 1995. When he got bronchitis, Steve Zaillian was brought in. Whedon returned and worked on revisions right through the start of shooting in May 1995. He left the project after getting married and two weeks into production, Jeff Nathanson was flown in to the set and worked on the script until principal photography ended.[4]

Halfway through filming both Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt were temporarily blinded by bright electronic lamps used to get the exposure down to make the sky behind the two actors look dark and stormy because it was too bright outside. Paxton remembers, "and these things literally sunburned our eyeballs. I got back to my room, I couldn't see".[4] To solve the problem, a Plexiglas filter was placed in front of the beams. The actors took eye drops and wore special glasses for a few days to recuperate. After filming in a ditch that contained bacteria, Hunt and Paxton had to have hepatitis shots. During the same scene, she repeatedly hit her head on a low wooden bridge because she was so exhausted from the demanding shoot that she forgot not to stand up so quickly.[4] Hunt did one stunt in which she opened the door of a vehicle that was speeding through a cornfield, stood up on the passenger side and was hit by the door on the side of her head when she let it go momentarily. As result, some sources claim that Hunt got a concussion. De Bont said, "I love Helen to death, but you know, she can be also a little bit clumsy," to which she responded, "Clumsy? The guy burned my retinas, but I'm clumsy ... I thought I was a good sport. I don't know ultimately if Jan chalks me up as that or not, but one would hope so".[4]

Some crew members felt De Bont was "out of control" and left five weeks into filming.[4] The camera crew led by Don Burgess left the production after five weeks, claiming that De Bont "didn't know what he wanted till he saw it. He would shoot one direction, with all the equipment behind the view of the camera, and then he'd want to shoot in the other direction right away and we'd have to move [everything] and he'd get angry that we took too long ... and it was always everybody else's fault, never his".[4] De Bont claims that they had to make schedules for at least three different scenes every day because the weather changed so often that "Don had trouble adjusting to that".[4] When De Bont knocked over a camera assistant who had missed a cue, Burgess and his crew left, much to the shock of the cast. Burgess and his crew stayed on one more week until a replacement was found in Jack N. Green. Just before the end of the shoot, Green was injured when a hydraulic house set, designed to collapse on cue, was mistakenly activated with him inside it. A rigged ceiling hit him in the head and he injured his back and had to go to the hospital. Green missed the last two days of principal photography and De Bont took over as his own director of photography.[4]

De Bont had to shoot many of the film's tornado-chasing scenes in bright sunlight when they could not get overcast skies and asked Industrial Light & Magic to more than double its original plan for 150 "digital sky-replacement" shots.[4] Principal photography had a certain time limit because Hunt had to return to film another season of Mad About You but Paul Reiser was willing to delay it for two-and-a-half weeks when the Twister shoot was extended. De Bont insisted on using multiple cameras and this led to the exposure of 1.3 million feet of raw film (most films use no more than 300,000 feet).[4]

De Bont claims that Twister cost close to $70 million with $2–3 million going to the director. It was speculated that last-minute re-shoots in March and April 1996 (to clarify a scene about Jo as a child) and overtime requirements in post-production and at ILM, raised the budget to $90 million.[4] Warner Bros. moved up the film's release date from May 17 to May 10 in order to give it two weekends before Mission: Impossible opened.

Soundtrack

Twister featured both a traditional orchestral film score (by Mark Mancina) and several rock music songs, including an instrumental theme song composed and performed for the film by Van Halen. Both the rock soundtrack and the orchestral score were released separately on compact disc.

Rock Score

  1. Van Halen - "Humans Being"
  2. Rusted Root - "Virtual Reality"
  3. Tori Amos - "Talula (BT's Tornado Mix)"
  4. Alison Krauss - "Moments Like This"
  5. Mark Knopfler - "Darling Pretty"
  6. Soul Asylum - "Miss This"
  7. Belly - "Broken"
  8. k.d. lang - "Love Affair"
  9. Nine Stories Feat. Lisa Loeb - "How"
  10. Red Hot Chili Peppers - "Melancholy Mechanics"
  11. Goo Goo Dolls - "Long Way Down"
  12. Shania Twain - "No One Needs to Know"
  13. Stevie Nicks Feat. Lindsey Buckingham - "Twisted"
  14. Edward & Alex Van Halen - "Respect the Wind"

Orchestral Score

  1. Oklahoma: Wheatfield
  2. Oklahoma: Where's My Truck?
  3. Oklahoma: Futility
  4. Oklahoma: Downdraft
  5. It's Coming: Drive In
  6. It's Coming: The Big Suck
  7. The Hunt: Going Green
  8. The Hunt: Sculptures
  9. The Hunt: Cow
  10. The Hunt: Ditch
  11. The Damage: Wakita
  12. Hailstorm Hill: Bob's Road
  13. Hailstorm Hill: We're Almost There
  14. F5: Dorothy IV
  15. F5: Mobile Home
  16. F5: God's Finger
  17. Other: William Tell Overture/Oklahoma Medley
  18. Other: End Title/Respect the Wind - written by Edward and Alex Van Halen

There are some orchestrated tracks that were in the movie but were not released on the orchestral score, most notably the orchestrated intro to Humans Being from when Jo's team left Wakita to chase the Hailstorm Hill tornado. Another omitted track is an alternate version of the Drive-In theme from when Jo and Bill are fleeing the F5 through the farm. Other, lesser-known tracks include an extended version of "Going Green" (when we first meet Jonas) and a short track from when the first tornado is initially spotted. Ironically, there are several parts released on the orchestral score that did not appear in the movie itself.

Sequel

While doing an interview with Bullz-Eye to promote the new season of HBO's Big Love, Bill Paxton revealed that he recently had a meeting with film producer Kathleen Kennedy about making a Twister 2. This would be the sequel to the 1996 film Twister that starred Helen Hunt, Bill Paxton, Cary Elwes and Jami Gertz. Paxton stated that he would like to direct the sequel if and when it is produced.

Reception

Reception to Twister was mixed, with a 55% "Rotten" rating at Rotten Tomatoes,[5] and a weighted mean score of 68 at Metacritic.[6]

Roger Ebert gave the film two-and-a-half stars out of four and wrote, "You want loud, dumb, skillful, escapist entertainment? Twister works. You want to think? Think twice about seeing it".[7] In her review for The New York Times, Janet Maslin wrote, "Somehow Twister stays as uptempo and exuberant as a roller-coaster ride, neatly avoiding the idea of real danger".[8] Entertainment Weekly gave the film a "B" rating and Lisa Schwarzbaum wrote, "Yet the images that linger longest in my memory are those of windswept livestock. And that, in a teacup, sums up everything that's right, and wrong, about this appealingly noisy but ultimately flyaway first blockbuster of summer".[9] In his review for the Los Angeles Times, Kenneth Turan wrote, "But the ringmaster of this circus, the man without whom nothing would be possible, is director De Bont, who now must be considered Hollywood's top action specialist. An expert in making audiences squirm and twist, at making us feel the rush of experience right along with the actors, De Bont choreographs action and suspense so beautifully he makes it seem like a snap".[10] Time magazine's Richard Schickel wrote, "when action is never shown to have deadly or pitiable consequences, it tends toward abstraction. Pretty soon you're not tornado watching, you're special-effects watching".[11] In his review for the Washington Post Desson Howe wrote, "it's a triumph of technology over storytelling and the actors' craft. Characters exist merely to tell a couple of jokes, cower in fear of downdrafts and otherwise kill time between tornadoes".[12]

Urban Legend

On May 21, 1996, a tornado destroyed a drive-in theater in Stoney Creek, Ontario which was scheduled to show the movie Twister in a real-life parallel to a scene in the film in which a tornado destroys a drive-in during a showing of the film The Shining.[13] The facts of this incident were exaggerated into an urban legend that the theater was actually playing Twister during the tornado.[14] On May 10, 2010, a tornado struck Fairfax, Oklahoma, destroying the farmhouse where numerous scenes in Twister were shot. J. Berry Harrison, the owner of the home and a former Oklahoma state senator, commented that the tornado appeared eerily similar to the fictitious one in the film. Harrison had lived in the home since 1978.[15]

Theme park attraction

The film was used as the basis for the attraction Twister...Ride It Out at Universal Studios Florida, which features filmed introductions by Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton.

References

  1. ↑ Twister (1996) - Trivia
  2. ↑ HD DVD Disc Historical Release Dates | High Def Digest
  3. ↑ Jeffrey Hilton - IMDB.com
  4. ↑ 4.00 4.01 4.02 4.03 4.04 4.05 4.06 4.07 4.08 4.09 4.10 4.11 Daly, Steve (May 17, 1996). "The War of the Winds". Entertainment Weekly. http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,292610,00.html. Retrieved 2009-06-14. 
  5. ↑ Twister Movie Reviews, Pictures - Rotten Tomatoes
  6. ↑ [1]
  7. ↑ Ebert, Roger (May 10, 1996). "Twister". Chicago Sun-Times. http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19960510/REVIEWS/605100302/1023. Retrieved 2009-09-03. 
  8. ↑ Maslin, Janet (May 10, 1996). "Twister". The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/library/filmarchive/twister.html. Retrieved 2009-09-03. 
  9. ↑ Schwarzbaum, Lisa (May 24, 1996). "Twister". Entertainment Weekly. http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,292676,00.html. Retrieved 2009-09-03. 
  10. ↑ Turan, Kenneth (May 10, 1996). "Twister". Los Angeles Times. http://www.calendarlive.com/movies/reviews/cl-movie960513-6,0,4826494.story. Retrieved 2009-09-03. 
  11. ↑ Schickel, Richard (May 20, 1996). "Twister". Time. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,984563,00.html?iid=digg_share. Retrieved 2009-09-03. 
  12. ↑ Howe, Desson (May 10, 1996). "Twister: Special Effects and Hot Air". Washington Post. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longterm/movies/videos/twister.htm#howe. Retrieved 2009-09-03. 
  13. ↑ "Tornado Destroys Twister Theater". Associated Press. May 22, 1996. 
  14. ↑ Steyn, Mark (May 24, 1996). "A Nobody in My Neck of the Woods". Daily Telegraph. 
  15. ↑ http://www.newsok.com/oklahoma-farm-used-in-film-twister-devastated-by-real-tornado-in-last-weeks-storm/article/3461763?custom_click=headlines_widget

External links

Works by Michael Crichton
Novels
The Andromeda Strain (1969) · The Terminal Man (1972) · The Great Train Robbery (1975) · Eaters of the Dead (1976) · Congo (1980) · Sphere (1987) · Jurassic Park (1990) · Rising Sun (1992) · Disclosure (1994) · The Lost World (1995) · Airframe (1996) · Timeline (1999) · Prey (2002) · State of Fear (2004) · Next (2006) · Pirate Latitudes (2009) · Untitled (2012)
Novels written
under
pseudonyms
Odds On (1966) · Scratch One (1967) · Easy Go (1968) · A Case of Need (1968) · Zero Cool (1969) · The Venom Business (1969) · Drug of Choice (1970) · Dealing (1970) · Grave Descend (1970) · Binary (1972)
Non-fiction
Five Patients (1970) · Jasper Johns (1977) · Electronic Life (1983) · Travels (1988)
Film
adaptations
The Andromeda Strain (1971) · Dealing: Or the Berkeley-to-Boston Forty-Brick Lost-Bag Blues (1972) · The Carey Treatment (1972) · The Terminal Man (1974) · The First Great Train Robbery (1979) · Rising Sun (1993) · Jurassic Park (1993) · Disclosure (1994) · Congo (1995) · The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997) · Sphere (1998) · The 13th Warrior (1999) · Timeline (2003) · The Andromeda Strain (2008)
Film writer
or director
Pursuit (1972) · Westworld (1973) · Coma (1978) · The First Great Train Robbery (1979) · Looker (1981) · Runaway (1984) · Physical Evidence (1989) · Jurassic Park (1993) · Rising Sun (1993) · Twister (1996)
TV series
Beyond Westworld (1980) · ER (1994–2009)
Films directed by Jan de Bont
1990s
Speed (1994) · Twister (1996) · Speed 2: Cruise Control (1997) · The Haunting (1999)
2000s
Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life (2003)