STACK #123 Jan 2015

DVD&BD

Q&A

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Tell us about the two sets of characters in Into the Storm ... STEVEN QUALE: At the beginning of the film, there’s the father and his sons, and the other people from the small community of Silverton who are doing their normal thing. The threat of a storm is coming, but nobody knows it’s going to become something as big as what it eventually ends up developing into. Then, on the other side, we meet a group of storm chasers who are actively seeking a tornado but can’t seem to ever be at the right place at the right time. There’s a lot of suspense leading up to when the storm finally hits, and then, once it does, the third act is just non-stop where you’re just fighting for survival. And when the two groups converge – the storm chasers seeking the thrill of the tornado and the people who are just trying to survive – it’s interesting to see their dynamic together and how they come to help each other out in the end. Director Steven Quale talks about the challenges involved in shooting the handheld disaster movie INTOTHE STORM. How did you work with the actors to communicate the massive visual effects components they’d be interacting with, while also bringing naturalism and spontaneity to their performances? Well, what was important for me was in the whole film, from visual effects all the way to the characters and performances, was to have a sense of realism. When I did research for this movie, I found that tornadoes are so spectacular in their own right that you don’t really have to augment it. What’s there in Mother Nature is stunning and horrific, impressive and awe- inspiring ... lots of adjectives when you see these images and video of real storms and tornadoes in particular. So, I filtered that down to all aspects of the

Director Steven Quale

film. I wanted the performances grounded in total reality. I wanted the characters, the situations, the conflicts not to feel contrived, but to feel believable. With all the actors, the idea was to try to make it feel as real as possible. We developed back-stories for each of the characters that aren’t included in the film, but gave them ways to relate to what they were doing. Then we just worked as a team. Part of what helped keep it grounded was the fact that we shot the film using handheld cameras for the most part, and in a kind of relaxed environment. Yet it had to be very structured because of all these visual effects that we would be adding later. We also had practical special effects with wind machines, and so forth. So, we had to maintain what you normally have in a movie, with rehearsals and hitting your marks and all of those normal things. But we let it be a little looser as far as the back and forth between everybody. What went into creating the massive tornadoes onscreen? Well, when I first read the script, I thought there was an amazing potential for the tornadoes. We have four major tornadoes that

hit and, in some cases, merge together, and my fear was that you could potentially have a feeling of repetition. But it also occurred to me that the tornado is a character, so like any great character in movies it can be very diverse and have different attributes. So, as I did the research for this film, I found that tornadoes can be radically different. I wanted the performances grounded in total reality There are the really thin and narrow rope tornadoes, which can have multiple vortices in the same tornado storm system. And then you’ve got the more traditional tornado, which is just a big wedge that goes up into the sky, which we’re most familiar with. And then you have these mile-wide or two mile-wide wedge tornadoes, which are enormous tornadoes that can spin with rotational speeds as high as 300 miles-per-hour. Then there is a fourth one, actually, the fire tornado, which is probably one of the

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