In a 2012 “Random Roles” interview with The AV Club’s Will Harris, Paxton, who died unexpectedly five years later of a stroke at the age of 61, revealed that he would’ve loved to direct a second “Twister” — one that’d give viewers a wilder, more visually immersive ride.
“I’ve always felt like there was a ‘Jaws’ version of that movie,” said Paxton. “I always felt like we did the Pepsi Lite version of that movie.” How would a caffeinated Paxton take on “Twister” play out? Here’s what he told Harris:
“There’s a tougher version of that movie that I think now […] I’ve kind of designed it so that me and Helen [Hunt] would have a daughter, a junior in high school, but she’s already dating a guy in college, and we’d kind of hand it off to them. There’s a great story of the Tri-State Tornado I’d like to tie into it as well.”
Let’s start with the story: a changing of the tornado-chasing guard would allow Paxton to, at the very least, take a step back and focus on the filmmaking. As to how he’d make this narratively compelling, we’ll never know. But the idea of bringing a natural disaster on the scale of the 1925 Tri-State Tornado to the big-screen … now, that sounds like an Irwin Allen-scaled “Jaws” (with, hopefully, none of the star-studded cheesiness –- which worked for those 1970s hoots, but would tonally clash with a post-Spielberg blockbuster flick).
Though Paxton’s vision was, at the time, very much wedded to a benumbing aesthetic trend that was driving early 2010s tentpoles, he believed he could do something special with the technology.
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