-Bill and Jo Harding are storm chasers in the process of divorcing. When they learn of an extremely lethal storm system moving through the Midwest, they team up to create a highly advanced warning system to alert everyone to these potentially violent tornadoes
-Bill Paxton: Bill Harding
-Helen Hunt: Dr. Jo Harding
-Cary Elwes: Dr. Jona Miller
-Jami Gertz: Dr. Melissa Reeves
-Phillip Seymour Hoffman: Dustin Davis
-Lois Smith: Meg Greene
-Alan Ruck: Robert "Rabbit" Nurick
-Sean Whalen: Allen Sanders
-Scott Thompson: Jason "Preacher" Rowe
-Todd Field: Tim "Beltzer" Lewis
-Joey Slotnick: Joey
-Wendie Josepher: Haynes
-Jeremy Davies: Laurence
-Zach Grenier: Eddie
Did You Know?
-When actor Bill Paxton died, Spotter Network had asked 200 storm chasers to spell out "BP" with their GPS tracker blips on a radar display to honor his passing.
-Filming was temporarily suspended in Oklahoma due to the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, OK on April 19,1995. The crew went to help out with recovery effort
-The sound of the tornado was created a slowed-down camel moan
-It's said to be an urban legend, but when this movie was playing at a drive-in theatre in Stoney Creek, Ontario, a tornado struck. In reality, it was a tornado striking a drive-in theatre in Thorold, Ontario on May 20, 1996. It damaged the screen. The movie was not playing when the tornado struck, but was scheduled to play later that evening
-The town that gets destroyed here, Wakita, is an actual town in Oklahoma. Part of the downtown business district area had been destroyed by the film crew to replicate the after effects of the tornado passing. Afterwards, the studio paid to rebuild the downtown area. As for the fire truck seen here, the town kept it
-To create some of the wind, a jet engine from a Boeing 707 was used
-The instrument package used by the storm chasers, "Dorothy" is a tribute to the real instrument pack, dubbed "T.O.T.O" used by real storm chasers to leave in the path of a tornado
-Whenever there's a news report shown in the movie, the newscasters being shown are actual weathermen from Oklahoma news stations. They include Gary England, who's a chief meteorologist at KWTV in Oklahoma City and Rick Mitchell, chief meteorologist at KOCO in Oklahoma City. The footage of Gary England giving a televised tornado warning in "1969" to Jo's family is actually archived footage of him giving a tornado warning. He didn't join KWTV until 1972
-This movie only took 95 days to film
-To make the skies look like pre-tornado conditions, the scenes inside the truck cab were flooded with high-intensity lighting. Because of this, Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton suffered minor retinal burns throughout much of the movie
-Some of the considerations for the role of Bill Harding included Tom Hanks, Kurt Russell and Michael Keaton. They all lost out to Bill Paxton, who was said to, according to director James Cameron, to have a "southern every man charm"
-The siren that Dorothy releases is a combination of a standard police, fire and ambulance siren control head. These control heads have various modes including yelp, siren and phaser. The sound was used later for Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines. That same sound was used when chasing a Toyota Tundra. It was created accidentally for that movie but intentionally for this movie.
-The base camp for the storm chasers was a pig farm. Each morning, the cast and crew woke up to the smell of a 2-acre pig waste holding pond
-When Bill's truck gets stuck on a tree, the oil tanker that pushes him out of the way says "Benthic Petroleum". This is the name of the oil company Ed Harris works for in The Abyss. Ed Harris had attended the University of Oklahoma, where he majored in theatre and also where the National Severe Storms Laboratory is located
-Lois Smith, who plays Aunt Meg, is seen reading Dante Alighieri's Dante's Inferno when the twister hits Wakita. In the story, a tornado hits in the Second Circle of Hell to punish people ruined by Lust
-Jan de Bont, a producer on the film, stated he hated the scene where everyone is at Aunt Meg's house eating steak and eggs because he is vegetarian
-With Jan de Bont being a fan of Tori Amos, he had asked that some of her music be used in the film
-The instrumental playing at the end is called "Respect the Wind" and it was written and performed by Eddie and Alex Van Halen
-The first music video playing in Dusty's van is "Motherless Child" by Eric Clapton. Later it's "Child in Time" by Deep Purple. This song is not only playing loudly on his loudspeakers, but the video playing it as well is from the 1974 California Jam (CalJam) Festival in Ontario, California. This is from the Glenn Hughes/David Coverdale era where the band had taken the stage ahead of the time they were supposed to and Ritchie Blackmore, already infuriated at everything running ahead of schedule and not to his particular liking, was further incensed by a camera getting to close to him on his right side. He stuck his guitar head through the camera, destroying it, as a warning to back off
-The ironic thing is that as the team heads out to chase after a tornado, Dusty starts playing "Child in Time" by Deep Purple on his loudspeakers. The video footage, however, was at the California Jam Festival on April 6, 1974. Deep Purple did not play "Child in Time" during their gig there. The song was performed by Ian Gillan, who was not with the band at the time.
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