With Speed and Twister, Jan de Bont Blew Up the ’90s Blockbuster

Is Jan de Bont the most ’90s director in American cinema? There are movie stars who feel very much a product of a particular decade, even if they started earlier or continued to work on less high-profile projects later. But due to the nature of how movies make demands on directors’ time, it’s relatively rare to come across a filmmaker so clearly rooted in a single ten-year period. Either they have a single, unequaled breakout that’s more year than era, or their career extends beyond the cycle of a decade. De Bont, however, has a filmography so finely tuned to the 1990s that it feels almost calculated.

Jan de Bont came up as a cinematographer, working on dawn-of-the-’90s action pictures like Die Hard (ahead of its time in 1988) and The Hunt for Red October, plus Black Rain for Ridley Scott and Basic Instinct for Paul Verhoeven. Then he made his feature directorial debut with Speed, the perfect choice for the latest-and-greatest Die Hard-on-a-whatever knockoff, and followed it up with Twister, ushering in a new era of CG-augmented disaster pictures. He then hit a stumbling block with Speed 2 before directing the 1999 remake of The Haunting and the 2003 Tomb Raider sequel. Then he more or less bowed out of the industry – no more cinematographer or directing credits over the past 21 years.

Despite four big-budget studio movies to his name, it’s difficult to zero in on a distinct de Bont style, not least because that involves remembering anything about Lara Croft: Tomb Raider – The Cradle of Life. (It’s the more respectable Indiana Jones rip-off of the two Angelina Jolie/Lara Croft movies, and therefore the less fun one, though Roger Ebert was a fan.) But Speed and Twister both feel like a particular moment in the history of summer movies, one commemorated this summer by a thirtieth anniversary for the former and a sorta-legacy sequel for the latter.

Speed may yet inspire a return of its own; Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock are arguably more popular now than they were back in 1994, and its recent birthday inspired a flood of appreciation for its status as a genre classic. To tell the story of a classic struggle between man and bomb on bus that explodes if bus goes under 50 miles per hour, De Bont’s direction combines slickness and velocity. It’s a more classically assembled than the music-video style of Tony Scott or Michael Bay, whose Bad Boys came out less than a year later with a soundalike score by the same composer, forever linking the two series despite a relative lack of common ground. Yet Speed also moves like a rocket – it’s a Die Hard riff that does another mini Die Hard riff as its exposition! Some of that is down to an unusually tight action-movie screenplay from Graham Yost. But de Bont gives the movie a sleekness that even the proper Die Hard movies are missing – largely by design, given their rough-and-tumble regular-cop hero, compared to Speed’s aerodynamic supercop. But it still felt like a breakthrough in American action-movie style, rather than a cynical amp-up. Or maybe it was more of an apex – for the proper 1990s, at least. (Reeves was at the forefront of another change at the decade’s close with The Matrix.)

Twister has a similar momentum: The camera is often in motion, trying to keep pace with the vehicles zipping all over the landscape in pursuit of tornados to study, the score attempting to goose some wide-eyed wonder from what is essentially a bunch of trucks driving to and from fields of CG. There’s certainly a charmingly silly snobs-versus-slobs energy combined with some comedy-of-remarriage banter to lend Twister its human interest; it probably made too much money in 1996 to accurately call it the digital-cinematic equivalent of a Universal backlot stunt show, even though that’s how a lot of it plays. Eventually, the barn-busting, sign-smashing, cow-tossing wind starts to lumber. While de Bont juices Speed at every opportunity, even when it’s not moving at 50 miles per hour, Twister loses steam more readily.

The comparison between the two might not even come to mind if the two movies didn’t share a director seemingly specializing in kinetic energy. But maybe Speed was lightning in a bottle, because Speed 2: Cruise Control moves more like Twister, a mobile disaster unit more than a sleek thrill machine. The big crash scene at its climax is physically impressive – clearly, real shit is getting wrecked – yet nowhere near the level of excitement of any given Keanu sprint session in the first movie. In other words, there’s a pervasive Twister influence on the production, where bigger becomes better – before that bigness winds up drifting everything away anyway. Based on de Bont’s two subsequent features, he found an impeccable match for his efficient talents the first time out, a mercenary-sounding project with surprisingly elegant machinery underneath.

Based on where mega-movies went throughout the 2000s and especially the 2010s, it becomes less surprising that de Bont de-facto retired from directing, even though he seems like one of those guys who could have been on any number of franchise-continuation lists. In the past, he’s vaguely attributed his quasi-retirement to the heavy studio interference he faced making the Tomb Raider sequel, though it’s surprising that those feelings would have lasted for two decades. Recently asked by The Wrap did recently ask him about directing another movie, to which de Bont said: “I really like the type of movies like Speed or Twister that has that high energy, with real people in it.” That’s consistent with other interviews where he’s talked about wanting to mix elements into a seamless experience, rather than one where the visual effects stand out. Natural that the man would cite his two massive successes as models for future projects, but wild, too, that making a movie like Speed or Twister nowadays seems like such a tall order.

Of course, there’s a movie that’s literally like Twister in theaters now. (De Bont was apparently in talks for an earlier iteration of the sequel, but has confirmed in multiple interviews that no one picked up the phone to ask him anything about the version that’s just become another smash.) But it’s a different movie landscape, one that makes de Bont’s biggest hit seem accidentally self-annihilating, the kind of visual-effects spectacular that threatened to overwhelm its actors. No matter how solid Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt are, they’re not exactly Keanu/Sandra-level stars. De Bont’s perfect storm was actually Speed, before big-and-bigger productions helped blow blockbusters apart, leaving him with the wreckage.

Jesse Hassenger is associate movies editor at Paste. He also writes about movies and other pop-culture stuff for a bunch of outlets including A.V. Club, GQ, Decider, the Daily Beast, and SportsAlcohol.com, where he also has a podcast. Following @rockmarooned on Twitter is a great way to find out about what he’s watching or listening to, and which terrifying flavor of Mountain Dew he has most recently consumed.