Storm-chasing movies are surprisingly few and far between given the continued popularity of the disaster genre at large, but director Jamie Winterstern is looking to fill a gap in the market when his feature-length debut Supercell arrives in select theaters, as well as on digital and on-demand from tomorrow, Mar. 17.
Indebted to the Amblin classics of days gone by, the story finds Daniel Diemer’s William Brody struggling with the legacy of his father, a legendary storm-chaser who gave his life to the profession. These days, the family business is in the hands of Alec Baldwin’s unscrupulously reckless tour operator Zane Rogers, who turned Brody Storm Tours into a tourist attraction.
With one of the most powerful storms ever recorded looming on the horizon, William leaves his mother (Anne Heche, in one of her final film roles) behind to team up with his old man’s ex-partner Roy Cameron (Skeet Ulrich) as they set their sights on chasing down a tornado for the history books.
Ahead of Supercell‘s release, We Got This Covered had the chance to speak to Winterstern about his first movie. During our chat, we cover the inspirations and influences behind the story, ensuring the family drama was never overlooked in favor of spectacle, crafting an old school disaster blockbuster on a significantly smaller budget than usual, and seashells, which you can check out below.
An obvious question but an important one, how does it feel on a personal and professional level to know that your first feature is just days away from release?
It is excitement, and there’s anxiety, and probably every emotion in between those two. It’s a moment I’ve been waiting for my entire life, ever since I was a boy watching films with my father. And now the day is approaching, and I just tried to enjoy it, especially with a week left until release.
You shot a couple of years ago, have you been feeling any impatience or agitation waiting on the release? Because someone once told me that a director is never done with a movie, there just comes a time when it gets taken out of their hands.
That is true. And it’s interesting, it’s been a four year journey. So four years ago is when I went storm chasing for the first time, and came up with the concept. It’s been two years since production, but it’s never been… even to this day, working with the distributor, coming up with marketing ideas of how to promote it.
I’m planning on going to Dallas for opening night, to the theater, I think it’s called the Grandscape theater at The Colony, so it’s never ending. And yeah, it is a weird relationship with a movie. I think the best way I can describe it is is a long relationship with a woman, you know? it’s just like, if I think about it, there’s a breakup that needs to happen in order to move on with my life.
So I’m going through the breakup phase. And that’s what’s happening, I have to let go of it. Because it’s going to be out there, and there’s nothing I can do at that point. And I gotta move on, and start dating a new idea. So that’s probably the best way to describe it.
Supercell is the first project to come from the deal between Short Porch Pictures – the company formed by your brother – and Highland Film Group, so did that combination of family and being first out of the gate place any additional pressure on your shoulders, or was it something you didn’t really think about?
You know, for me, it was “How do I get my first film out the gates?” Listen, having my brother as a producer was a blessing and a burden. You have that family connection, and there’s that shorthand between both of us to make something happen that might not normally happen under normal circumstances. But then there’s also the brother component, the family component, and you know, it’s interesting!
I think having a tornado film as your first movie out the gates is not an easy one. And I’m very grateful that my brother championed it, and helped get it produced, because I don’t think a movie of this size for somebody who hasn’t done a feature would have happened under normal circumstances. So I’m very grateful for my brother to team up with me and and help realize this dream of mine.
Storm chasing is something you’re obviously interested on a personal level, when did you first come to the realization that it was the perfect opportunity to serve as the backdrop to your first feature as a director?
Well, my first trip I went with my fiancee, I’ve always been enamored by the sky, by weather. I’m from Montreal, Canada, originally, we spent a lot of time in Florida as snowbirds escaping the cold. I was fascinated by the sky, and I always wanted to go tornado chasing, and I finally made a decision in 2019 to do it.
And I wasn’t thinking about “Oh, could this be a movie or a script?” I just went to enjoy it, to be an observer of something grand, and the first supercell I saw was the biggest, badass thing I’ve seen up close and personal; a natural phenomenon. And I was so hooked that after the first trip I convinced my buddy Johnny Wactor – who’s an actor, he was in General Hospital and he also plays a small part in Supercell – we went just as fans of of weather, and went back a week later for another severe weather event.
And we drove 3000 miles through the Midwest, and I have a camera. You know, as a filmmaker, I can’t help but just want to capture things, and it wasn’t for anything but my own personal pleasure. And then once I got back from the second trip, and I started watching the footage, I realized that there was a story here.
The storm chasing community, they haven’t had a story told since 1996, which was Jan de Bont’s Twister. There’s been a plethora of end of times, Roland Emmerich movies that exist between then and now. But those weren’t really movies about storm chasing. And I thought that kids today who are in their teens, they didn’t grow up with Twister like I did. So I just felt like this was a great story to be told.
There have been a few – but not many – storm chasing movies, so it’s not exactly a subgenre that’s been seen and done a thousand times over. Did you relish that opportunity to step in and bring something new to the table when there’s so much ground that hasn’t been covered in a similar setting?
Out of necessity of budget and time, we kind of had to… Because you know, you remember Twister? Big studio movie, I don’t know exact figures and inflation, but let’s say it’s $100+ million they had to play with.
Out of necessity on this movie – even though it has kind of a classical feel, kind of a love letter back to that the early… I guess you can call Spielbergian era of filmmaking – I still wanted this naturalism of how to capture it, and make it more of a subjective experience, by sticking with the main characters so you don’t see everything.
You never get these big drone shots where you see the entire world, and it’s not built on CGI. I had to embed myself in the storm chasing community and make really good relationships with filmmakers who spent decades filming the storms on really good cameras, and through utilizing their libraries, was able to use very minimal VFX to comp in real skies. So it has a more naturalistic feel, than let’s say, you know, a Twister or or any other weather film.
It’s not the most expensive storm chasing film, but you wouldn’t be able to tell from watching the action onscreen. Did you let your imagination run wild when writing the script and then work backwards from there, or was the story always created with the inevitable limitations you’d have to face in mind?
Ignorance is bliss. And that was me. You know, I partnered with a USC alum, we both were in the program together, Anna Elizabeth James, and I don’t think that budget was something on our minds when we wrote it. And of course, I learned my lesson very quickly in pre-production when I was told repeatedly by my brother and other producers that “Jamie, you storyboarded a $50 million movie, that’s not happening.”
And maybe I was very naive. And I would say that, yeah, sure. If I had a few movies under my belt, I would understand that, but I kind of tried to will it. And I, like many directors on the day, you’re faced with reality fast when you have this grand idea of how a scene is going to play out.
And maybe there’s 10 setups that you have in mind, and you only have 15 minutes to cover the scene, and you’re forced very quickly to choose two pieces of coverage. So that was a big exercise for me on compromise, and just trusting myself by the end of the 20-day shoot; and that’s how long it was, it was only a 20-day shoot.
Maybe I had sleepless nights on the first five, six, seven days, and I questioned whether whether I could do this; “why did I choose this career path?” You can’t show that for the crew. You have to remain very resilient, but I will say by day 15, I started gaining the confidence, where I realized that this is exactly what I want to do with my life.
Alec Baldwin gave an interview a while back where he not only praised your infectious enthusiasm, but admitted Supercell had him doing things on set he hadn’t done for decades, which is a testament to both you as a filmmaker and the way he responded to the material.
Thank you. Yeah, Alec, listen, Alec was incredible to work with. He’s a legendary actor. And, for me, I almost treated at like film school to work with an actor of that caliber. And we only had five days together to shoot his scenes. And I remember he told me this story, because I think he has one directing credit in his whole entire career.
And he told me he hated the experience of directing, and the analogy he put to it was as if you’re a surgeon, and you asked for the worst scalpel, and they give you a spoon. And that’s directing. You don’t have necessarily the tools you want to, to shoot or execute a scene, but you have to take that spoon and perform surgery.
And he hated that feeling. And and I just thought that was just interesting. To work with a man like Alec and also with an actress like Anne, and Skeet; talk about how lucky am I as a first-time director to work with such prolific talent. You kind of just take a step back, and observe, and let them do what they do best.
It’s a family story at the end of the day – but the set pieces are obviously integral when you’ve got a movie called Supercell – was that an easy balance to strike during writing, production, and post, or was it more of a balancing act to ensure that one didn’t overpower the other?
I always wanted to bring the family and the character first, before the storm chasing. And this spectacle was always going to be a backdrop for what was really a personal story about a coming-of-age, of a young boy dealing with death and grief, and ultimately learning not to take his mother for granted.
And that’s a lesson that I learned. Because during the course of writing, and through the whole process of making this film, I lost my mother to Alzheimer’s. And I was very fortunate my entire life to, you know, I came from a pretty stable home, with both my parents in the home, I wasn’t a product of divorce.
But I dealt with a lot of grief in my 30s watching my mother slowly forget who she was, and who I was. And I wanted to definitely take that and imprinted in the movie. And that was always important from the get go.
The Amblin influences are there for everyone to see, but were there any particular inspirations or influences of yours film-wise that you were drawn to more than others – without mentioning Twister – when it came to creating the look, tone, and feel of Supercell?
I mean, for me, it was the product of not just… Yeah, it was Spielberg, Bob Zemeckis, Ron Howard. Films like Back to the Future, even like back Backdraft and Apollo 13. Because I feel like storytelling today has lost… Well, it’s moved into a very safe place where I guess you get studios that don’t want to make take major risks.
There’s this big double down on on superheroes. And kids don’t really have this relevance of seeing real-life people like firefighters or astronauts, or even storm chasers or scientists, for that matter. You know, we grew up watching archaeologists and Indiana Jones, a paleontologist in Jurassic Park, these were professions that we could achieve as people and look up to.
So for me, it was always trying to bring back this classical era of filmmaking, a little bit of that escapism, and in a way, to bring families together. That ultimately was the goal. And I never wanted to steer away from that.
You’re a noted fan of the many collaborations between Spielberg and John Williams, so was that something you actively sought to replicate in the score? Because it’s definitely got those sweeping overtures that enhance the imagery, as opposed to just being music for music’s sake like you can sometimes get in broad, disaster-driven films?
This score was something that I was thinking about before writing. Music to me is one of the most important aspects of filmmaking. It really goes hand in hand with picture. And another USC alum that I graduated with, his name’s Corey Wallace. And he’s a fantastic composer.
And I went to Corey, when I was just formulating the treatment for the story. And I said, “Corey, why is it that we don’t hum the themes of the movies that we watch anymore? When we did that in the 80s and 90s”. And we both agreed that we needed to create a theme, a motif that was simple, yet memorable.
Obviously, John Williams and Alan Silvestri are the masters of that, but we’ve shied away from it, that orchestral score, so I knew from the beginning, we just need to find the main theme. And if we can find that main theme – which we ended up discovering while I was writing the screenplay with Anna – once you find that main theme, then you can start layering it, and using it in different styles throughout the movie.
And that’s not just the end of it, you know, there was the Supercell theme, there was the Mother/Son theme. There was Zane Rogers had his own theme, which was a little bit antagonistic. It’s a lot of fun. I had a lot of fun with Cory.
Now that Supercell is on the horizon, what comes next? Are there any projects you’re actively working on at the moment that you’re allowed to talk about, or is there anything you’re hoping to tackle in the future?
Well, it’s funny that it seems like I’m always drawn to nature. The next big frontier I’m discovering is seashells believe it or not, and a lot of that comes from my time that I spent in Florida. But the Southwest Florida coastline, which is basically Marco Island to Sanibel, Florida is the mecca of seashells in the world.
And I’ve just completed production on a documentary, a full-length documentary called Sanibel, which discovers the world of seashells and the impact that Hurricane Ian had on the area. I’m really excited about that. I’m also developing a feature screenplay that has to do with a like a grounded sci-fi, about how seashells connect people to the afterlife. So I’m just getting into a new world – which is seashells – after escaping storm chasing.
If you could direct any project of your choosing without restriction – as in, you can make whatever you want however you want and you start tomorrow – what would it be and why would it be that?
I would 100 percent go in on the seashell script that I’m working on, I would take all the resources that I could get for that one, that one’s even more personal to me, than I would say Supercell. Because I want to everything that I’ve learned with Supercell as my first film, I can take all those learnings and now apply it to my second feature. So I would absolutely take those resources and apply it to to that.
I’m assuming it would be a very different seashell movie if you had a hypothetical budget of $200 million.
I mean, I trust that it would change! It would change drastically, it would take it from being more of an intimate story and making it more of a world story. So it would take… you would probably see it go from more of an E.T. to a Close Encounters.
If I had that amount of resources where I’m even… I gotta be careful because E.T. was a big studio movie of its time as well! So yeah, that would be fantastic. I would have to think more about that. My brain is on seashells right now, to be honest with you.
Supercell releases in select theaters, as well as on digital and on-demand from tomorrow, Mar. 17.
