The filming of the disaster film Twister clearly got out of control and caused damage to the main actors Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt a temporary blindness.
Instead of storms, there was only nice weather when filming the action adventure
As the site Fandomwire reported in 2021, Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt were on the set of Twister to contend with exceptional conditionswhich had health consequences.
The film is about the dangerous hunt for a tornado in Oklahoma. At the same time, meteorologist Bill Harding (Bill Paxton) gets closer to his estranged wife JoAnne (Helen Hunt), despite the planned divorce.
Helen Hunt revealed in an interview with Vulture in 2020 that Twister director Jan De Bont had visited Oklahoma as an authentic filming location and was hoping for appropriately gloomy weather there. But as Helen Hunt reported, things were to turn out differently:
Unfortunately, I think Jan had the sunniest, most beautiful tornado season in Oklahoma history. I feel bad for him as a filmmaker because you fly all the way there with all the equipment to capture the stormy sky and it’s sunny and blue almost every day.
Drastic measures on the set of Twister left stars temporarily blind
Jan de Bont decided to create a dangerous tornado scenario in front of the camera took drastic measures and used extremely bright lighting on setto create an appropriately stormy atmosphere.
As Bill Paxton recounted in a 1996 interview with Entertainment Weekly (via Cinemablend), this left him and co-star Helen Hunt with severe, if temporary, vision damage:
These lights were like balls of sunshine – and these things literally burned our eyeballs. When I got back to my room I couldn’t see anything.
Helen Hunt also described her experience:
We shot the scene all day, and the next day Bill came into the make-up and said, ‘Can you see?’ And I said, ‘Not really.’ It was super weird.
Two ophthalmologists were consulted and fortunately came to the conclusion that the stars would not suffer any long-term damage. Helen Hunt described the days afterwards as follows:
Ultimately it wasn’t a big deal. We put on some dark glasses and walked around like mice in Cinderella for a while. […] But it went away again. I guess they fry your callus and then it grows back.
Incidentally, Twister was not only well received by critics in cinemas, but was also considered one of the most successful films of 1996, with worldwide sales of 494 million dollars.