Facing Nature’s fury
Amy Smart takes on tornado’s awe & terror in ‘13 Minutes’
Part human drama, part Nature’s awe-inspiring horror show, “13 Minutes” offers the skinny on an increasingly visible threat: tornadoes.
“The 13 minutes refers to when a community gets the tornado warning: They have 13 minutes to take shelter before it hits,” explained Amy Smart, who leads an ensemble that includes Thora Birch, Peter Facinelli, Trace Adkins, Paz Vega and Anne Heche.
“Yes, it’s a tornado movie but it’s so much more,” she said in a Zoom interview. “It takes place in a rural town in the Plains. Oklahoma is where we shot and it follows four different families who are all dealing with their own issues.
“It comes to a head when the tornado hits and people have to come together in a really humane way to support each other and help out.”
Smart, 45, plays Kim, a regional emergency manager married to a meteorologist. Their daughter is hearing impaired.
“They are very involved in the weather all the time and they know that there are issues with the coming weather.
“Of course in towns like this it’s pretty normal,” Smart noted. “Only it just progresses and gets worse and worse.”
As that happens, Kim steps up to “call the shots and sound alarms when it’s impending and they realize the tornado is about to hit.”
That means “a lot of communication goes down as well. She needs to still be this leader helping the community, sounding the alarms. At the same time, she wants to go find her daughter!
“It’s a lot of dire circumstances and shows how tornadoes really devastate a town in a matter of minutes. I mean they sweep through and just level it all.
“When we were filming just to see a neighborhood leveled — it’s beyond the devastation. You can’t believe that these natural disasters can just ruin things so fast.”
“13 Minutes” takes its meteorological science seriously. “We had experts on set who helped guide us into the reality of how warnings go off. The protocols and the experi
ence of that. Because it was important this be as realistic as possible.
“One of the crew had been through two tornadoes,” she discovered. “One had ripped off half his house — and he still lives there. It’s amazing how resilient people can be. And fearless.”
Smart isn’t in quite the same danger zone in her other job – playing Barbara Whitmore, the mother of “Stargirl” on the hit CW superhero series. She’s now in Atlanta filming a third season.
“We love our little ‘Stargirl’ families and are so happy right now to be back together working for the next six months.”