Helen Hunt almost quit Twister due to knee injury, told herself to 'run anyway' (exclusive)

There was a moment when Helen Hunt thought she'd have to walk away from Twister.

Just weeks before the Mad About You star was to begin filming what would become the 1996 blockbuster, she found herself laid up in her Oklahoma hotel room.

"I injured my knee right before we started," Hunt says, speaking to Entertainment Weekly in celebration of the 4K Ultra HD and digital release of a remastered version of the disaster classic. "And so a week or two before, I remember sitting in Oklahoma with ice on my knee and calling my agent and going, 'Am I going to be able to pull this off?' So, for me, it was just like 'Run anyway' because I had no other choice."

And this wasn't As Good as It Gets. Twister was "a very physical movie," Hunt recounts.

"When you have the scenes where all that [weather] comes at them, the acting is pushed in the background, and it is really the actor responding to their surroundings," adds Twister director Jan de Bont. "Now, when they do action scenes, they see one side was stunt-doubled, and then they cut to the actor's back. That doesn't work. You never see every scene when there's special effects, physical media effects. I filmed the actors at the same time, the same moment, so they react to the real thing. They don't react to, 'And now fall down...' It doesn't work. This was all real."

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"Looking back, it's all for the best that there wasn't the technology to do it all on your laptop. Instead, they just pummeled the s--- out of us, and it looks amazing," Hunt concludes. "So much of acting now is you're looking at a piece of tape, or you're looking at a green screen, or you're looking at dots on someone's face, and someone has to tell you, "Well, what's going to be here later is this thing's going to come around the corner." A lot of what we reacted to was really happening. And while it made it messier, it made it easier to act."

Twister is now available on 4K Ultra HD Disc and digitally.