It's just not summer without a Sharknado movie. Luckily, the low-budget disaster movie-turned-cultural phenomenon is getting ready to swim back to Syfy on July 22 for its third coming, Sharknado 3: Oh Hell No!

Oh hell yes! Ian Ziering and Tara Reid will be back for this third installment of the franchise as newly-back-together exes Fin and April — this time to save the East Coast, or rather "Feast Coast," from being completely torn a part by Sharknadoes. Sharknado 3 promises to bring even more beloved landmarks (the White House, Universal Studios), more celebrities (David Hasselhoff, Bo Derek, Ann Coulter) and, of course, more sharks flailing around in twisters.

If you don't understand what all of the fuss over the Sharknado movies is about, you're probably taking them too seriously. It's about watching Ziering and company do whatever it takes with whatever object is lying around to save their current city from complete and total destruction by a whirling cascade of bloodthirsty sharks. Oh, and all of the over-the-top performances and camp are good too. That's just about all there is to it.

Though it may not seem like it, a lot of work goes into making the Sharknado movies a reality. Okay, some work. No one knows that better than Thunder Levin, the writer of all three Sharknado films. And yes, that is his real name.

T-Lounge recently spoke with Levin over the phone to get all details on Sharknado 3, from the challenges of writing the film to its most hilarious celebrity cameo to why this franchise might just save the world. Seriously.

It just started raining here in New York, so I feel like the universe must have known that I was speaking to you today.

Yeah, keep your eye on the skies.

Exactly. So just to start off, what can we expect from Sharknado 3?

Let’s see. Three times the sharks, three times the 'nadoes and 100 percent more Hoff.

What is going to be different about this movie compared with the first two films?

Well, it’s got a bigger scope. Each of the first two films took place in one city, and this is basically the entire East Coast. It starts in Washington, D.C., in Florida in Orlando and points beyond even that. So it’s definitely a bigger film. They do a lot of traveling. It’s really kind of like several different movies in one, because the opening is kind of a White House Down/Die Hard kind of action film, and then it becomes a road trip movie, and then it becomes a disaster film at Universal Studios, and then it becomes yet something else again. It’s really sort of expanding the horizons of the franchise.

Was that challenging at all, to have such a huge scope of geography for this installment and having the characters move throughout all of these different locations?

Yeah, it was a bit of a challenge. That was certainly something that had to be worked on. One of the things that I labored over a lot on the first two movies was making sure the geography was all perfectly accurate. And then when the film got shot in three weeks with very little money, all of that went out the door, and nobody seemed to care. Certainly not more than one or two people on Twitter might have commented about how they got from one place to another in an unrealistic amount of time.

On this film, I finally realized that I was the only one or almost the only one who cared about making sure that the physical progression of where they are made sense. And so I worried about that less on this film and just concerned myself with the characters and the sharks and the craziness. But yeah, it was a bit of a challenge trying to cover all that ground, but it also gave us lots of opportunity for interesting story stuff, so it’s a win-win.

The first film was set in L.A., and the second film was in New York. You put a lot of the local flavor of each city in each film. Was there room to do that with Sharknado 3 being set in all of these different locations throughout the East Coast?

That was something we could not do quite as much in this one, because we weren’t in each place for as much time. And also, the first two movies were my two hometowns. I mean, I live in Los Angeles now. I’ve been out here for almost 20 years. And I grew up in New York City. So I knew those towns intimately.

In this one, I’d never been to Orlando or Universal Studios. I know Washington a bit because I’ve got friends there, so I visit it a lot. But we don’t spend a lot of time moving around in Washington. It’s mostly right there in the White House and the Capitol grounds and stuff like that. So I don’t think the local flavor is going to be quite the same, but in exchange for that, we get more of an epic scope.

What was the inspiration for the subtitle of this installment, "Oh Hell No!"?

Honestly, I don’t know. They didn’t go with my title. I wanted it to be called Sharknado 3: The Unbearable Lightness of Being, but they didn’t go for that. I’ve heard conflicting stories on where “Oh Hell No!” came from. I heard that it was The Asylum’s [Sharknado 3's production company] marketing guy who came up with it. I’ve also heard that it came from something Tara Reid said in an interview. I don’t know exactly what the story is on that, and I don’t know that it matters, because it’s just kind of perfect.

So you think it’s a fitting subtitle for Sharknado 3?

Yeah. I mean, actually one of the other subtitles that I had proposed was "WTF." I thought that would be funny too.

Was your process for writing this film the same as for the first two?

No, it was the same as the second one because the process changed a bit from the first one. In the first one, I was pretty much left to my own devices. In the second one and now the third one, there were a lot of different eyes on the project. You know, now that it’s become this franchise, this phenomenon, there are a lot of people you have to satisfy and a lot of people who have to approve everything that’s done.

Just in general, people are paying more attention to it now. So it’s not just me by myself coming up with ideas and then writing them and then turning the whole thing in, in the end. The approval process for the story outline is much more laborious than it was on the first one.

I imagine adding in so many celebrity cameos for the second film and now the third must have changed things a bit as well.

Yeah, that’s interesting because a lot of times, these cameos are cast at the last minute, and we have to add characters and somehow have them make sense — even when they weren’t originally intended to be in a particular scene. Sometimes, we will write a character as sort of a placeholder for a cameo, not knowing who’s going to play it. That’s happened actually twice on this film. We ended up with several different actors being cast for what was eventually one part, having to figure out how to split it up. There’s been a lot more sort of adapting and rolling with the punches to make sure it all works.

How do you decide which celebrities are going to get killed off and which are going to survive the Sharknado?

Right, that’s kind of the luck of the draw, which celebrity lives and which celebrity dies. You know, there are celebrities that you might want to see die in the movie who live. A particular political commentator comes to mind. Then there are celebrities who you might want to see live who die. So that’s kind of luck of the draw: when they’re cast, what day they’re available, because, you know, sometimes you can only get somebody on this particular day in this particular location, so you have to put them into a role that’s being shot that day in that place.

It’s not always as thought-out as you might like it to be, and it’s not always as meta and synergistic as it could be. At the heart, these are still low-budget films. We’re still shooting them very quickly and without a lot of resources. Just because they’ve become more successful doesn’t mean we have more money to do them – at least not to a significant extent – so that impacts those choices.

Are the celebrities who make cameos in the films mostly okay with what will happen to their characters?

Yeah, usually. If somebody is going do one of these films, they know what they’re getting into. This package is clearly labeled. For the most part, they come into it planning to just have fun with it and not be too concerned and not take it too seriously. I mean, Mark Cuban is a perfect example. He was on set a whole long day, and he just had a blast. It was like he was being a kid again, it seemed like, and getting to play pretend. He was shooting machine guns and throwing hand grenades and being the president of the United States at the same time. It was really sort of a joy to watch. So as long as the celebrities show up in the proper frame of mind, I think they’re all good with it, whether they live or die.

Who is your favorite celebrity cameo from Sharknado 3?

Well, I mean, I mentioned Mark Cuban because I think he’s the one that really stands out for me. And I also really like the Penn and Teller scene. Because they’re comedians, essentially, it was the first time that I was really able to write an actual joke. I enjoyed that because, you know, most of the time, Sharknado has to be funny, but it has to be played straight to be funny. Writing the Penn and Teller scene was sort of refreshing because I got to actually take advantage of them, sort of, to tell an actual joke, so that was fun.

Which celebrity would you love to appear in a Sharknado movie?

Oh, well I’ve said that before, it’s that I’d love to get Harrison Ford in one of these. And I think Bill Murray would be great, so that’s probably my top two. And you know who else we actually wanted to get, but he was busy with his new TV series? Bruce Campbell would be extraordinary to have in one of these, especially because of the whole chainsaw tie-in with Evil Dead with Ash. He and Fin fighting side-by-side with chainsaws, that would just be an incredible moment. I’d love to see if there wasn’t some way to make that work.

I know this is a very fictional film…

It is? [Laughs]

...but did you do any kind of research for these movies, or was there any sort of consultant or shark expert on set to keep things accurate?

I don’t understand this perception. These are all well-researched, heavily documented documentaries. This is an important treatise on global warming. Let’s see, did I do any actual research? No. Actually, that’s not true. Now that I think about it, I did.

There were a couple of things that I researched about military fighter jets and about some of the physics involved with what we do at the end of the film. The thing is, you do that research so that you know what you’re doing, but then the odds are that it all gets thrown out the window anyhow. I mean, the story has to trump science when you’re doing a movie like this. But it’s good to know what the truth is so that you can decide how to manipulate it.

Looking toward the future, it seems like the next Sharknado would have to take over the world. Is that something you would like to see if there is another Sharknado movie?

I would certainly like to see that. I was actually pitching that for the third one, the global Sharknado — and that was vetoed for this one. Hopefully that will be the next one, or at least international locations. I’d love to see a shark on the Eiffel Tower or battling sharks in the Coliseum in Rome or something at the Sydney Opera House. Stuff like that would be really cool. I’d love to do that. You know, who knows where else it might go? There are lots of possibilities and lots of different directions if it continues.

Have you given any other thought to what you would want to see in the next Sharknado movie?

Yeah, just in the last few days, we’ve been sort of just batting some ideas back and forth. But, you know, we have to see if the audience wants it. We’ll see how the third one does. There’s every indication that it will be successful. People are certainly talking about it. But I wouldn’t want to pre-suppose anything. We’ll wait and see.

Yeah, people are talking about it, and now every year, it seems like people look forward to the next installment.

It’s sort of become a shared social experience, which, you know, as the way we consume media fractures, and everybody’s watching shows in different places in different ways at different times, we’ve sort of lost the watercooler moment, you know? And so Sharknado is sort of combatting that, I think, and it’s sort of the shared, communal experience of the Internet age. That’s a good thing, I think.

Yeah, Sharknado seems to be one of those things that you have to see when it happens, because, you know, the next day or whenever, it’s just too late.

Yeah, it’s not the same. What’s interesting is I have these Sharknado hashtag search columns open, so whenever I have Twitter or Tweet Deck open, I see what’s come up. Every once in a while, you’ll see somebody who’s watching it months later who decides to live tweet it anyhow, to put out their reactions as they’re experiencing it to sort of retroactively try to be part of that experience. There is obviously this craving for this communal experience.

You know, it used to be — from the days of cavemen sitting around a fire telling stories, to the Greek amphitheaters, the commoners coming to see Shakespeare, to even 30 or 40 years ago — 1,000, 2,000 people sitting together in the dark to watch a movie in one of the big movie palaces. It was always a shared, communal experience. It gave us a common language as a society. With the Internet revolution and the way media is consumed now, we’ve lost that, and so I think there is a craving for it. In a surprising way, Sharknado is saving the world, and I think that’s important.

Did you ever imagine that it would kind of take off like this, or that you would have two sequels to the original movie by now?

Sure, I knew it all the time. No, I mean, who could have predicted this? I had hoped that it might become sort of a cult classic, like The Rocky Horror Picture Show or [The Adventures of] Buckaroo Banzai [Across the 8th Dimension] or Evil Dead, so that would be great. I was certainly hoping for something like that. But there was no way anyone could have foreseen that it was going to take off the way it has. And if you could figure that out ahead of time, you’d be a very rich man or woman.

Do you have a survival strategy for how you would personally survive during a Sharknado?

Yeah, I’d find Ian Ziering and his chainsaw and just stay close to him.

Has working on these movies made you more or less afraid of sharks?

Neither. To be honest, these movies are so unrealistic. I’ve talked to some scientists about this, and theoretically, it would be possible. In all honestly, I’m more concerned about a giant earthquake. I’m more concerned about a global pandemic or a terrorist getting a nuclear weapon. Those are the disasters I’m prepared for.

I’m not really concerned about the sharks. I’ve swum with sharks. I’ve snorkeled with sharks. I think now since I’ve made these movies, there might be a sense that I should stay away from them just out of sort of a karma thing, because they know I’m responsible for the deaths of millions of sharks [Laughs]. But no, seriously, I’m not any more afraid of sharks than I was before.

Do you think the Sharknado movies have made other people more afraid of sharks?

Well, I would hope so. After all, before it was just a matter of if you’re afraid of sharks, stay out of the water. We’ve eliminated that as a safety mechanism, so I would hope people are running in terror.

Right, nowhere is safe.

Nowhere is safe.

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