They filmed on a big stage in Rudersdorf, where they set up a large rostrum with 15 technicians with valves connected to a giant propane gas tank outside.

BD: The sequence turned out brilliantly. What is some of the other vfx work in the film?

JD: There are greenscreen composites in that opening sequence in the farmhouse, and CIS did a terrific job of doing that composite work [under the supervision of Greg Liegey]. And then we did a ton of removing wires, getting rid of equipment that was in the shot, getting rid of breathing that wasn't supposed to be there when somebody was dead. That kind of stuff.

BD: So there was no CG?

JD: That's right: there was no three-dimensional stuff for this movie. We did everything in traditional composite and overlay approach. Now the trick is -- and it's the same issue that Quentin had with using "digital" for projection -- he wanted to make sure there were no digital artifacts in the compositing, because the image had to be digitized and then brought back to an analogue medium, and he was very concerned about the digital intermediate because he didn't want the movie to feel like it had been electronically manipulated -- and EFILM did a great job of that. The trick was getting the grain, the contrast and color to match up. The 3D stuff is hard to do, but you do about 95% of it in a mechanical way. You've gotta make sure that you've rendered the object with enough resolution so that it'll stand up to close scrutiny, and then you've gotta make sure your texture maps are fitted properly and aren't scratched and there's no tearing and then the compositing step: the lighting and integration of the material obviously done in the digital environment has to be done in the computer; we did most of that practically. And then the final put together is the big issue: shooting indoors and outdoors, of course, and combining scenes on the cut that were lit with daylight and with incandescent light is always a challenge.

BD: What about the bar shootout?

JD: We added shots and muzzle flashes and took wires out and took a few people out who were in the wrong places. The other big issue, although CIS wasn't involved, except for composite purposes, was Shosanna's face on the smoke [in the movie theater], and that was done with the same group of people in Berlin that did the fire stuff. They did a terrific job with creating in the theater environment a dense wall of smoke on which we could use our high-powered projectors to actually project the face and enough stop and depth of field to keep the face sharp enough so it was recognizable.