Finally, during an annual Civil War recreation, Method created a bravura tornado/storm sequence. This was tricky, according to Dumont. "It came to us with five week left and I had a separate team," he explained. "Based on production concepts, we created a progression for the storm cloud sequence involving a supercell, tornadoes and CG debris. We had to replace most of the trees for the right movement because the plates didn't have any wind. We had to replace very quickly all of the tops to get the wind blowing in there. We also created objects being sucked into the tornado, including monuments and fences, and at the end we created a change of color correction as it gets darker and darker."

But wouldn't you know it: in actuality, the tornados they researched were too smooth and elegant in real life. So like everything else, Method embellished with details as long as they used nature as the basic element.

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Bill Desowitz is former senior editor of AWN and VFXWorld, the owner of Immersed in Movies (www.billdesowitz.com), a columnist for Thompson on Hollywood at Indiewire and author of James Bond Unmasked (www.jamesbondunmasked.com), which chronicles the 50-year evolution of 007 on screen, featuring interviews with all six actors.