LINK: Dykstra Talks Inglourious Basterds

From the get-go, what we always do is translate the written word into something visual and, of course, Quentin’s great to talk to because he’s a total visualist in the way he conceives of the storytelling aspect. So we were trying to figure out how to impart the presence of this character in this scene in the theater in a way that would impactful. His initial idea was to have Shosanna’s image on screen and have the fire consume the image. Well, by traditional standards, you would set about doing that by shooting the screen and then shooting the fire as a separate element and doing an optical composite to put the two pieces together. But he wanted very much to have that happen in the environment with the audience watching the actors, the stunt people and the extras. So it was a challenge because, technically speaking, fire is very bright and if you want to have fire with any detail in it, you have to expose it in an f/8 or an f/11. And when you do a projected image, you’re limited by the brightness of the projector, and, of course, that usually is in the realm of an f/4 or f/5. So it was trying to figure out how to create this image in situ, which was one of his prerequisites, or at least that’s where he wanted to start, and make all of the components synchronize. And we had to figure out how to make the screen burn at the rate that you choose to have it burn and have it start at the point you want it to start and have it integrate with the action of the image that’s being projected because it’s all happening at one time.