Despite directing and acting in various films served with copious amounts of violence, Eli Roth never quite came close to death on any of those projects until Inglourious Basterds.

During one of the latter scenes of the Quentin Tarantino‘s WWII tour de force, a fire consumes a Parisian theater where the basterds confront Nazi soldiers. It was during this scene that Roth received a taste of the pain his films’ characters experience ten-fold.

“We almost got incinerated. The fire comes up. They thought it was going to burn at 400 degrees centigrade and it burned at 1,200. That’s like 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit! You see the swastika fall. It was not supposed to. It was fastened with steel cables; the steel liquefied… I was on the ground, my feet were up, I had ice packs all over me… The fire department said another 10 or 15 seconds, the structure would have collapsed.”

Let’s hope that this doesn’t discourage Roth from further creating or acting in films (or even collaborating with Tarantino)!