Quiz

Languages spoken in the film are English, French, Italian, Mandarin, German, Russian, Latin, Armenian, Sanskrit, Egyptian (not Arabic), Babylonian and a little Romanian. The ancient Sanskrit, Egyptian and Babylonian are authentic, researched in ancient texts and manuscripts by a team of expert linguists. The film also includes an artificial, "made-up" language, done with such integrity that it could provide the rudimentary basis of a new language.

The modestly-budgeted film was financed by the director's successful vineyard in California.

Shot with two of Francis Ford Coppola's own Sony HDW-F900 CineAlta HD cameras. The signals from both F900s were recorded onto an HDCAM-SR field recorder in the HDCAM SR format. By sending the uncompressed, full raster 4:2:2 signal from the camera to the SR recorder, the team was able to preserve more of the camera's inherent image quality. In addition, the SR deck features the unique ability to record two simultaneous 4:2:2 A and B camera inputs onto a single tape. These recordings became the equivalent of the film negative and were used for the final digital intermediate. The onboard HDCAM tapes were used as back-up tapes for reviewing footage and to create DVCAM copies for ingest into the Final Cut Pro editing station. Coppola shot his next films with the same HD cameras and a similar workflow.

A total of 162 hours of footage were shot. The shoot-to-final-film ratio is 80:1.

The first assembly put up by associate editor Corina Stavila and her assistant Andrei Dascalescu came in at about 3 hours and 30 minutes. The next cut brought that down to 2 hours and 50 minutes. This version was trimmed a further 30 minutes, including restoring 10 minutes of scenes that had been cut; resulting in a length of 140 minutes. However, the target was to bring in the film at two hours, therefore In September 2006, editor Walter Murch worked closely with director Francis Ford Coppola to get the cut down to two hours. An early version contained for example a sub-plot, also included in the novella, featuring the 1938 student radicals and the secret police associating Dominic with them. This sub-plot and other scenes were ultimately dropped upon suggestion by Murch in order to keep the story more personal and reaching the intended two hour goal.