|
DIRECTOR
Steven Soderbergh says that he hadn’t even completed
work on Ocean’s Twelve when he began thinking
about ideas for Ocean’s Thirteen, the third
installment of the hugely popular series. “We were just
finishing the second film, and I thought it would be fun
to go back to Las Vegas for the next one. In large part,
the film was motivated by everyone wanting to work
together again. But it was always with the understanding
that it had to be ‘all in’ or we were not doing
it—everybody comes back or nobody comes back.”
Producer
Jerry Weintraub adds, “In the six years since we did the
first film, people’s lives have changed. Not only are
these actors all in demand, they have families and
babies and new interests that had to be taken into
consideration. The truth is, you can’t get this large a
production together unless everybody is willing to throw
his hat into the ring. I also gave them fair warning. I
called everyone 18 months before and said, ‘We’re making
this picture in the summer of 2006. Get ready; we’re
coming at you.’ And once I told them that, they knew it
would happen.”
Weintraub adds that the term “everyone” applied not only
to the film’s cast but to the man at the helm. “For me,
as a producer, there’s Steven Soderbergh and then
there’s everybody else. In everything we have done
together, we have a wonderful partnership. Any accolade
that can be said about the guy, he lives up to. He is
simply great.”
Aligning
the schedules of a cast that included the likes of
George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, Andy Garcia, Don
Cheadle, Bernie Mac, Elliott Gould, Carl Reiner, et al,
involved an operation worthy of Danny Ocean himself.
But the man who plays Danny Ocean knows to whom the
credit belongs. “The truth is that Steven is the
creative force of these movies, but Jerry Weintraub is
the heart and soul of the Ocean’s films, period,” says
Clooney. “You have to keep in mind that getting all
these guys together isn’t easy—not that we don’t want
to, but it’s very hard to pull everybody’s schedules
together because we’ve all got different gigs. To find
one period of time when everyone is available is tricky,
and only Jerry could make it happen. He understands how
to do it…he uses guilt,” the actor teases.
Upping
the ante of an already stellar ensemble, Soderbergh and
Weintraub cast Al Pacino as Willy Bank, the
unscrupulously ruthless casino owner who swindles
Elliott Gould’s character, Reuben Tishkoff, out of his
share of a new Las Vegas casino; and Ellen Barkin as his
right-hand woman, Abigail Sponder.
Much
like the actors who play them, Danny Ocean’s gang had
gone their separate ways after their last heist. But if
there is one thing that would always have the power to
bring them together again, it is saving one of their
own. “I have always embraced the idea that these guys
are thieves and con men,” Soderbergh acknowledges, “but
they’re not entirely driven by money. Certainly, in this
case, they are driven by friendship and revenge. The
‘all for one and one for all’ ethos dictates that when
one of them is betrayed—especially in the way that their
friend Reuben was betrayed—it’s payback time. It seemed
like a strong premise.”
The
filmmakers knew that, beyond the elements of friendship
and the desire to work together again, a primary factor
in reassembling their cast would be the script. To craft
the screenplay for Ocean’s Thirteen, they
ultimately chose the writing team of Brian Koppelman and
David Levien, who had previously delved into the milieu
of inveterate gamblers in the poker drama Rounders.
“Brian
and David had written Rounders, a drama about
friendship and poker that I loved,” Weintraub says. “I
spoke to Steven about them, and when we all met, Steven
and I knew they were the guys to write this movie.”
Soderbergh offers, “I knew who Brian and David were
because we had many mutual friends, and I had liked
Rounders a lot. There was not a long list of people
that we thought could step into this specific universe
and pick up the language and the sense of humor. Brian
and David got it at once. I met them for lunch and
within minutes we were starting to work on the
script. It really is in their wheelhouse; they like
these kinds of movies and these kinds of characters.”
“In a
way, David and I have been preparing to write this movie
for most of our lives,” Brian Koppelman affirms. “We
have spent a lot of years exploring the culture of
Las Vegas and the gambling lifestyle. We read every book about con
artists and thieves that we could get our hands on. So,
when we met with Steven, we talked to him about the
great con movies, about the nature of heists, and about
how these characters have evolved since the first movie,
which David and I both loved. Right away, we were all
talking the same language.”
“One
thing that makes a con movie work is how much you care
about the people who are perpetrating the con and how
much you want the mark to be taken down,” David Levien
notes. “In Ocean’s Eleven, Danny wants to get his
wife back and take down casino owner Terry Benedict, so
the guys all work together to undertake this incredibly
elaborate heist. Twelve was about them using
their skills to literally survive—to get out of the
trouble that they got themselves into in Eleven.
Thirteen is all about friendship, which was a
great jumping-off point for the movie. We love these
characters and know how much they mean to each other, so
to see Reuben brought down by an outsider… they’re going
to pull together for him, and that’s what drives the
entire story. It’s not just a heist for the sake of it.”
“It’s a
charitable heist, if you will,” agrees Andy Garcia, who
plays Terry Benedict, the mark of the first movie, who
gets his revenge in the second and becomes the gang’s
unlikely ally in the new film. “It shows the kind of
friends they are, and I think that’s something an
audience can get behind right away.”
Don
Cheadle, who plays Cockney engineer Basher Tarr,
remarks, “They’re doing it for all the right reasons,
which means there’s no money in it for them. But I guess
altruism has its place, even in thievery.”
Opening
across the
Philippines
on June 6, Ocean’s Thirteen is distributed by Warner
Bros. Pictures. |
