11 Things You Didn’t Know About Ocean’s Eleven
One of the better team-up heist movies, and additionally one of the better remakes, is 2001’s Ocean’s Eleven. Seeing an All-Star cast including George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, Andy Garcia and Julia Roberts lead a fun and thrilling casino caper makes many people forget about the 1960 Rat Pack led Ocean’s 11. While it is hard to pass the star power of Frank Sinatra, the 2001 edition is a fun lighthearted ride that combines the sharp writing of Ted Griffin with expert direction of Steven Soderbergh. Let’s take a look at some things that you may or hopefully may not know coming straight from the mouths of many of the principal participants in this 11 Things You Didn’t Know About Ocean’s Eleven.
1. Both screenwriter Ted Griffin and director Steven Soderbergh wanted to distance the film from the original by eliminating similarities and even going so far rearranging and entire shot in Los Angeles to avoid a giant Frank Sinatra mural.
2. Much of Ocean’s Eleven would not have been possible without the Las Vegas connections of producer Jerry Weintraub. The production was given unprecedented access and able to film right on the Bellagio gaming floor and shut down the valet causing even the biggest high rollers to use the side entrance. Only the behind the scenes of the casino were filmed on a soundstage.
3. Weintraub even has a small role as an unnamed high roller, but one can assume he is Jilly from Philly after he had a good time with Nick Papagiorgio.
4. Rusty (Brad Pitt) has a trait of always snacking, which started out kind of as a goof by Brad Pitt, but he liked it because it makes sense that guys always on the move would have to eat whatever and whenever they got a chance. Pitt probably didn’t like it when he chose shrimp cocktail for Rusty in one scene and according to Soderbergh ate 40 shrimp while filming the scene.
5. One Las Vegas landmark that was supposed to be in the film was the New York-New York Hotel & Casino. It was originally the hotel that casino mogul Terry Benedict (Andy Garcia) was imploding for his new hotel. For a movie filmed before September 11, 2001 that wasn’t a problem. For a movie set to be released after 9/11 it caused the filmmakers to rush to change the hotel to the imaginary Xanadu. To this day I get an eerie feeling watching the behind the scenes featurette on the DVD which still shows the New York buildings crumbling.
6. The imploding building was probably the largest CGI piece, but it wasn’t the strangest. The scene at the dog track with Rusty and Saul (Carl Reiner) features a digitally inserted dog into last place. I guess that is easier than telling a very competitive greyhound to come in last place… but still not the strangest use of CGI. That award would go to digitally inserting a middle finger and some knuckles onto Yen’s (Shaobo Qin) hand because he physically couldn’t do it at the correct angle for the camera while folded in half.
7. So you like strange things. How about the wig that Rusty wears while impersonating a doctor was the same wig that Mike Myers used while rehearsing for Austin Powers. When Pitt saw the hairdresser remove it from a bag for the first time he likened it to a beaver being pulled out.
8. Speaking of costumes, costume designer Jeffrey Kurland wanted Danny (George Clooney) and Linus (Matt Damon) to wear only leather vests during the heist, but George and Matt overruled them and we are spared the sight of their bare arms as they have black t-shirts on underneath the vests. Overall, the cast loved Kurland’s work.
9. The boxing match between Lennox Lewis and Wladimir Klitschko was a fight that at the time of filming had never happened and despite everyone on every commentary assuming that the two would fight, we never got to see the pugilists in a real bout. Lewis actually lost his heavyweight title after filming, but reclaimed before Ocean’s Eleven was released.
10. To pull off the heist, the thieves need bags of flyers (for hookers) to be taken out of the vault that was supposed to be money, but not even screenwriter Ted Griffin can explain how they got all those flyers down in the vault so they could be taken out as part of the ruse.
11. The famous shot of the thieves watching the Bellagio fountains near the end of the film was left up to the actors own volition on what order they would be standing and what order they would leave. After working for six weeks in Las Vegas the cast had no trouble knowing their characters.
