NOBODY REALLY WANTED an Ocean’s 11 remake. The original 1960 film, about a group of World War II veterans who plan a New Year’s Eve heist on five Las Vegas casinos, was better remembered for its cast than its quality, its chief reason for existing mainly so that the ‘Rat Pack’ —entertainers Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr, Peter Lawford and Joey Bishop —could hang out, gamble and get drunk.
Watched with today’s eyes, it’s a rather cheesy, dated, best-forgotten crime comedy. “The truth is,” George Clooney later said, “most people never saw the original Ocean’s 11. They just think they have. Because those guys were the coolest.”
Somehow, its legacy and memory endured. For one thing, the 1960 film transformed Las Vegas’ reputation and status, playing a significant role in turning this once sparsely populated, dusty desert town —previously best known for nuclear testing —into the epitome of cool and sophistication. (Its impact can still be literally seen in the town; Sinatra, Martin and Davis Jr have Vegas streets named after them.) More importantly, it laid the groundwork for that hottest of hands: the remake that surpasses the original.
The story of the new Ocean’s Eleven —numerics aficionados will note the written-out number there, distinguishing it from the original’s “11” —begins with legendary, larger-than-life producer Jerry Weintraub. An old-fashioned, Brooklyn-born dealmaker, Weintraub started out in the music industry, producing tours for Elvis Presley and —yes —Frank Sinatra, before moving into film in the 1970s. Despite openly professing that he “never thought the [original Ocean’s 11] was great”, he bought the remake rights in the 1990s, and held onto them for several years, seemingly recognising a certain magic quality in having an ensemble of insanely cool, handsome, famous people hanging out in a phantasmagorically unreal place like Vegas. George Clooney was first on board as Danny Ocean, and so it wasn’t a surprise when his Out Of Sight director, Steven Soderbergh, the man who had helped turn Clooney into a fully-fledged movie star, came on board too.
By the turn of the century, Soderbergh was the toast of Hollywood, riding high on being nominated twice in the same Best Director category (for Traffic and Erin Brockovich, winning for the former). And after years of intense dramas and dark subject matters, he was looking for something a little brighter. “That was conscious on my part,” he later reflected, speaking about Ocean’s. “I wanted it to be a sort of light entertainment. I wanted it to be sparkling.” So Soderbergh set about making a comedy caper with one foot in the retro razzle-dazzle of the original, and the other in the sharp, slick, hyper-cine-literate smarts of the time. “I wanted it to have a baroque visual palette and style to burn,” Soderbergh explained, “and yet be breezy.”