George Clooney at the Cannes press conference for Ocean's Thirteen. Click for more photos of the press conference. Photos by Matt Carr.

Billionaire Boys Club

Clooney, Pitt, Damon, and the rest of Ocean's Thirteen's merry pranksters serve up some hype with a side of ham at Cannes.

by Karl Rozemeyer

The Cannes film festival's ability to ingest celebrity hype in a single dose hit overload with the screening and press conference for Steven Soderbergh's Ocean's Thirteen. Danny Ocean's boys are back and the arrival of most of the cast (including Brad Pitt, George Clooney, Matt Damon, Andy Garcia, Don Cheadle, as well as franchise newcomer Ellen Barkin) in the south of France to promote the film out of competition was met with a frenzy of paparazzi photographers unable to decide which mega-star to train their cameras on.

Press queries ran the gamut from Oprah's appearance in the film to the secret Sinatra handshake, whether Clooney will ever marry again, and if there is any chance of Matt Damon continuing his run as Jason Bourne after this summer's release of The Bourne Ultimatum. (The answers to the last two are "no," by the way.) Clooney, seated in the center of the star-studded line-up, was more court jester than king, reeling off quips such as "This script may go down as one of the great screenplays of all time." Also "This film is a basically a cry for peace." And "I wanna do musicals mostly."

Brad Pitt, George Clooney, and Matt Damon at the Cannes premiere of Ocean's Thirteen. Click for more photos from the premiere. Photos by Matt Carr.

Jokes aside, Soderbergh dismissed any insinuation that the third installment of a successful franchise is in any way a frivolous undertaking. "There is an assumption... that if you are making an entertaining film that you are not as engaged, that you are not as into it, not as passionate about it. I don't work that way. I don't think any of these people here work that way. We just love making movies. From my standpoint, the Ocean's films are more difficult for me than some of the serious films that I have made that I have got much more attention for. And they are tricky. They are really tricky. It is a side of my interest and my personality that I really like to explore occasionally."

Having said that, he quickly retreated from any parallels with the classic The Sting, which he described as "one of the most flawlessly constructed films any of us have ever seen. It is a masterpiece of construction."

In Ocean's Thirteen, Danny Ocean and the gang are motivated to pull off their riskiest casino heist yet as an act of vengeance for the double-crossing of Ocean's friend and mentor Reuben Tishkoff (Elliot Gould).

"The most appealing thing to us about the movies is the camaraderie," says Soderbergh. "This idea of one of the characters being wronged and the other characters having to come and defend him and make that right is a good premise for us because it played into the relationships between the characters. It was sort of a revenge film. But we don't like mean people. So it was an opportunity to watch somebody mean get his head handed to him. So that was fun."