Premiere: To get back to Ocean's, what did you do after turning in the mostly-finished script? Was it off to Vegas and L.A. at that point?

BK: We actually went to Vegas with Steven before we wrote, and we toured some of the hotel casinos really extensively. [It was] back of the house stuff, the count rooms, all the inner workings so that we sort of had the full range of where we could set scenes, and all the stuff that they could do. We sat with the casino security experts and they told us how formidable their systems were so that we could go from there as to how our guys could overcome all those measures. Once the movie was going to go into production, we went out and were on set the whole time.

Premiere: Were casino floors reconstructed on set and so on? What was the layout like?

DL: On Ocean's 11 they shot on location at the Bellagio. It was great for the look of the movie, but they felt there were a lot of constraints about where and when they could shoot. So this time they got a collection of the biggest sound stages at Warner Brothers and basically built the whole inside, and a piece of the outside, of a massive hotel casino. It's an incredible set. Everybody who came onto that set of the main casino, even guys that have been in the business for 25 years, were just blown away at the scope of it and lavish design.

Al Pacino and Eddie Jemison in Ocean's Thirteen

BK: Jerry Weintraub is like, in all the good ways, like a Sam Spiegel or something —one of the true legendary giant producers. [He's] a guy who's made movies on such an epic, grand scale for so long and, you know, also was extraordinarily successful in music before. When we were writing the movie, he kept saying things like, "You guys must be so excited for your first real movie." And you know, Dave and I have written five movies, created a TV series, shot another pilot, so we'd look at each other sometimes, like, "Our first movie? We've got posters cover the walls of our office. What do you mean, our first movie?" And then the first time we'd walked into the casino that was built on the Warner Brothers lot, I remember Dave and I looked at each other, then turned to Jerry and we're like, "We got it, it's our first movie." The scale of this thing was remarkable. Incredible.

Premiere: Having the flexibility of a set must have given Steven Soderbergh a lot more in terms of visual possibilities, really getting inside things.

BK: As we were writing, he would feed us visuals. He has a book that he fills with these visual thoughts.

DL: He would say something like, "I have an idea of a huge drill rotating very slowly. I don't know what it's doing."

BK: And we would go and think about that: "All right, what could that mean in terms of putting this movie together?" Or he'd say, "I like the idea of a whole hotel room..."

DL: ...instead of stealing something from a room, let's steal the room.

BK: In the end we didn't steal a room exactly. But that visual notion inspired a similar enough thought.

Brad Pitt in Ocean's Thirteen

DL: He tries to construct the stories from a visual standpoint. I suppose all directors are supposed to do that, but a lot of them don't. Then he carries through all the way. Steven was not only the cinematographer, he also operated the camera, and then at the end of the day he would cut the previous day's work along with the editor Steven Mirrione. Between those two guys, they would be basically caught up with the camera every day as we went. So part of Steven's plan is to leave a lot of resources over, to do sort of additional photography. It's almost not "reshoots" because we didn't really redo scenes that didn't come out well. It was more like the movie would be going in a direction and we'd all be aware of it during shooting, so we'd add a little extra thing to a location that we were going to be, or some new thing that we hadn't considered but which was suggested by what had been shot. It was also great because if there'd be a set-up in, you know, say scene 30 that played much more seriously than we thought it would in the script given the way the actors decided to go with it, then there might be like a B part to that day down the road. And we'd have seen the prior scene, so we know whether and how to change the pitch so it will all work together. It was like a very informed way to make a movie, as opposed to having a compilation of footage come together after the principal photography is already done.