BK: I'd also just point out one thing that I don't think gets enough acknowledgement in the press, which is Steven's main collaborator through all his movies is Greg Jacobs, who is his assistant director and is a fine director in his own right. And assists Steven, serving so many functions on the movies. Steven really does look to Greg very often during the course of a shoot.

DL: Yeah, he drew on Greg in a much more creative role, as opposed to the function of a lot of ADs, which is to just tell you if you're going to make the day or when you need to move on.

BK: Greg was a great sounding board.

DL: Yeah. He had a great objectivity.

Premiere: So you had been communicating with Steven and with Clooney during the process of writing the script, but when the whole cast came on board, was there any kind of piling on?

Ellen Barkin and Matt Damon in Ocean's Thirteen

DL: Yeah, everybody came in and said, my part should be bigger. [laughter] No, if any of that went on, it never came back to us.

BK: This group of guys, it's just incredible. And I include Ellen Barkin in that, when I say "this group of guys." She's hilarious and great.

Premiere: There was some concern when the first announcements about the picture were made, that it was not going to feature the return of either Catherine Zeta-Jones or Julia Roberts and that this was going to be a more guy-centered thing. And when this announcement was made, it was kind of put upon you guys as having responsibility for that.

DL: Yeah, I believe there was a press release that said something like "the writers couldn't come up with suitable story lines" for them. But I mean if you think about sort of the driving forces behind this movie, if they really wanted them in the movie, would we be the ones to undo their fun? I mean we probably had 50 pages worth of material for them. You know, I think the way you phrased the question, the "guy-centered" nature of this thing, made certain of the key players in this thing realize that the audience liked the camaraderie amongst the guys.

BK: And many of the guys are people we have a history with. Certainly with Matt Damon, who was in Rounders. We knew Don Cheadle, we knew Scott Caan, we knew Casey [Affleck] through Matt and Ben [Affleck]... we have pretty familiar relationships with most of these guys on some level.

Shaobo Qin, Scott Caan, and Bernie Mac in Ocean's Thirteen

DL: And all these guys enjoy the process. You know, Jerry [Weintraub] managed to get them all together three times within six years, which when you think about the schedules of these people is pretty impressive. And you know, they're all happy to give another guy a moment in a scene. They know that they're going to get their moment and everybody just is taken care of and it's just a very low attitude sort of a process.

BK: They all just want the whole to really be better. They really do. There were only a couple of times I can think of when George and Matt would come up and make suggestions on how to make stuff better. But actually how to make it better, which is very different than your normal motivation...

DL: And occasionally we dropped some bits of expositional heavy lifting on Brad Pitt's able shoulders, and he would come in and thank us for such an opportunity. [laughter]