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MOVIELAND
23 September 2006
My friend Michael Almereyda was in town this week doing more scouting for the modern-dress version of "The Merchant
Of Venice" he hopes to shoot here this Fall. Michael's friend Steven Soderbergh was in town, too, doing a week of location
shooting for "Oceans 13", and Soderbergh was kind enough to let Michael drag me along with him to watch a night
of shooting.
The location was part of the unfinished addition to the Venetian -- a parking garage still under construction . . . wide
open floors of bare concrete with open sides and a forest of long silver wires hanging down from the ceilings, sort of like
a modern art installation, as Michael described it, lit only by glaring work lights also hanging down from the ceiling at
regular intervals. It looked very cool.
The scene involved Eliott Gould, playing a character familiar from the earlier "Oceans" films, confronting the
new bad guy for this installment of the series, played by Al Pacino.
I've never been on a film set as quiet and mellow as this one. An air of calm and efficiency and collegiality prevailed.
The AD barely had to raise his voice to silence the set for a take. Soderbergh, who sat behind the camera to supervise every
set-up and sometimes operated the b-camera, seemed like a precocious, self-assured kid, just having fun but moving with astonishing
speed. The whole thing had the feel of a bunch of friends getting together to make a movie -- which is sort of startling
on a picture this big. Jerry Weintraub, the legendary producer, was on the set for a while and seemed calm and cheerful himself
-- which is always a sure sign that the director has things under control.
Soderbergh watched the actors work out blocking, planning his shots accordingly and sometimes marshaling the actors into
the right positions for the lighting -- which came entirely from the overhead work lights, already in place. Soderbergh didn't
even use reflectors in the shots I watched being made. And yet, on the video monitors, the images looked gorgeous. All of
this, of course, is quite impossible -- but Soderbergh was doing it.
Gould came onto the set with his reading more or less worked out -- he'd crafted just the right mix of bewilderment, anger
and humiliation for the scene, in which Pacino is trying to cut him out of a big casino deal. Pacino's performance evolved
as he rehearsed and as the takes progressed. It got bigger in some places, quieter in others, but it always played off what
Gould was doing. Indeed, Pacino seemed to be trying to listen harder and harder to what Gould was doing and to react to it
more spontaneously. It was sort of miraculous to watch two old pros work so wisely together -- what might have been just
an exchange of lines to be shaped in the editing room became a real moment, alive and unpredictable, even though the lines
themselves were rarely ever changed.
The screenwriters, Brian Koppelman and David Levien, who wrote "Rounders", were on the set -- at one point I
watched them both watching the video monitors as their lines snapped, crackled and popped in the mouths of Gould and Pacino.
They were grinning like kids.
All movies should be made this way -- almost none ever are. Soderbergh is important for the cutting-edge stuff he does
between his big commercial films -- astonishing experiments like "Bubble", for example -- but in some ways turning
a big high-profile Hollywood production like this into an intimate, humane collaboration is even more radical.
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