I had shot movies in his Mirage Hotel before so he had a sense of what I would be doing and he trusted me with the reputation of his hotel. In addition, at the time I made our deal, it was owned by Steve Wynn, who is a very dear friend of mine. It's also the most luxurious and the most important hotel in town. 'The reason we selected the Bellagio,' says Weintraub, 'is that it's the prettiest hotel in Las Vegas.

The cast also called the hotel's exclusive private villas home for the duration of their stay in Las Vegas. Of all the luxury hotels on the strip, the one chosen for the major portion of the film was the Bellagio, where the company spent nearly five weeks filming interiors and exteriors. He did an amazing job of pitching the story and pitching us as a group that wasn't going to do them a disservice, either literally by making a mess of their casino or by making a movie that would reflect badly on them. We would have been just another movie trying to gain access. 'Literally,' adds Soderbergh, 'it wouldn't have happened without Jerry. And by the fact that they all had such respect for him. Jerry got us literally millions of dollars worth of production value in Las Vegas alone - simply by knowing the right people. He has this great element of showmanship, which Steven and I don't really have. But we had no idea what a wonderful producer he is. 'We knew he was a producer and also that he had orchestrated all those big music concerts. 'Jerry was the element that Steven and I didn't know about,' George Clooney says. This largesse of cooperation can be explained in two words: Jerry Weintraub. as it turned out, the cooperation that was extended to us by the casinos, Particularly the Bellagio, was unlimited. I've had friends who had worked on films there and knew that normally the hotels only want film companies to shoot between midnight and 6:00 a. 'one of the things that scared me when I read the script was the amount of time that we would have to be shooting on the floor of the casino,' Soderbergh reveals. Las Vegas, with its famous strip lined with luxurious hotels and casinos, became the largest set for the film. Half way through this film I was wondering what I had gotten myself into. 'This is the kind of film technically that people like Steven Spielberg and David Fincher and John McTiernan do with both hands tied behind their back,' Steven Soderbergh says with a laugh.

Oceans 11 the bellagio casino heist