Ocean's Eleven - A Little Less Conversation

They couldn’t really do any worse than the original, could they? It would be quite an achievement to make anything as smug, self-centred and completely witless as the Rat Pack vehicle made in 1960 that Ocean’s Eleven (2001) took its name from. Fortunately director Steven Soderbergh’s film isn’t what you’d call a remake. Soderbergh deliberately rejects any references to the rat pack – Danny Ocean, played by George Clooney, and his 11 partners in crime aren’t middle-aged, chauvinistic love rats and they don’t sing either. By emphasising the contrasts in character, any male bonding fest is cleverly avoided, given this is the kind of buddy action caper that usually thrives on it. Fortunately though, the new version has stuck to jazz as the major musical flavour of the score and there’s no doubt that David Holmes’ tunes are an essential character in the film – an Oceans no. 12, before the sequel was even thought of.

It was Nelson Riddle who provided some big band swagger for Sinatra’s playboys who, at the pinnacle of their dinner suited Vegas career, also croon to the songs of Cahn and Heusen while the inevitable bluesy strip-show sax pipes up at any sign of a member of the weaker sex. Indeed, being a heist movie set in Las Vegas is one of few nods to the original. Set in the present day, we’re talking about an entirely different Vegas, an ostensibly cleaned up, corporate Casino Disneyland, next to the original’s hedonistic oasis of showbiz and strippers. So Soderbergh goes for a score of super cool funky jazz, Holmes finding a balance between contemporary beats, sampling and pure acoustic music.

There are however a set of retro kitschy non-originals; but Perry Como and Percy Faith come with an ironic wink while the Elvis song (‘A Little Less Conversation’) introducing the backdrop to the sparkly Las Vegas setting is notably one of the most obscure Elvis cuts – or was at the time (Off the back of the film, Holmes’ Elvis remix became a no.1 hit.) As a former DJ, Holmes has a knack of selecting the right record for the right occasion. Unusually, Soderbergh brought in the Irish-born David Holmes, who was also an in-demand 1990s pop producer, at an early stage of the film production; as well as his DJ experience being vital to his approach as a film composer, Holmes’ “imaginary soundtrack” albums from the period of the late 1990s (a track from this period ‘Gritty Shaker’ makes an appearance in the film as does a reworked version of ‘69 Police’) caught the attention of director Soderbergh and resulted in their first collaboration on Out of Sight (1998).

On this and Oceans Holmes’ score signalled a move towards using sampling in film scores. Holmes sent CDs with source music to the director asking him to request those he wanted to hear in the film. One was the Elvis track and the other Debussy’s ‘Clair de Lune’. Besides appearing in their original form, both received Holmes’ cut and paste treatment on the original score.

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