David Levien & Brian Koppelman: Ocean’s Two

Longtime friends and writing partners go all in with Ocean's Thirteen

by Kevin Canfield | Published July 31, 2007

(Page 2)

MM: How do you guys write? Is it a real collaborative process, where you’re constantly talking, etc.

DL: Yeah, we write in the same room, we talk out the outline, type it up, talk it back and forth, then we go to scenes the same way. We say the dialogue back and forth a lot.

BK: We take stuff home and always make notes separately and then we’ll come in in the morning and one of us will say: “I re-read the thing last night. Let’s look at this scene and change it.” But then when we do those changes, we run it through the same process; nothing goes in until both of us go through it together.

MM: When you go your separate ways and make your notes, do you often find you’ve found the same hole, the same problem in the script?

DL: Very often, yeah.

BK: It’s rare that one of us will come in and the other guy will think ‘He’s crazy.’ Like most writers, we basically always think we’ve done a bad job as we’re going and just want to make it better. So when one guy comes in with an idea on how to improve it, the other guy is usually ready to go.

DL: And if Brian’s willing to just write a draft on his own, I support it.

BK: It’s funny, because I feel the same way. (laughs)

DL: We’ll keep the money split the same, but if you could just do the work, that would be fantastic.

MM: As writers, who brings what to this relationship?

BK: We’ve been best friends since we were little kids. I had just turned 16 and David was 14 when we first met, so we have so many common experiences… and a similar aesthetic. Over the years, maybe as grown-ups, we’ve each developed different interests, but a lot of the root stuff is similar.

MM: Was the career path always film?

DL: It was for me. After college I went to Los Angeles, and I was working in the movie business before I was writing. I was an assistant in development and stuff like that for a couple of years before I ended up back in New York. I’ve also written novels, so maybe that could be considered slightly different, but it’s been mainly film from the time we wrote our first script together, which was Rounders in 1995.

BK: When I was in college I discovered the singer-songwriter Tracy Chapman. I produced her demos, helped get her first record deal and made that first album, [with the hit] “Fast Car.” I always loved movies and music and books, and knew that I would live in one of those worlds—or a couple of those worlds. But for eight or nine years, I was in the music business… I got to work with some incredible artists, but never lost this desire to be a writer and a filmmaker. Finally, I sort of reached a point where I knew I had to either do it or really be pretty miserable. So David and I ended up committing to writing Rounders together.

MM: When did either of you—or both of you—know you’d made it as a moviemaker?

DL: The first sort of “you know you’re really in it” moment was the first day of shooting of Rounders. It was four in the morning underneath the Manhattan Bridge, and we showed up wearing our New York City clothes—wool overcoat, little shoes and all that stuff. It was winter, so we immediately started freezing to death.

We rode up and saw 50 trucks and trailers and generators and cameras and lights, and Matt Damon was ready to shoot. We were like, ‘Wow! We’re in the movie business now.’

BK: I remember waking up and being so excited about it. It was freezing in New York—it was December 15. I thought: I’m going to a movie set, so I have to be cool. I wore these cool leather boots, only it was fucking cold and my feet froze through, and I had a thin leather jacket on. I remember calling my wife and asking: “Can you bring mittens and some big, comfy boots?”

Another welcome-to-the-business moment: As we were writing Ocean’s Thirteen, Jerry Weintraub kept saying things like, “Wait until you guys come on a movie set. Wait until you guys see what it’s like.” I kept saying, ‘Jerry, we created a TV series, we’ve made six movies, we produced The Illusionist. We’re in the movie business!’

But I remember the first day we were on the set of Ocean’s Thirteen: We walked in and we were on a platform and a helicopter was going to land. We were working with Matt Damon and Ellen Barkin, and then George Clooney showed up to say hi to everybody. As everyone was crowding around Clooney I saw this stunt helicopter being brought in. I remember looking at Jerry and going, ‘Oh, I realize now.’

MM: How much did the script change along the way? Did you find yourselves rewriting on the fly?

BK: Soderbergh is the only director we’ve ever seen who is caught up to picture from an editing perspective every day. He shoots and then edits the material from the day before. So what was great is you would shoot a scene and then you could watch it the next day—a good version of it—and then say, ‘Okay, if that’s the way that scene is going to play, then do we need to shift something later to make it matter or to answer it?’

DL: There was some ad-libbing, but they stuck to the script pretty well. There’d be these surreal moments on-set when they’d call us over. It would be Steven Soderbergh—Academy Award winner and multiple nominee, Palme d’Or winner—and George Clooney—another Academy Award winner—and they’d look at us and go, “We need a line here!” We’d look at each other and kind of go: ‘Well, why don’t you guys come up with it? You’re the geniuses.’ MM

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TAGS brad pitt brian koppelman david levien george clooney ocean's 11 ocean's 13 screenwriter script steven soderbergh writer

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