Hotels on Screen: The Bellagio in Ocean’s Eleven  

Few hotels in the world have received such a stylish cinematic love letter as the Bellagio did with the 2001 heist film, Ocean’s Eleven. The on-screen romance begins with an establishing shot of Las Vegas, when the camera glides from the dark Nevada desert across the famed Strip and its brilliantly lit facades.

Suddenly, the glowing, golden interior of the Bellagio fills the shot like a fabulous Italian mansion. Both on-screen and off, its scale is astonishing: With 36 stories containing 3,005 rooms, the hotel towers over an eight-acre artificial lake where 1,000-odd fountains shoot streams of synchronized water 460 feet into the air. And for the next two hours of the film, the A-list cast led by George Clooney, Elliott Gould, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, Andy Garcia and Julia Roberts wisecrack their way through the resort, showcasing its attractions, and firmly putting it on the international pop-culture map as the last word in cool and glamour.

Play Video

Costing $1.6 billion to build, the Bellagio received lavish attention from the press as the world’s most expensive resort when it opened in 1998, but the Hollywood imprimatur has proved just as enduring. “The Bellagio had a lot of momentum before the film,” says Alan Ferguson, who was the hotel’s senior vice president for public affairs at the time. “But Ocean’s Eleven had a profound impact by validating its sense of style, swagger and elegance, and locking that in.” There have been changes to the Bellagio in the years since, he adds, including the addition of the 33-story, 923-room Spa Tower in 2004 and plush new restaurants. “But Ocean’s Eleven made the hotel timeless. The movie is just as thrilling and stylish today as it was when it was first released. You can watch it over and again, and you can still recognize things.”

Even so, the choice of the Bellagio as the film’s setting was not as inevitable as it might seem today. “It was a very Vegas story,” explains Ferguson. Through a mutual friend who managed the circus entertainers Siegfried and Roy, the film’s producer, Jerry Weintraub, was introduced to Steve Wynn, the Bellagio’s high-profile owner. (It is now owned by MGM Resorts International.) The pair hit it off and shook on the location. “It was new, it had buzz, and it was gorgeous. Really, it made sense, if you think about the characters in the movie.”

Bellagio

3600 Las Vegas Blvd S, Las Vegas, NV, 89109

Book now

Book now

From the start, the shoot was one of the easiest Ferguson has ever worked with, he says. “The director, Steven Soderberg, was incredibly well-organized. The whole walk-through to inspect the shooting locations—and there were 10 of them!—only took about 90 minutes. He was very decisive. Soderberg said, ‘OK, we do this here, we do that there. Let’s move on!’ But when you watch the finished scenes, they are actually very complex.”

Today, the Bellagio is just as theatrical as it appears in the film, starting with the lavish Italianate exterior inspired by the hotel’s namesake village in Lake Como. Its opulent interiors, which evoke the art-filled palaces of Imperial Rome, also remain.

When Rusty Ryan (played by Pitt) wanders the marble-floored lobby, we catch glimpses of the brilliantly colored, hand-blown glass flowers of Fiori di Como by artist Dale Chihuly blazing overhead on the ceiling—the world’s largest glass sculpture. The casino gaming floor scenes were all shot on site. And one of the most visually striking scenes in the film is where George Clooney sits down with Julia Roberts in the softly lit Picasso restaurant. “Nothing was moved, nothing was added,” Ferguson says. “The crew just came in with their cameras and shot it. There were still diners at the nearby tables! And if you go there today, it’s just the same,” he adds. “I know their table—it’s still one of my favorites!”

But the film’s faithfulness to reality ends the moment the action proceeds behind gaming floor doors for the robbery scenes. The spectacular, hi-tech interior workings of the casino were all invented in a Hollywood studio with a dash of sci-fi fantasy, Ferguson says. “[Producer] Jerry Weintraub assured us: ‘Don’t worry, we’re not going to film in your accounts room or your cash vaults. We’re going to make that up! We’re going to create our own world.’”

Ocean’s Eleven also helped revive the mystique of Las Vegas as a destination, which had suffered since its peak chic era of the 1950s. In fact, it was a remake of a 1960 heist film starring Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., and others in the Rat Pack. The 2001 Clooney-Pitt version effortlessly updates the era’s glamorous vision of the city.

The last scene, where the gang gathers outside the Bellagio after the heist to watch the choreographed fountains dance to Debussy’s romantic melody Clair de Lune is one of the most memorable scenes of the movie. “It’s a terrific final image to leave the audience with,” says Ferguson. “It captures the over-the-top quality of Las Vegas, but also the emergence of a very elegant, high-end hotel culture. At the Bellagio, you can get a beautiful room, great service and amenities—and they’re available to anyone, not just high rollers.”

Tony Perrottet

Writer

Tony Perrottet is a contributing writer for Smithsonian magazine, a regular contributor to the New York Times and WSJ Magazine, and the author of six books including ¡Cuba Libre!: Che, Fidel and the Improbable Revolution that Changed World History (Penguin Random House)