FIVE FACTS FRIDAY: OCEAN'S 8.

#1 CATE AS... CATE

               It’s common news that Sandra Bullock is attached to Ocean’s 8 film project way before the other casts and she was the first to cast as Debbie Ocean, the sister of Danny Ocean from Soderbergh’s Oceans Trilogy. And the next actress cast on after Sandy was Cate and she said yes!

But what you don’t probably don’t know, the original name for Cate’s role is… *drumrolls* CATE!

Yep, I found it shocking. Cate found it sweet and flattering but then she insisted on changing the name.

“We wrote Cate's character Cate and called her Cate in the script. And then Cate, fortunately, wanted to do it, but kind of gently let us know 'Guys, this isn't really appropriate anymore.' She was very sweet, but 'I don't think we should name the character after me' We're like 'Yeah, that's a fair point.'
Sandra Bullock and Cate Blanchett were some of the first cast members approached, with Cate's character Lou even given her real name during the writing process. While this may have helped Blanchett sign on for the role, the name had to be changed before shooting began.” Gary Ross told Cinemablend

Gary Ross probably inspired by Cate’s persona and it was sweet but come on! Lou seems to be a more fitting name for a club owner, Debbie's heist partner and all around a character with the biggest BDE, Lou, which is the female version of Rusty –played by Brad Pitt from the Oceans Trilogy.

"Alright?"

#2 IS IT REAL?

Yes, the Toussaint necklace is real and exists in the real world but the one that used in the movie is not real.

Let me tell you the history of the real Toussaint necklace.

First thing first, it was made for a man. It was created in 1931, having been designed by Jacques Cartier for the Maharaja of Nawanagar. Featuring the 136.25-carat 'Queen of Holland' diamond, the original was described as a 'cascade of colored diamonds' although they appeared to be white colorless diamonds in the film, they were actually blue-white diamonds in real life.

I did say that the necklace is existed in the real world but no longer in its original form. It was dismantled and its diamonds used to create other pieces.

Maharaja of Nawagar with the real Toussaint.

But if it’s made for a man then why is it named the Toussaint?

Well, the necklace was named after Jeanne Toussaint, Cartier's creative director in the 20th century. According to Vogue, “it is called the Jeanne Toussaint necklace in tribute to Cartier’s former creative director, who was key in shaping Maison's identity during the decade.”

How much the necklace worth in real life?

Although we don't know how much it was worth in 1931, it's very possible it would have been worth the $150 million price tag if it existed now.

The Toussaint replica design.

Then how the one in the movie made?

According to Buzzfeed, Cartier made a fake replica necklace out of zirconium oxides and white gold. The piece was created in Cartier's Paris workshop. The Cartier team reported used historical photographs, archival drawings and the original necklace plans to get the likeness right. Since it was made for men, believe it or not, the necklace is actually bigger in real life, so, what they do next is reduced the necklace about 15 to 20 percent in size so it would fit Anne Hathaway. We don’t want our Annie to be engulfed by it.

It took more than 4,200 total hours to create the necklace for the film, and between 10 to 15 artisans were involved in the creation of the replica then flown from Paris to New York to shoot the film.

Cartier, as the exclusive jewelry partner of the film, Cartier was on-site during the filming of the robbery scene at the Metropolitan Museum. For five consecutive nights, jewelry was loaned to those making a cameo with pieces ranging from the Cartier Collection to current high jewelry and watches (For further details on this matter look #4). For two days New York’s Cartier Mansion was converted from salon to cinema set as the 52nd Street store also acts as the set of two major scenes.

"Look at you!"

#3 HAIL SARAH EDWARDS!

 Let’s talk about fashion!

The first question should be how, costume designer Sarah Edwards, pulled it all off “in a matter of weeks”?

First, she created eight distinctive overall looks for the eight main characters. Then, she designed costume changes for each character, as outlined by the film's director and co-writer, Gary Ross. According to Variety, Sandra Bullock had a whopping 65 changes, and Cate wasn't far behind with 45. And for Bonham Carter's character, Edwards even had to design a 50-look fashion show from scratch. 

"This is a flight to nowhere without any peanuts."

Then there’s the MET Gala, all eight women also needed a show-stopping dress, on top of the wardrobe needed for the hundreds of extras appearing as attendees and workers at the event.

"We were kind of pulling it down from the trees, wherever we could get it from. There were certain things that we made, and things we bought, and things we got from vintage or archival sources. It was really all over. … There are not enough clothes in the world to do that movie, for all those women.” Sarah Edwards told Buzzfeed News

But fortunately, she got help from the fashion world.

“We got a lot of help from the fashion world. There were a lot of people really interested in being a part of it.” She told Vogue UK. It was when Cartier came calling, however, that she realized the extent of the cast's influence. The storied jeweler invited Edwards and Hathaway into its archive to select rare stones to complement her costumes as Daphne Kluger.

“We sat in this incredible room and Cartier brought us trays and trays of jewelry. We went through every single one and matched the jewelry to all of Anne’s outfit changes – it was incredible.”

Edwards’s team includes 15 styling assistants on normal days, near 50 for the gala shoot, dressed 300 extras in couture and designer dresses that PR agency KCD helped her source.

“We couldn’t go to Macy’s and buy these dresses. It would never have looked real! We had to have access to authentic designer gowns.”

For the Met Gala looks, Edwards turned to eight top fashion designers and handed them a highly unusual portfolio of demands.

"They weren't just designing a dress for the red carpet or a dress from their collections. We were asking for a dress that would fit our story, our characters, our timeline, [and] the different actions they had to do in the film."

On top of the tight deadline, each dress also had to remain distinctive from the others, from color choices to silhouette — and that's before the finished garments arrived at the set.

"They all came in days before the girls worked in them, and they'd never had them on. It was pretty crazy. There were no other dresses. It was such a big ask for these designers to do this. We were wearing them, no matter what."

And no, Sarah Edwards didn’t even try to dress Anna Wintour for the MET Gala scene and some of the famous cameos weren’t confirmed until the shoot day. And, some were coming red-carpet ready wearing their own personal collections.

Cate wears archival Givenchy jumpsuit and Sandy wears Alberta Ferretti.

#4 HOW THE MET GALA HAPPENED!

There are three things to make the MET Gala happens.

First, you got to get permission from the MET. It’s a museum, after all, filled with historical and valuables artifacts that cost a major fortune. So, how did Gary Ross convinced them?

The filmmakers managed to win over museum directors with their personal enthusiasm — in Ross’s case as a self-described “art-history geek” — and repeated assurances to take good care of the multimillion-dollar artworks around which they would be filming. In the end, the production was allowed to shoot inside the museum for a precedent-setting ten days — but only from 4:30 p.m. to 3 a.m. That meant a high degree of organization as well as meticulous safety measures.

“We’re shooting in the American Wing. We’re around John Singer Sargent’s and Eakins’s paintings. We’re having actual safety meetings about how we’re going to move through this space with our equipment — because no one’s going to want to put a camera through a John Singer Sargent. It’s worth more than the budget for our film! So there were a lot of really rigid protocols that were adhered to. And the Met saw that we took that seriously and that we weren’t going to screw their place up.” says Gary Ross to Vulture.

It was rumored that the fee to film at the MET museum is included a $1 million donation. Well, Pagesix informed so.

Now that he got the museum permission, the second thing to do is getting permission from the creator of the MET Gala, the iconic chief editor of Vogue magazine, Anna Wintour.

“The ball, that’s Anna Wintour’s creation. And this was done from the very beginning with the collaboration, advice and the assistance of Vogue. Anna wanted to make sure the aesthetics were up to her standards. I presented her with the design. She was impressed with and moved by that. And she went, ‘OK, this is up to what we do.’” Ross said in an interview.

To provide an added dose of verisimilitude, the editor permitted filming to take place in Vogue’s New York offices. And the magazine’s real-life director of special events, Edie Kiernan, appears in the movie as herself, depicted hiring Sarah Paulson’s hyper-efficient character to help organize the gala’s logistics.

Both Wintour and Vogue’s European editor-at-large Hamish Bowles intimately invested themselves in making the movie’s fictive Met Ball as convincing as possible.

“We’re letting people into the Met Ball, so she wants to make damn sure it’s a real Met Ball. At the same time, we really need her assistance and understanding of what goes on behind those gates so we can do it accurately.”

In real life, Bowles oversees a key component of the gala every year — the Costume Institute Exhibition — and basically replicated those duties in the service of Ocean’s 8, calling in vintage, medieval-inspired haute-fashion pieces from such top-tier designers as Jean Paul Gaultier, Alexander McQueen, Valentino, and Dolce & Gabbana that are seen on bejeweled mannequins in the movie’s version of the exhibit.

From there, the Temple of Dendur — a massive pharaonic monument comprised of 1,423 stone blocks that was transported from Egypt to the Met in 1967 at the behest of Jacqueline Kennedy — was visually transformed into a replica of the Palace of Versailles for the film (befitting the fictional gala’s theme: European royalty) via computer projection mapping. “That’s not CG,” the director says. “That’s completely practical. Everything you see on the walls was what we saw: being surrounded by Versailles.”

Now that you got the MET and Anna Wintour is all hands-on on recreating the MET Gala, the last thing you need is some famous faces, or maybe a lot of them.

“That’s a necessary part of the Met Ball, right? These people have to be famous. That means your background is famous.” Says Gary Ross.

But how, like HOW in the world Gary Ross gathered all those celebrities as cameos?

The answer is quite simple: by hosting a party!

“We had a whole plan. At the Met Gala, all those people are famous, right? So I have an expectation on me to have famous extras, and that's not easy. We realized these people wouldn't come and be normal extras in a holding pen for eight hours. So we created a club upstairs in The Met in their member's dining room at night. We called it 'Club Oceans' and it was a party of all famous people hanging out, having a good time. And when we needed an extra we'd go upstairs and we'd pull someone out. There were Cartier jewels that they could all put on and wear. There was good food. So they all got to go to a party.” Ross told Cinemablend

“We created a kind of party upstairs for them all. We took the executive dining room and converted it into a kind of club where people could hang out. A bunch of interesting people up there. When they were not on camera, they were at a fun party meeting people. And we had a bunch of Cartier jewels that they could wear if they wanted to and accessorize with, like, millions of dollars’ worth of jewelry. We had to create an environment they wanted to be in. We had a bar and food. And when we needed a shot, we would say, ‘Can you just come downstairs for half an hour?’ ‘Yeah sure!’ Then they’d go back to the party.” Says Ross in another interview with Vogue.

How about the main casts then?

“There are days on a movie when the movie’s bigger than any single one of us. You absolutely felt that. These women have all spent time getting into costume to play parts. But here, they’re getting ready for a ball, putting on a ball gown, and getting ready to go to this party. Then you go to the party and it looks just like the real Met Ball? I think that had an effect on everybody. It puts you in a different headspace.”

And because there are a lot of celebrity cameos, some of them were already red-carpet ready, wearing their own personal collections for the faux MET Gala.

“There were a few. We’d shoot for 12–14 hour days during the night, so in order to get people who have important lives and obligations and busy schedules to come, we would try to just fit them in wherever was convenient. Oftentimes that meant that they would be flying in from somewhere for an hour or something, so we would meet with them and look at what they wear wearing to see if it fit. It was kind of spontaneous.” Sarah Edwards told The Cut.

Olivia Munn, who is one among the celebrity cameos, dressed herself for the cameo. And paid for everything from her own pocket. Well, tbh I’d really like to be in it even though I have to be a buster.

#5 GIRL POWER INDEED!

Hollywood might be the biggest film industry in the world yet some people in the industry still think that a bunch of female casts working together is bad news. In this case, includes three out of eight are Oscar winners. They expect jealousy, catfights and bad blood between them but the Ocean’s 8 casts prove them wrong.

Even some of them are already in a movie together, such as Cate and Sarah Paulson was in Carol together. Anne Hathaway had been starred in Alice in the Wonderland with Helena Bonham Carter and so on.

The casts admitted that they don’t get along well when they first met, but in a normal way, of course, you can’t expect they sitting around a bonfire and sing kumbayah on the first day of filming.

It just came naturally, in one interview Sarah Paulson said that one of the moments that brought them together was that because they filmed around the time the announcement of the US election voting result. And in the Ellen show, Anne Hathaway told the story of how she got so insecure about her body post-maternity yet Rihanna complimenting her on her new body shape and how Sarah Paulson can’t stop singing “Work” whenever Rihanna is around. And Awkwafina said how she’s sick of being asked to rank her castmates because they’re all equally cool in their own way.  “I’m tired of being asked to rank my castmates. I’m sick of Cate Blanchett, man.” Awkwafina said and Cate jokingly responded, “To be honest, it’s mutual.”

              

“I think that the media needs to start talking about this stuff differently. I feel like that might be beginning to change, perhaps with female journalists, because women have been collaborating in the film industry for quite some time, even though the industry is trying to separate us, and silo us. But it’s also the way it’s talked about. And the pressure that’s put on female movies, or that they’re even called female movies.” Cate told Refinery29.

If you’re still asking if they’re friends or not, the casts have a group text chat but Sandra Bullock had them deleted it because she’s afraid that someone might hack their phones.

"Because of all the talk, we've disbanded it. As of last night at the dinner table, we had a little funeral for it. We all got very paranoid about being hacked. What if we lost our iPhones? It was time. It was time to say goodbye." Sandy told USA Today.

They even have their own roles in the group text, according to Sandy; Mindy Kaling was the go-to for GIFs, while Anne Hathaway served "great meme." Awkwafina, meanwhile, gave "great everything. She's one of the funniest human beings, in print and in person."

And then there's Rihanna, who would occasionally chime in with disarmingly witty comments or words of wisdom, according to Bullock, much like she did on set.

“You don't think she's listening because she's very calm. We get very animated around RiRi and all of us want her to see us. But she'll be very calm and all of a sudden, she'll turn and throw something out at you and you're like, 'Oooh.' She's like a sphinx." Bullock says about Rihanna. 

And I bet, Cate is the one who supplies so many “tad naughty” jokes like the one she shared with Jessica Chastain on the GG red carpet.

But on a recent interview with Yahoo during her press tour for her movie Glass, Paulson said that the group text, in fact, is back and active

“I would love to be reunited with all those women. We have still have our exciting text chain going, and we still talk, and all that’s wonderful. But it would be great to have another opportunity to bring it to the screen. And to learn from what we did, and how we could do things even better. That would be great, I would love it.”

And the other thing that brought them together is the ‘crazy hours’ they did to film this movie.

"We worked long hours. We worked 15 hours a day in heels. Half of us have kids, the other half are running major corporations. We were lying in the middle of the floor in a loft in Brooklyn, commiserating, eating meats that Helena (Bonham-Carter) was serving us." Sandy told USA Today.

And Sandy in one interview said that the Oceans men aren’t working as hard as them and they didn’t get the bar like the oceans men got.

So sandy ultimately provide a bottle of Tequila and have a drink with the casts but Cate has a suspicion that Sandy wasn’t drinking at all.

Admitting that juggling multiple professional projects and family lives left the cast "absolutely beat", she also revealed it wasn't unusual for the actresses to sneak in tactical naps on set.

"Cate and I were talking about how I would find her sleeping in the oddest places literally caught up on sleep." Sandy told Harper's Bazaar.

WHO ELSE WISHING THERE'LL BE OCEAN'S 9?

See you on the next post!

- Catewalk