“Damn, I hate being a foregone conclusion.”
Director John McTiernan changed the heist from an armed bank robbery as in the original 1968 Steve McQueen version to an art heist because he felt audiences would be more sympathetic to an unarmed art heist done for a thrill. Faye Dunaway, who plays the psychiatrist in the remake, played Catherine Banning in the original. Rene Russo performed the first nude scenes of her acting career as Catherine Banning. Her line, “You’re not boring, I’ll give you that,” was her ad lib. The idea of unusual heat in the museum rendering thermal cameras useless came from McTiernan’s earlier movie, Predator (1987). In that movie, McTiernan’s actual thermal cameras began to fail when the jungle temperature reached over 90 degrees. The Shelby Mustang that Thomas Crown drives on Martinique was originally intended to be used by Arnold Schwarzenegger ’s character in Last Action Hero (1993), another McTiernan film, and was borrowed from the director’s private collection for this film. Crown’s watch is a Jaeger-Lecoultre Reverso, but the logo was hidden because Pierce Brosnan had an exclusive deal with Omega watches. The New York Metropolitan Museum of Art had refused permission to film in their interior, so they shot inside the main New York Public Library instead. The two Claude Monet paintings used in the film are not owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Thomas Crown Affair was the first of two film remakes that John McTiernan made from Norman Jewison movies. The other one is Rollerball (2002).
