Crown (Brosnan) and Banning (Russo) get away from it all in Martinique. Below, Crown with his previous girlfriend, Anna, played by DKNY model Esther Cañadas.

“You probably can’t get permission to film an art theft in any major museum in the world,” says McTiernan. “They have huge security systems and they’re very secretive about how they operate. They also can’t insure valuable art works against potential damage from a film crew working around them with smoke effects and sprinkler systems going off. So we had no choice but to make our own museum.”

What you see in the movie, as Brosnan goes in to carry out his coup, is the outside of the Metropolitan Museum, followed by the entrance hall of the New York Public Library, followed by a huge museum set lovingly created by production designer Bruno Rubeo in a studio in Yonkers. The actual Monet which Crown steals, meanwhile, was recreated - along with 200 other works exhibited in the Museum - by a group of perfectly legal art forgers called Troubetzkoy Ltd who are based in Paris and count movie companies among their major clients.

But stealing paintings is basically a pretext in the 1999 Thomas Crown Affair. Brosnan, St Clair, McTiernan and writers Leslie Dixon and Kurt Wimmer have shifted the balance from crime-thriller to romance. Or, if you prefer to think of it that way, they have brought the sub-text from the chess game right out onto the surface. “When I watched the original Thomas Crown Affair,” says St Clair (a UCLA graduate who had worked in film production for over a decade before linking up with Brosnan), “I thought, ‘This character is Pierce: he could play this.’ We both thought it would be a wonderful challenge to incorporate the themes and conflicts of the old movie into something contemporary and original.”

So Dixon - whose background is in romantic comedy, with such titles as Outrageous Fortune, Mrs Doubtfire and the upcoming Madonna/Rupert Everett movie The Next Best Thing to her credit - was teamed up with action specialist Wimmer (Sphere) to adapt the original screenplay. That was by Al Trustman, who had drawn on his Boston banking background to write The Thomas Crown Affair Mark 1, and who counts that other Steve McQueen classic, Bullitt, among his other credits.

The idea was for Dixon to concentrate on the relationship and Wimmer to deal with the heist. “But it turned out to be a collaboration in the truest sense of the word,” says Wimmer. Brosnan then sent the first draft to McTiernan, with whom he had last worked in 1986 on Nomads, the actor’s third movie and McTiernan’s first. McTiernan committed overnight.

“The original was primarily a caper film,” says the director. “This is a romance. It’s about two hard cases, two people who are very good at being successful singles and very bad at sustained relationships.