The Thomas Crown Affair (1968)
I don’t think of The Thomas Crown Affair (1968) as a serious film, but it’s very stylish and I had a lot of fun making it. I see the main theme as that of the outsider. Thomas Crown (Steve McQueen) is a man so rich and smart he’s bored, so he decides to try to outwit big business. He orchestrates what appears to be the perfect bank robbery, and the police and the insurance company fail to find any leads to who is behind it. The insurance company hires Vicky Anderson (Faye Dunaway), an investigator who works principally on intuition. She is successful in finding Thomas Crown, but the situation is complicated when they fall in love.
It’s the only film I’ve ever made that I would consider amoral – essentially, it’s an evil piece because it’s about a man who believes he’s invincible and smarter than everybody else – but I’ve always been attracted to the idea of someone taking on the system.
I couldn’t have made the film without Haskell Wexler, a talented cinematographer who was willing to experiment with innovative techniques such as multiple screens and handheld camerawork. (This was before steadicam.) I also had Hal Ashby as my editor and associate producer before he became a director himself. We all worked tremendously well together – it was a very creative experience.
We started with an 80- or 90-page script by Alan R. Trustman – his first screenplay (until then he’d been working as a lawyer). So it was a simple idea that we expanded upon together using a lot of improvisation. Shooting the film in Boston was an advantage – we were far away from Hollywood and there was no one to bother us.
I carne across the multiple-screen technique for the first time at Expo 67 in Montreal in a film called A Place to Stand – by Christopher Chapman. I thought it was brilliant because it condensed an hour’s worth of film into 17 minutes. I realised that the eye is able to take in more than one image at a time as long as the viewer is not distracted by dialogue. I took Haskell and Hal to Montreal to see Chapman’s film and suggested we use the technique in the opening sequence of ours, in which five people who don’t know each other gather to perform a crime. The technique enables you to convey a tremendous amount of information very quickly we were able to tell the five different stories simultaneously.
I’m always asked about the chess scene. What I remember is the way the scene is described in the screenplay. Something like: “He looks at her. She looks at him. They look at the chess table. He smiles and looks at her and says, ‘Do you play?’ and she says, ‘Try me’.” Trustman then describes what ensues simply as “chess with sex”. So we spent two or three days shooting “chess with sex”. There was no dialogue and the scene was largely improvised. I was able to talk to the actors from behind the camera on close-ups because the shots were so tight they were never in them together. The scene works well because it combines Wexler’s playful photography, Michel Legrand’s sensual music and Ashby’s inspired editing.
The chemistry between Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway was terrific, though they’d never worked together before. In fact Dunaway was not well known at the time; it was before the release of Bonnie and Clyde. She was working off-Broadway, which is where I saw her and thought she’d be right for the part of Vicky Anderson. I asked Arthur Penn, the director of Bonnie and Clyde, to show me some clips to see how she photographed.
McQueen, on the other hand, was not my first choice. I’d worked with him on The Cincinnati Kid in 1965, but I couldn’t see him in this part. For a start, I’d never seen McQueen in a suit and Thomas Crown is a graduate of Dartmouth. But he wanted to play the part badly and convinced me he should have it. He certainly put a lot of energy into preparing for the role – he didn’t like horses, but he learned to play polo because he knew I would insist on getting that scene right, and he worked until his hands bled perfecting a backhand shot, which was the only shot he could do. The dune-buggy scenes were a different matter. He loved playing those scenes.
When it came to editing the flying sequence I showed it to Alan Bergman, Marilyn Bergman and Legrand with ‘Strawberry Fields’ by the Beatles playing over it. I knew they didn’t like to be shown rough cuts with someone else’s music, but I wanted to give them an idea of the feeling I wished to convey. Then they all went away and wrote a remarkable piece of poetry. The song written for that sequence, which became the signature tune for the film – ‘The Windmills of Your Mind’ – was awarded Best Original Song at the 1968 Academy Awards. The music, and particularly that song, is integral to the film.
The ending is the one we always intended to have. I thought it was so clever, the way Crown sets it all up and comes out the winner. You also know that it’s Vicky Anderson’s one opportunity for love, but she loses out because of her betrayal. So the film is also about betrayal, which is a theme I’ve developed in many of my films. The ending was what attracted me to the script – I suspect we are all betrayed at some point in our lives.
— Norman Jewison was talking to Nicola Freeman.