It's not hard to see what Sean Connery saw in Entrapment. The hero, Robert MacDougal, is a raffish, debonair type, a loner with a highly developed aesthetic sense who happens to be the world's greatest art thief. 'Mac', as he's nicknamed, also exudes more than a passing air of similarity to a certain secret agent Connery used to play all those years ago.

The veteran Scot, who arrives on the Riviera fresh from his exploits on the devolutionary campaign trail with the Scottish National Party, is in little doubt as to the qualities of the screenplay penned by Ron Bass... "A ripping yarn with wit and an intriguing, romantic element that puts a real sting in the tale," he enthuses. "It's like a Peking Opera - each character has an agenda different from the one they initially appear to have."

Connery developed Entrapment through Fountainbridge Films, the company he runs with Rhonda Tollefson and named, as every fan knows, after the area of Edinburgh in which the star grew up. But although Connery is credited as one of the film's producers, he insists that his work behind the scenes did not hamper his performance in the slightest

"Rhonda looked after the day-to-day nuts and bolts of the production," he explains. "I saw my contribution as producer as keeping up the momentum of filming, and working with director Jon Amiel, the crew and the other actors to maintain a set where everything was enjoyable as much as anything else."

Pitted opposite Mac is Virginia 'Gin' Baker (Catherine Zeta-Jones, fresh from her success in The Mask Of Zorro). She's an insurance investigator who suspects Mac has stolen a priceless Rembrandt, and her pursuit of him leads them all the way from the Highlands of Scotland to Kuala Lumpur, where the action comes to a head on top of the Twin Towers, currently the world's highest building, just as the millennium beckons.

"I do think that the whole idea of the millennium bug will prove to be a paper tiger," says director Jon Amiel. "But we decided that the ultimate heist should take place at a moment of transition and confusion, which mirrors the transition and confusion of the two main characters. While the world is distracted by a giant firework, the thieves strike."

Amiel (pronounced 'ay meal', contrary to various attempts) is a cerebral English literature graduate who began his career directing Shakespearean productions for The Oxford and Cambridge Theatre Company. As such, he is hardly the usual jobbing director you would expect to find helming studio thrillers. He actually inherited the job on Entrapment at short notice when the original director fell out with Connery (and was promptly sacked), and likens the film to the kind of sophisticated comedy-thrillers of the 1950s - films of the standing of Stanley Donen's Charade and Hitchcock's North By Northwest.

Amiel's is one of the most varied careers of any of the directors currently working in Hollywood. Back in the days when he worked for the BBC, he directed Dennis Potter's ground-breaking and controversial TV-drama The Singing Detective. He then went on to make his debut feature, Queen Of Hearts (1989), a feel-good yarn about Italian immigrants in London.

In Hollywood, he has made the Martin Guerre remake, Sommersby, the serial-killer thriller, Copycat, and the Bill Murray comedy, The Man Who Knew Too Little.

Having steadily worked his way through such a variety of relatively mainstream genre movies, Amiel doesn't feel at all embarrassed at being a hired hand and actually seems to enjoy the experience.

"The truth is, Hollywood is much more open-minded, much more willing to accept me as a film-maker than England ever was," he says.

If only people would learn how to pronounce his name. Geoffrey Macnab