FAQ

Insurance agent Virginia "Gin" Baker (Catherine Zeta-Jones) pretends to be a burglar in order to catch aging master thief Robert "Mac" MacDougal (Sean Connery). They plan and train for the heist of the century, $8 billion to be stolen from the International Clearance Bank (ICB) at the stroke of midnight on Y2K. What they don't plan on is falling in love.

Entrapment is based on a story idea by screenwriters Ronald Bass and Michael Hertzberg. The screenplay was written by Bass and two other screenwriters, William Broyles Jr. and Don MacPherson.

"Y2K" refers to the Year 2000 (2K), when the year changed from 1999 to 2000. At the time, it was feared that this change was going to cause massive confusion to the world's computers, which were mostly set during the 1900s' century and people weren't sure how the computers were going to react when the date suddenly flipped to 2000. The change took place without any major problems because 1) many IT staff worked hard to accommodate the change and 2) many systems did not store years in 2-digit 10-state data stores but altogether numbers of seconds elapsed since a particular date in 32-digit 2-state data stores, and many software two-digit years were merely represented by a given value minus 1900.

That was Gin. She broke into the 70-story high building by dropping from the roof and squeezing through a telescoping window in order to steal a priceless Rembrandt painting that Waverly had insured, and then tried to convince her boss, Hector Cruz (Will Patton), that the entire caper was carried out by Mac. Unknown to Gin, Mac was watching her through the window from a nearby building and simply re-stole the painting from the ground floor where she had dropped it into the mail chute to send on to her buyer Conrad Greene (Maury Chaykin) in Kuala Lumpur.

The vase contained copies of the complete plans for Bedford Castle where Mac and Gin are planning to steal a valuable golden Chinese mask. Exterior shots of Bedford Castle were actually taken at Blenheim Palace in Woodstock, Oxfordshire, England.

That was Duart Castle on the Isle of Mull. To see photos and read about Duart Castle, the ancestral home of the clan MacLean, go to Duart Castle.

Gin and Mac needed two things: (1) a retinal scan from the head director of the bank, and (2) the password. The password turned out to be "Never use a cannon to kill a mosquito". Both of these were provided to Gin by Conrad Greene.

She dropped her parachute, which is why Mac gave her his parachute to use in order to jump down the air vent and make it to the ground safely.

In 1999, the Petronas Twin Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia at 1,483 feet (452 meters) were indeed the tallest buildings in the world based on the US-based Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH), which defines the measurement of a building's height starting at the level of the main entrance and ending at the top of any structural components, including unoccupied spires but does not include antennae, as antennae can be added or removed from the top of a building without changing its structure. As of 2004, however, the honor of tallest building in the world switched to the Taipei 101 in Taipei, Taiwan, measured at 1,670.6 feet (509.2 meters). That honor is again going to pass in 2009 to the Burj Dubai in Dubai, UAE upon its completion at 2,320 feet (707 meters). By contrast, the Sears Tower in Chicago, Illinois, measured by CTBUH standards, stands at only 1,450.58 feet (442.137 meters).