And the world is like an apple

Director John McTiernan interviewed by Alex Simon, 1999:

Your version of The Thomas Crown Affair is one of the only remakes I've seen that surpasses the original.

John McTiernan: That's very kind, but part of making movies is the ability to capture the time in which they were made. I think the original was a product of its time (1968), so it's not fair to say that the original doesn't hold up by today's standards. The more something is a piece of its time, the [more] it's going to date afterwards. So I think that to say the original is dated is almost a compliment to it. It says that it really captured the era in which it was made, which I think it did. It's funny, if you remade a movie in 1968 that was originally made in 1938, nobody would think twice, because you'd be spanning this chasm that made it another world. Maybe it's because there's such a huge population of baby boomers that still think of 1968 as being a fairly recent time that we don't feel that distance now. When you look at the original now, at the time it was so cutting-edge, and now that sort of high-style cinema verite, which today looks quite theatrical trying to give the illusion that it's real. I wanted to do a remake that wasn't quite a remake, but a compliment to the original, a bookend, a sequel...I don't know what the hell you'd call it. (laughs) I wanted to give a sense that this movie respected that one.

I think the best remakes are the ones that are re-imagined. Literal remakes have never worked.

No, they don't. You take a portion of the story and go with that, then it can work. No one thinks twice of doing Shakespeare productions every year. It's not "We're re-doing MacBeth," because (Shakespeare) is part of our landscape, so the idea that those plays keep getting renewed is perfectly normal. And I think that eventually, people will start doing that with movies, because there's enough of a history of movies now.

The full interview - along with many other movie interviews at the Hollywood Interview.