Porque o cineasta não queria os avanços tecnológicos que estavam disponíveis em 2014. Ele também queria capitalizar a mania do Y2K.
O diretor e roteirista Scott Frank explica isso em uma
Where did the decision to set the movie in 1999 come from?
Well, there were a couple of reasons. I always knew I wanted to set it in the past because I didn’t want to set it in a time where cell phones are so ubiquitous. Thrillers have become all about technology and using technology. That seemed, to me, not so interesting. And what I liked about the story was that there were still pay phones on the street and people were still using them, but it was on the cusp of something. To that end, when I went back to it a couple of years ago to start thinking about directing it, I realized that the great thing about Y2K was that everybody was afraid of the wrong thing, as the character says in the script now. Everybody was worried about getting stuck in elevators or worrying about our computers exploding or whatever we thought would happen, and I thought it seems quaint now by comparison to what happened after that. So I thought that was a great opportunity to set something in New York, when New York was doing really well and crime was down and everybody was fat and happy and content, meanwhile, around the world, there was something that we weren’t paying attention to. I looked at these two bad guys as a harbinger and I thought it was the perfect time, if you did it subtly and didn’t make a big deal out of it. And it was a great way for me to organize myself creatively around the movie that way.