Development and writing
The screenplay for the 1972 version of The Getaway was written by Walter Hill. In 1990, Hill's wife, Hildy Gottlieb, had left her job as an agent to head up Alec Baldwin's production company, Meadowbrook Productions. Hill and Baldwin were friendly – at one stage they were going to make The Fugitive together before being replaced by Andrew Davis and Harrison Ford. According to Baldwin, Hill always wanted to film his original script of The Getaway before it had been changed by Sam Peckinpah. Hill was going to direct with Baldwin starring, then, according to Baldwin, "they got into a hassle about the budget and Walter split to go do Geronimo, and he gave everybody his blessing to go do it without him."
Producer David Foster approached Roger Donaldson to direct in Hill's place. Donaldson originally said no as he did not want to do a remake. Then he read the script "and I really liked it," said Donaldson. "And then I rented the original movie, which I'd never seen, and I liked that, too. I saw how I could put my own stamp on it. There were lots of things about it that appealed to me: I love the Southwest, I love the genre of the road movie, I love a thriller and I like the sort of underlying conflicts of the relationships in that movie."
Baldwin said he "always wanted to do a movie that required what I consider to be movie acting, which is that it's not what you do, but what you don't do. It's all about small, and less and less. An action film is a perfect opportunity for that. There's always a steady flow of action films – it's the most mined material – but what distinguishes an action movie is the acting."
Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger had fallen in love while making The Marrying Man together and he asked her to play the female role Carol McCoy. Basinger said she "loved" the original movie "a lot. It had this cult status. But my first reaction to Alec's suggestion was no." She went back to the original Jim Thompson novel to see if there was a more substantial theme to the story.
I saw that this theme could be summed up in one word – trust.... And I said to Alec, "See what we have here. This is all about trust. These two people can't trust anybody or anything. They can't trust their colleagues. They seemingly can't trust each other. And when mistrust occurs, it breeds violence and havoc."
Basinger says her views were incorporated into rewrites of the script by Amy Jones. She liked them and accepted the role. Basinger:
There's something going on between us here that was never developed between Steve McQueen and Ali McGraw [sic]. The movie asks all sorts of questions about our relationship. I'd said to Alec that if we did this together, I wanted it to be more of a partnership movie than the first. I wanted to see where that aspect went, with the movie being more about the relationship and the violence running second – although there's plenty of that in the movie... Let's not kid ourselves. This movie is made for a commercial audience. It's a very difficult question for me because I don't like violence. But at the same time, how else are we going to make a film that faithfully mirrors the truth out there in our society? This is a story about misfits in a world of misfits. It's a story about trust and mistrust and how mistrust breeds violence.
Baldwin and Basinger were collectively paid $4 million to star in the film together.
