Getting Away With It

Getting Away with It is a hilarious, insightful conversation between two visionary directors, Steven Soderbergh and Richard Lester, about the manifold joys and hardships of being a filmmaker. Though a generation apart, both share the infectious passion of cinephilia and have had a wide impact on the world film community. Soderbergh's freshman effort as a writer-director, sex, lies, and videotape, inaugurated a movement in low-budget, independent American film that remains a vital part of contemporary cinema today. Lester's freewheeling films of the sixties and seventies (including the Beatles' movies Help! and A Hard Day's Night; The Knack; How I Won the War and Petulia) helped to create a "new wave" of British film-making. Together they discuss their respective adventures in motion pictures in a free-ranging and sardonically educational dialogue.

Interwoven with this dialogue is a similarly witty and insightful journal by Soderbergh, recounting an extraordinary twelve months in which he rejected the Hollywood system and ventured into "guerilla film-making" with the offbeat projects Schizopolis and Gray's Anatomy, before returning to the Hollywood fray with his acclaimed adaptation of Elmore Leonard's "Out of Sight", starring George Clooney.