Walter Hill
Walter Hill is an American filmmaker, known for his action films and revival of the Western genre.
He has directed such films as The Driver, The Warriors, Southern Comfort, 48 Hrs. and its sequel Another 48 Hrs., ''Streets of Fire and Red Heat, and wrote the screenplay for the crime drama The Getaway. He has also directed several episodes of television series such as Tales from the Crypt and Deadwood and produced films in the Alien'' franchise.
He founded Brandywine Productions with David Giler and Gordon Carroll.
Hill said in an interview that "every film I've done has been a Western", and elaborated in another that "the Western is ultimately a stripped down moral universe that is, whatever the dramatic problems are, beyond the normal avenues of social control and social alleviation of the problem, and I like to do that even within contemporary stories".
Early life
Hill was born in Long Beach, California, the younger of two sons.His paternal grandfather was a wildcat oil driller; his father worked at Douglas Aircraft as a supervisor on the assembly line.
Hill has said that his father and grandfather were "smart, physical men who worked with their heads and their hands" and had "great mechanical ability".
Hill's family had originally come from Tennessee and Mississippi, "one of those fallen Southern families, shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations".
"I got along with both my parents very well," Hill said. "I admired them enormously."
Growing up in Southern California, Hill was asthmatic as a child and, as a result, missed several years of school.
Hill became a film fan at an early age, and the first film he remembers seeing was Song of the South.
He later described his taste as "juvenile", stating: "I liked adventure, westerns, but I liked everything.
Musicals.
But the general, I remember not liking kid movies... still don't, I think that's hung on."
His asthma receded when he was 15 and he began to think about becoming a writer.
He worked in the oil fields as a roustabout on Signal Hill, California, during high school and several more years while in college.
One summer, he ran an asbestos pipe-cutting machine and worked as a spray painter.
As a teenager, Hill contemplated being a comic book illustrator and studied art at the Universidad de las Américas, Mexico City.
"Mexico was as far away as I could get without any money," he says.
He then transferred and majored in history at Michigan State University.
He said that, during this period, he was a particular fan of Ernest Hemingway's writing and came to believe that "the hardest thing to do is write clearly and simply, and make your point in an elegant way".
Upon graduation, Hill was called up for the United States Army in 1964, but childhood asthma saw him ruled ineligible.
This forced him to think about what he wanted to do for a career.
"When you are that age, you think you are going to be in the army two years, it's a huge amount of time.
You don't bother worrying about what you are doing.
Suddenly, this whole thing was upon me."
Through a friend Hill got a job in Los Angeles researching historical documentaries made by a company that was associated with Encyclopædia Britannica.
He began seeing more and more scripts, writing scripts and developed the urge to direct.
Career
Assistant director
After this contract to make historical documentaries finished, Hill worked for a time in the mail room at Universal.He then got into the training program of the Directors Guild of America, which enabled him to work in television as an apprentice.
He observed and worked for over a year on such shows as Gunsmoke, The Wild Wild West, Bonanza and Warning Shot.
"I did a lot of shows for a couple of weeks, they would rotate you through," he says.
Hill wound up as second assistant director on The Thomas Crown Affair in 1968.
He then went on to work as the uncredited second assistant director on Bullitt — "It was my job to set background and also to set it up with the police.
We had to organise every shot so people wouldn't wander out into the middle of the street and be hit...
Every time we did a shot I was scared to death."
In 1969, he was the second assistant director on Woody Allen's mockumentary film, Take the Money and Run, but said he remembers doing very little except passing out the call sheets and filling out time cards. He also worked as a first assistant director on a television advertisement. "I didn't have a shred of desire in those areas," says Hill of assistant directing. "I wanted to work and be around films. I certainly took my duties fairly seriously and all that. I didn't see it as a long term kind of commitment."
Screenwriter
During this time Hill was writing screenplays on nights and on the weekends."I began to read screenplays that were being made, and I hesitate to say this, but I guess I read them and said: 'Christ, I could do that.'" It took him "four to five years to write my first screenplay writing at night, while I still had another day job."
He says one of his earlier works "was intensely personal about a love affair I had. It was terrible, I knew it." It was not until he started writing in a more "structured narrative environment" that he "began to find my voice... I had a hard time finishing scripts. My problem was finding certain character narrative concerns. Once I finished scripts, I almost instantly made a living. Not only made a living, but got them made. From the time I finished them to the time they were getting made, making progress on the trail, that all happened pretty quickly.
Hill later said, "I was very sympathetic and identified with the New Hollywood." But his films "are, or were, rather retro. That is to say, I didn't tackle subjects. I wanted to do genre films."
Hill's first completed screenplay, a Western called Lloyd Williams and His Brother, was optioned by Joe Wizan. It was never made but the script was admired at Warner Bros who asked Hill to pitch some projects. He came up with a detective story, Hickey & Boggs and the studio agreed to finance a draft. "Detective films were very old hat, not the kind of thing a young screenwriter was going to pitch," recalls Hill. "I think they were intrigued, maybe fresh air could be blown into a venerable genre."
Warners liked the Hickey & Boggs script and hired Hill to rewrite the script for The Thief Who Came to Dinner, for which he ended up getting sole credit. Hickey & Boggs was later sold to United Artists and rewritten by director Robert Culp. Hill said he felt the film "had some nice moments, but it was cast much differently than it was written. I wasn't too excited about it."
Meanwhile, Peter Bogdanovich's ex-wife Polly Platt, a film editor, had read Hill's script for Hickey & Boggs and recommended him to co-write The Getaway, which Bogdanovich was going to make with Steve McQueen. Bogdanovich and Hill worked on the script together in San Francisco while Bogdanovich was directing What's Up, Doc? Hill says that Bogdanovich was interested in making the film a more Hitchcock-type film. They had completed 25 pages when they went back to L.A., whereupon McQueen fired Bogdanovich without reading any of their work. Sam Peckinpah came on to direct; Hill started from scratch and wrote his own script in six weeks. The resulting film was a big hit which Hill later described "of the films I wrote, I thought it was far and away the best one, and most interesting." He said the success of the film "was really how I got to be a director; the fact it had done so well put me in line to get a shot."
Hill and Peckinpah got along well and for a time it seemed Peckinpah might direct Lloyd Williams but he decided to make Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid instead. The Thief Who Came to Dinner eventually came out. Walter Hill later said "Warren Oates was very good in the movie—better than the movie was. They cut a lot of things out of the movie they shouldn't have."
Hill went on to write a pair of Paul Newman films, The Mackintosh Man and The Drowning Pool. By Hill's own admission, his work on The Mackintosh Man "wasn't much" and he did it to settle a lawsuit with Warner Bros, with whom he was angry for selling Hickey & Boggs—Warners offered to settle the suit if Hill wrote them a screenplay, giving him the chance to adapt his choice of several novels that the studio owned the film rights to. He picked The Freedom Trap, by Desmond Bagley.
"I wrote a quick script which I was not particularly enamored with myself," Hill said. However it attracted the interest of Paul Newman and John Huston. "One would like to think you are mistaken about the wonders of your work, but I didn't believe it," he said. "That part turned out to be true. I went over to work on the script with Huston. He wasn't very well, I ended up with sole screen credit, but one of the problems is the screen credit is misleading very often. I wrote 90% of the first half, various people wrote the rest. I didn't think it was a very good film. Hill says he never saw the final product, but was told it was "a real bomb".
Producers Larry Turman and David Foster asked Hill to adapt Ross Macdonald's novel The Drowning Pool for Robert Mulligan to direct as a sequel to a previous Newman film, Harper. The producers did not like the direction Hill took with his script—he later estimated only two scenes in the final film were his—so he left the project to write Hard Times for Larry Gordon at Columbia Pictures.
In the early years of his career, Hill set up his own production company, Brandywine Productions, to develop and produce films. A script came to him, Alien, which he optioned and rewrote with his partner, David Giler. Hill and Giler were not credited for their writing work. Hill decided not to direct the film, which became a massive hit.
John Hughes later recalled, "I had been writing scripts for quite a while, but I never really knew what screenwriting was about until I read the script Walter wrote for Alien."