Walter Hill

Born on January 10, 1942, in Long Beach (California), Walter Hill was an asthmatic child who missed several years of school. Due to his sick nature, he spent a lot of time alone, which led him to become fond of comics and radio serials. During his youth, he worked as a laborer on an oil well and in construction, before graduating with a degree in history from Michigan State University.

Selected as a Directors Guild Fellow, he serves as second assistant director on two films starring Steve McQueen , Norman Jewison ‘s The Thomas Crown Affair and Peter Yates ‘ Bullitt . When the famous actor bought the rights to Jim Thompson ‘s novel The Getaway , he hired Hill to write the adapted screenplay along with Peter Bogdanovich . But the latter was eventually fired by McQueen, so Hill had to write alone ( Sam Peckinpah took over the direction).

In the early 1970s, Walter Hill was responsible for other notable scripts for films like Down to the Water and Mackintosh’s Man , starring Paul Newman . In both cases he had run-ins with directors and producers, with whom he could not agree. He was somewhat disenchanted with his work as a screenwriter, so he concentrated on becoming a director again.

After meeting producer Lawrence Gordon, with whom he unexpectedly (and unusually in his career) managed to get along perfectly, he proposed to write and direct The Wrestler (1976) , his debut feature, with Charles Bronson as a fighting boxer. illegal. He blamed the influence of John Boorman ‘s Point Blank , which had an impact on Walter Hill , due to its chaotic jumps in time. “I found it to be a very free structure, which reminded me of a Japanese haiku.” explained the filmmaker, who also imitated this style in his review of the script for Alien, the eighth passenger , finally discarded, although Hill appears credited in the Ridley Scott filmas a producer, as well as on the sequels, and provided ideas for Aliens, the return and Alien 3 . The chronological editing is also one of the hallmarks of Driver , his second work as a director, which he wrote with Steve McQueen in mind. But he refused to shoot another car chase film, so he was replaced by Ryan O’Neal , who plays a specialist in driving for bank robbers.

As a filmmaker, Walter Hill seemed to have picked up the baton from the aforementioned Sam Peckinpah , due to his raw, realistic and parsimonious violence, but he also showed the influence of European directors such as Jean-Pierre Melville and Sergio Leone . With The Warriors (The masters of the night), about street gangs, there was some controversy, since it caused riots even inside the cinemas, while the authorities did not like that it revealed police deficiencies. As seen in the film, in New York the gangs were rampant and imposed their own law, and even offered a totally real fact from the mouth of a character: “gang members outnumber policemen five to one.” Although it was immediately withdrawn from theaters due to the scandal, it became a cult film that inspired numerous half-baked imitations.

Walter Hill made his first foray into the western with Legendary Outlaws , his most similar work to Peckinpah’s cinema, with three families of actor brothers (the Carradines, the Keachs and the Quaids) embodying as many clans of criminals (the Youngers, the Millers and the James). In essence, it was a fairly classic film. “The decline of the western came when directors wanted to use it to explain psychoanalytic theories,” Hill later explained in an interview. “However, they work best when they work with moral material and when they respond to the patterns of Greek tragedy.” It did not get the expected impact, but Walter Hill swept the box office with Limit: 48 hours , designed for Clint Eastwoodand Richard Pryor , eventually replaced by Nick Nolte and Eddie Murphy , as a cop and the convict who is given parole to help him solve the case. Mix between comedy and action, it also shows criminals as the owners of the city in certain contexts. At that time, the director was considered one of the great promises of the 70s, with prospects of becoming one of the greats, like Michael Cimino , Peter Bogdanovich and William Friedkin , who for various reasons have been forgotten.

Unfairly, Hill hit the biggest bump of his career with Streets of Fire , a comic-style rock adventure film for young audiences, where a heroic individual tries to save the singer from a group kidnapped by bikers. The introduction of the beginning of this “rock and roll fable” (as Hill defined it), supposes a whole declaration of principles. “I’ve tried to make what I would have considered a perfect movie in my teens. I’ve put in all those rare ingredients that I still like: fancy cars, kissing in the rain, trains in the middle of the night, high-speed chases, fights between gangs, rock musicians, motorcycles, jokes in the middle of critical situations and questions of honor”.

Married in 1986 to producer Hildy Gottlieb, the couple have two daughters, Miranda and Joanna. He did not fare so well professionally at the end of the decade, forced at times to direct spin-offs such as The Great Waste , a dull comedy at the service of the pushy Richard Pryor , whose character is forced to spend a million dollars on less than one day. After the irregular drama Crossroads – with Ralph Maccio as a renowned bluesman aspiring who must defeat one of the best guitarists in the world in a musical duel – he reunites with Nick Nolte in the uninteresting Betrayal Without Limit and in 48 more hours, deteriorated and late sequel to his best-known film. Hill only enjoyed some success again with Danko: Red Heat , where Arnold Schwarzenegger played a Soviet policeman, forced to form a tandem with an American ( James Belushi ). Although the combination of humor and action made it clear to some extent who was behind the cameras, the truth is that it had the stamp of a commercial blockbuster, along the lines of the greatest hits of the time of the muscular Austrian.

More recognition was given to Handsome Johnny , with Mickey Rourke as a misshapen gangster planning a major heist. But it had very little impact, like the westerns Geronimo, a Legend and Wild Bill . Nor did almost anyone see the entertaining The Last Man , a curious ‘remake of remakes’, since it covers Yojimbo , by the Japanese Akira Kurosawa , which in turn was almost completely inspired by the text “Red Harvest”, by the American Dashiel Hammett, and which it had also given rise to A Fistful of Dollars , by the Italian Sergio Leone .

But the biggest fiasco of Walter Hill ‘s career was the science fiction film Supernova , with a more or less comfortable budget (60 million euros were no small feat in the year 2000). During filming, the director had fierce confrontations with the producers over the direction the film should follow, and because he incomprehensibly needed more money, which forced him to reduce the planes of spaceships or those that required special effects to a minimum. Once finished, the producers did not like it at all, who fired Hill. They hired Jack Sholder ( The Occult ) to trace it, and since they were still not satisfied, they finally called Francis Ford Coppola himself, so the footage went from 140 minutes to 90. Even so, it was a box office hit of epic proportions.

Since the prison-pugilistic thriller Undefeated , from 2002, Walter Hill had not directed for the cinema for a decade, although in this time he has dealt with episodes of the Deadwood series and the Broken Trail miniseries –both from the west– and continues to appear as producer of everything recently shot related to the Alien saga (the unexciting Alien vs. Predator , Alien vs. Predator 2 and the comparatively at least superior Prometheus ). But finally, Walter Hill returns with A bullet in the head , adaptation of the graphic novel “Du plomb dans la tête”, byAlexis Nolent . Its absolute protagonist is Sylvester Stallone , who in recent years has managed to completely resurrect his career from nothing. Will the 72-year-old Hill manage to catch some of the second youth of “Sly”?