Welcome to the Deep Dive. Today we're focusing
on a filmmaker whose work really defined action
cinema for, well, half a century. Yet his name,
it often kind of resides in the shadow of some
of his contemporaries. Right. We are talking
about Walter Hill. He's the architect of these
gritty, stylish classics like The Warriors, 48
H 'ers, and maybe the guy who, more than anyone
else, really structurally shaped the whole Alien
franchise. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Hill is just
a magnificent study in artistic singularity.
He's one of those rare directors in modern Hollywood
who stayed, you know. uncompromisingly loyal
to a specific aesthetic. Even when that aesthetic
led to, well, some colossal box office failures,
he's kind of the quiet master, you know? His
films seem simple, but they're relentlessly intense.
Deceptively simple, yeah. And the key thing we're
unpacking today, the thesis that seems to govern
his whole career, it comes from Hill himself.
He stated quite clearly that every film I've
done has been a Western. And that's the crucial
lens, isn't it? What's fascinating is his definition
of a Western. It has almost nothing to do with
horses or, you know, six shooters. Right. He
sees the Western as fundamentally a stripped
down moral universe. He means a world where the
conflicts, the problems, they exist beyond the
normal avenues of social control. It's about
what happens when the rules break down. Okay,
so that sets our mission statement for this deep
dive. We're going to look at his biography, his
films, his interviews, his own notes, really,
to trace how this moral universe evolved. Whether
he's directing a buddy cop film set in the 80s
or... you know, an actual historical Western.
That structural framework, it stays the same.
It really does. It's a journey into how this
unique writing style, this relentless focus on
genre, allowed one filmmaker to navigate, well,
the really volatile landscape of Hollywood. He
generated massive hits and also some truly controversial
but maybe magnificent failures, too. And that
longevity that's really relevant for you, the
listener, he'll prove that sticking to your guns,
genre purity, a clear artistic voice, even one
that sometimes tanks commercially, can keep you
working. And eventually it can earn you the highest
honors. We're talking Emmy wins, the Writers
Guild's Laurel Award. It's quite the career arc.
OK, so let's unpack this. Let's start right at
the foundation. His early life, Walter Hill,
born January 10th, 1942, Long Beach, California.
How does a young kid from California end up with
this intense focus on like solitary narrative?
Well, it starts, ironically, with his health.
Hill had severe, really crippling asthma as a
child. Right. It was so bad he actually missed
several years of school. And this wasn't just
physical. It created this kind of enforced solitude.
Intellectual imaginative solitude. So he spent
a lot of time alone. He said it himself, didn't
he? That the asthma made him profoundly comfortable
being alone. And that led to, his words, a tremendous
amount of reading at an early age. He wasn't
getting stimulation from playing with other kids.
He was getting it from stories. Exactly. He read
constantly, listened obsessively to the radio,
became, and this is his phrase, utterly besotted
with daytime serials. He realized this solitude
let him live in this imaginary world. He got
comfortable with abstract ideas dominated by
stories, narrative and characters. And that comfort
with abstraction, that singular focus, that becomes
the absolute defining feature of his screenwriting
later on. So lean. So archetype driven. And that
solitary nature, it shaped his early film taste,
too, which is pretty revealing. He liked adventure
films, westerns, musicals, things with clear
structure, clear morality. Right. But he explicitly
disliked kid movies. Seems like he rejected sentimentality
in favor of pure drama even then. The very first
film he remembers seeing, Song of the South,
the Disney one from 46. Controversial now, but
that was his first memory. And you also can't
ignore the blue collar roots. The family background
that grounded him in a world of physical work
of stoicism. Oh, OK. And that feeds directly
into the kinds of heroes he champions later.
You know, the working class guy who relies on
skill, not talk. His paternal grandfather was
a wildcat oil driller. His father supervised
at Douglas Aircraft. And he admired them. He
called them smart, physical men who worked with
their heads and their hands. And he didn't just,
like, admire it from afar. He lived it. During
high school and college, he actually worked on
the oil fields on Signal Hill as a roustabout.
Yeah, tough work. He also ran an asbestos pipe
cutting machine, worked as a spray painter. These
are intensely physical, manual jobs. That physicality
gave him a certain grounding, for sure. But...
His ambition, it was artistic. He actually thought
about being a comic book illustrator for a bit.
Studied art down at the Universidad de las Americas
in Mexico City. Mexico City, why there? He said
it was as far away as I could get without any
money. That kind of practical, decisive choice,
wanting distance, independence, that feels very
Walter Hill, doesn't it? It does. But the academic
path, that shifted eventually. He majored in
history at Michigan State. Seems like a bit of
a detour, but maybe not. This is where his writing
philosophy starts to form, apparently heavily
influenced by literary figures, especially Hemingway.
Oh, the Hemingway influence is huge. He wasn't
just reading him for pleasure. He was studying
the prose. He wanted to, uh... Write clearly
and simply and make your point in an elegant
way. Clarity, simplicity, elegance. Exactly.
That's the intellectual foundation for the whole
haiku style that would make him famous later.
It's all about stripping narrative down to its
absolute bare essentials. So he graduates, can't
join the army because of the asthma, suddenly
has to figure out, okay, how do I make a living
telling stories? Heads to Hollywood. What was
the plan? Well, he took the traditional route.
The gritty way in. Started doing research for
historical documentaries. And then crucially,
he took that classic Hollywood advice. Get a
job in the mailroom. Right. The mailroom at Universal.
Yeah. Someone told him it was a good way to meet
people. He wasn't expecting a handout. He was
just trying to work his way into the system.
And from the mailroom, he gets into the Directors
Guild of America training program, which sounds
pretty demanding. That was his real film school,
right? An apprenticeship on high pressure TV
sets in the late 60s. Absolutely. He was an apprentice
assistant director observing and working on the
bedrock of American genre TV. We're talking Gunsmoke,
Bonanza, The Wild Wild West. Wow. He was learning
hands on the economy of storytelling you need
for TV. Efficiency, clarity. It's a perfect match
for that Hemingway inspired approach he was developing.
And he moved to features pretty quickly. Second
assistant director on The Thomas Crown Affair
in 68. Then uncredited second A .D. on Bullet.
Also 68. That bullet job that gives you a real
sense of the adrenaline and chaos he was seeing
firsthand. His job was logistics, setting background
for the street shots, coordinating with the police,
making sure nobody got hurt during those high
-speed chases. He admitted he was scared to death
during every single shot. So you've got this
academic guy, the history major, raised on quiet
reading, suddenly thrown into the middle of a
massive San Francisco car chase, genuinely terrified.
You have to wonder how much of that raw adrenaline,
the chaos, calculation of risk fed into how he
wrote action later. Oh, definitely. That experience
must have cemented the difference between writing
about action and filming it. He learned action
isn't abstract. It's logistics. It's risk. It's
immediate consequences. But here's the interesting
part. Even with that invaluable experience, he
didn't want to be an assistant director long
term. Really? Yeah. He said he wanted to work
and be around film. Sure. But. He didn't have
a shred of desire to keep being an AD. His focus
was always on writing and directing his own stuff.
Okay, so that's the key transition. He's doing
this grueling AD work, but he's also spending,
what, four or five years writing screenplays
at night? His first attempts, he said, were too
personal and terrible. What was the click? What
shifted him from writing terrible scripts to
finding success? Structure. It was all about
structure. He realized success wasn't going to
come from navel gazing, but from imposing a clear,
rigid framework. The lightbulb moment came when
he started writing within genre films, working
in a more structured narrative environment. He
understood the rules of the Western, the noir,
the crime thriller. And that structure gave him
the discipline his writing needed. And once he
found that genre focus, things moved fast. His
first proper Western script, Lloyd Williams and
his brother. it got optioned right away never
made but still right But the big break, the one
that really launched him, was The Getaway in
1972. Yeah, he was brought in to co -write it.
Then Peter Bogdanovich got fired. Sam Peckinpah
came in. Hill saw his chance. Basically rewrote
the entire script from scratch in like six weeks
to fit Peckinpah. Intense pressure. And he called
that specific draft far and away the best one
of the films he'd written. It's massive success
with Steve McQueen and Peckinpah. He said, that
was really how I got to be a director. It proved
he could deliver. Pure genre under fire. But
that screenwriting phase also taught him some
hard lessons about compromise. Like in 73, he
wrote The Macintosh Man, basically just to settle
a lawsuit with Warner Bros. He was pretty blunt
about it. Admitted he wrote a quick script, wasn't
very good. Said he never even saw the final film.
Heard it was a real bomb. That must have been
a harsh intro to the reality of being a writer
in Hollywood. Your words are just the starting
point. And we see it again on The Drowning Pool
for Paul Newman, right? He figured only maybe
two scenes of his original script survived in
the final 75 film. Exactly. And that experience,
seeing his carefully crafted work get diluted
or just thrown out by the studio machine, probably
reinforced his instinct to make his writing as
lean and essential as possible. Right. Like if
they're going to mess with it anyway. Might as
well just give him the absolute spine, the core
structure. Much harder to break that. So connecting
this back to his love of simplicity, the screenwriting
struggle, it really forged his style. It wasn't
just what he wrote, but the revolutionary how.
Which brings us to the defining thing about his
aesthetic. The spare universe, that haiku approach.
Yes. And the specific catalyst for this was reading
Alexander Jacob's screenplay for John Borman's
Point Blank. Hill said reading that script was
an absolute revelation. Just showed him how little
you actually needed to write to convey huge amounts
of drama and action. And he just ran with it,
developed this extremely spare, almost haiku
style, for stage directions and dialogue. Applied
it ruthlessly, hard times, the driver, the warriors,
and famously, that uncredited rewrite of Aliens.
And just so people understand what that means
for a script, a typical writer might put, he
pauses, thinking about his past mistakes and
the challenge ahead, before slowly, deliberately
picking up the gun. Hill, using his haiku style,
would probably write something like, he stops,
waits, picks up the gun. Maybe three lines max.
The genius there is it forces the director, the
actor, everyone to internalize the emotion. There's
no description of the feeling. The feeling comes
purely from the action, the character's position
in the scene. It's pure genre. Movement, consequence,
not psychology. And speaking of massive influence.
Yeah. the alien franchise and that's a great
sort of uncredited story of walter hill's writing
career he co -founded brandywine productions
with david giller and gordon carroll they essentially
built the engine for one of sci -fi's biggest
ips brandywine optioned the original alien script
which was basically kind of a b -movie monster
flick right pretty much hill and giller rewrote
it fundamentally now They didn't get writing
credit because of some WGA arbitration thing,
but they got producer credits and their structural
changes were absolutely monumental. What were
the key changes? They moved it from being just
monster runs loose on spaceship to a really tense
character driven survival story. And crucially,
they made Ripley the main hero. The original
script had several male leads kind of competing.
Hill and Gidler streamlined the cast, elevated
Ripley, made her the backbone. They applied that
sparse haiku style to action horror. And the
tension, it comes precisely from that economy,
what you don't see, what you don't know. And
the impact was huge and lasted. John Hughes,
right, the famous screenwriter, later said he
only really understood screenwriting after reading
Hill's version of the Alien script. That one
document basically redefined action horror structure.
And Hill's involvement through Brandywine has
been consistent ever since. Yeah. Which shows
his business sense, too. He was story executive
producer on Aliens in 86, writer -producer on
Alien 3 in 92. He stayed on as a producer for
every entry since Prometheus, the upcoming stuff.
He's this uncredited sci -fi giant who made his
directing name elsewhere. So after proving himself
as this powerhouse writer, he finally gets his
shot behind the camera, met producer Lawrence
Gordon in 73, struck a deal. write a script,
direct it for scale. That gave us his directorial
debut, Hard Times, 1975. And Hard Times was the
perfect first film for him. It embodied his philosophy.
Made fast, made cheap, 38 days, just $2 .7 million
on location in New Orleans. Stars James Coburn,
Charles Bronson. It's about illegal street fighting
in the Depression. It's a pure Western, isn't
it? Totally. Two strangers roll into town. One
has a code, one has a talent. They operate outside
the law. Classic setup. What's amazing is even
after that successful debut, he stayed fiercely
protective of his vision. He got offered the
shootest, which would have meant directing John
Wayne. But he turned it down. Why? Simply because
he didn't like the script. He wouldn't compromise
his aesthetic, not even for the Duke. That takes
guts. And he also dipped his toe into TV around
then, which had this kind of hidden legacy. He
created a series called Dog and Cat in 77. But
he got so mad when they rewrote his pilot script
that he took his name off it, used a pseudonym.
But here's the kicker. That original pilot script
for Dodd and Cat, the one he hated because they
changed it, it had that spare buddy cop dynamic
he had basically codified. And years later, it
influenced Shane Black when he wrote the original
script for Legal Weapon. No kidding. Yeah. Proves
the strength of Hill's structural DNA, even when
he himself disowned the final product. OK, so
after that fairly strong start. Hill's career
hits that infamous late 70s roller coaster. Let's
talk about his second film, The Driver from 78.
Maybe the purest expression of his Western idea
in a modern setting. It is utterly, utterly uncompromising.
Characters with no names. The Driver. The detective.
They're just their functions, their archetypes.
It's so lean. It's almost abstract art. He wanted
Steve McQueen originally, but McQueen passed.
I think commercially. Yeah. A total disaster
in the U .S. Hill himself said the film made
exactly zero dollars domestically. Zero. Zero
dollars. That's fatal. Should have been. He genuinely
thought his career might be over. Said if he
hadn't already been shooting his next movie,
it might have ended right there. Why do you think
he went so abstract, so stylized, knowing the
commercial risk had to be huge? Was it just for
the satisfaction of boiling the genre down to
its absolute essence? I think it was a test of
his whole philosophy. Could the Western idea
survive with literally nothing left but the conflict
between two professionals, the lawman and the
outlaw? American audiences in 78? Nope. too pure
but the paradox is it was huge overseas and later
massive cult film right he even noted that when
they do retrospectives of his work now the driver
is often the first film they show he trusted
the aesthetic would win out eventually and he
only survived the immediate fallout because he'd
already secured financing for the next one the
warriors by promising to make it very cheaply
And the war years, 1979, that's the quintessential
urban Western rate. Yeah. A gang, the protagonists,
have to cross hostile territory, the boroughs
of New York fighting off rival gangs, these other
outlaw clans, just to get back to their home
turf. It's the Western journey framework overlaid
onto contemporary New York. Brilliant. Yeah.
But the film became this cultural flashpoint.
steeped in controversy. When it came out, there
were actual shootings, some killings at screenings,
often gang -related incidents. Paramount got
spooked, pulled all the radio and TV ads. That
must have sent shockwaves through Hollywood.
It did. Studios got terrified about releasing
intense urban action films for a while. But Hill,
very pragmatically, noted the bottom line. Hollywood
forgives a lot when you have a hit. And The Warriors
was a hit. Critics who got the style loved it.
Box office trumped the scandal, ultimately. Okay,
so after those contemporary urban westerns, he
finally makes his first true historical western
with the Long Riders in 1980. Yeah, structurally,
this one's fascinating. It's about the James
Younger gang. And the casting gimmick is genius.
He cast real -life acting brothers, the Keeches,
the Carradines, the Quades, the Guests, to play
the historical outlaw brothers. Oh, right. That
immediately reinforces the themes of loyalty,
family, clan structure. It echoes that Western
code. Hill said his own code for the film was
simple. Keep the jokes funny and the bullets
real. He followed that up with another film that
got critical praise, but was, again, a commercial
catastrophe. Southern Comfort in 1981. Intense
thriller. National Guardsmen lost in the Louisiana
Bayou battling Cajuns. Hill rewrote that script
with David Giller, turned it into this tight
existential thriller. A lot of people saw it
as a Vietnam allegory. Hill denied that specific
intense. It was just about, you know, men push
beyond social. control again. But the commercial
failure was brutal. Hill lamented it didn't make
a nickel anywhere, foreign, domestic, anything.
It was a universal audience failure. So we're
seeing a definite pattern here. Artistic purity,
like the driver and Southern comfort, often equals
financial failure. By the early 80s, despite
his talent and this growing cult reputation,
Hill must have been commercially on thin ice.
Exactly. And this is where timing and necessity
kind of collide. The writer's strike ended. Hollywood
needed projects fast. Producer Larry Gordon apparently
dusted off a script that had been shuttling around
development for years. That script was 48 H's
Hill. And the studio jumped on it and put it
together really quickly. The casting for 48 H's
in 82, that was just lightning in a bottle. Nick
Nolte was already attached. And Hill's girlfriend
at the time, a talent agent, suggested this young
comedian from Saturday Night Live, Eddie Murphy.
Yeah. That pairing the greedy veteran character
actor and the explosive, completely fresh comedic
talent, it basically defined the modern buddy
cop movie. Now, the shoot itself was apparently
pretty rough. Clashes between Hill, the studio,
Nolte, Murphy, volatile mix. But the result.
massive industry -changing box office hit. It
took that mismatched partners trope already a
staple and supercharged it with Hill's Western
structure. Two guys, cop and criminal, forced
to team up in that moral gray zone where the
system has failed. And that success gave him
the clout to make his really stylish, really
specific rock and roll fable Streets of Fire
in 1984, set in this fictional, hyper -stylized
city, an attempt to mash up the purest elements
of the musical and the western. And I like the
driver. Streets of Fire bombed initially at the
box office, but almost immediately it gained
this incredibly passionate cult following. It
fits the pattern. Hill chases his pure aesthetic
vision, risks initial rejection, but achieves
lasting, genre -defining style. Then came the
big anomaly. The one he openly admitted was just
about the money. Brewster's Millions in 1985,
his first and only straight -up comedy, made,
in his own words, to improve his bank account
and success quotient. How do we square that?
Hill the auteur, the genre purist, the Hemingway
disciple, taking on a broad comedy remake. Was
that just a necessary compromise to fund the
next passion project? Seems like it. He called
it an aberration in the career line. necessary
one, maybe. It was profitable. And it let him
pivot right back to action with Red Heat in 1988.
That paired Arnold Schwarzenegger playing this
stoic Soviet cop. perfect hell archetype, all
physical presence, with Jim Belushi as the wisecracking
American. Red Heat made money, showed he could
handle huge stars and budgets, but it was actually
a bit of a box office disappointment for that
peak Schwarzenegger era. This period also saw
him flexing his producer muscles, right? He was
involved with the tales from the Crypt TV show.
Yeah, executive producer and directed some episodes,
kept his hand in different pots. But it's clear
by the end of the 80s, he was still shaping genre
cinema, even if his purest Westerns weren't always
connecting commercially. Oh, and we have to mention
his biggest commercial hit, the only sequel he
directed. Right. Another 48 H -ers in 1990. Critics
mostly saw it as just a retread of the first
one. Kind of tired, but financially. It was his
highest grossing film ever. Pulled in $153 .5
million worldwide. Just goes to show, in Hollywood,
sometimes revisiting past glories, even if creatively
maybe less exciting, is the most bankable move.
OK, moving into the 90s, the roller coaster ride
continues, maybe gets even bumpier. He directed
Trespass in 1992, but its release got really
complicated because the 92 L .A. riots happened
right before it was supposed to come out. Oh,
wow. Yeah. The studio had to delay it, change
the title, shows how real world events can just
derail everything. And then he went back hard
to his obsession, historical westerns, with unfortunately
pretty mixed results again, Geronimo. An American
Legend in 93 and Wild Bill in 95 both got kind
of middling reviews, didn't do well commercially,
seemed like audiences just weren't biting on
the kind of unvarnished, authentic Westerns he
wanted to make. And that failure led to some
pretty candid reflections from him. He admitted
in 95 that his style, where, as he put it, bullets
are real, characters operate in a grounded, dramatic
world, was feeling slightly out of step. With
the big trend towards oversized kind of cartoon
action movies. He was basically lamenting the
shift away from serious realistic action towards
hyper -stylized, physics -defying spectacle.
He was a classicist stuck in the emerging blockbuster
culture of the late 90s. He tried to recapture
that pure aesthetic with Last Man Standing in
96 starring Bruce Willis, a very direct return
to his roots, Prohibition -era Western update
of Ujimbo, which itself came from Dashiell Hammett's
Red Harvest, back to that sparse, gritty style.
But again, audiences just didn't really connect.
But the real low point, the absolute professional
catastrophe that nearly ended things for him,
was Supernova in 2000. His conflict with MGM
over his vision for that sci -fi film got so
bad that they brought in Francis Ford Coppola
to recut the entire movie. Coppola, wow. That's
a major intervention. Huge and incredibly demoralizing
for Hill. He withdrew completely, took his name
off it, used the pseudonym Thomas Lee, a variation
on the industry's Alan Smithy distress signal.
He said his original cut was much darker. The
whole experience made him think about quitting.
After decades of grinding to have your vision
totally hijacked like that. Yeah, I could see
how that would make you want to walk away. He
did recover, directed the prison boxing movie
Undisputed in 2002. But what's truly fascinating
is what happened next. He found this incredible,
immediate acclaim and recognition, not in feature
films, but in prestige television, proving his
mastery was still there, maybe just needed a
different screen at that moment. Okay, this is
where it gets really interesting. 2004, Hill
directs the pilot episode for HBO's Western drama,
Deadwood. Think about the irony. A decade after
his big -screen westerns flopped, he wins the
Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Directing for
a Drama Series and a DGA Award just for that
one pilot episode. It was stunning validation,
wasn't it? Almost instant proof of his mastery
of the genre, his ability to establish that stripped
-down moral universe with incredible efficiency.
The quality was undeniable, however. Classic
Hill conflict here, too. Despite the wins, he
apparently had a major falling out. with the
show's creator, David Milch, during the editing
of that pilot. Never worked on another episode?
Seems like it was a clash of two very strong,
uncompromising artistic visions. But the TV awards
kept coming. In 2006, he directed the Western
miniseries Broken Trail. Huge audience success.
Became the highest rated original movie on cable
at the time. And again, swept the awards. Won
another DGA award for directing and the Primetime
Emmy for Outstanding Limited Series. It just
cemented his legacy as the master of the Western
form, regardless of screen size. The genre had
migrated to premium TV and he followed it there
and triumphed. So by the 2010s, he sort of described
himself as semi -retired. Noted pretty pragmatically
that the desirability of hiring directors over
60 is fairly diminished. Took a bit of a break,
but then Sylvester Stallone pulled him back to
direct Bullet to the Head in 2012. He never really
stopped working, though, did he? That commitment
to narrative is deep. He published a graphic
novel, Trigger Man. And then, incredibly, at
age 77, he wrote and performed a spoken word
record, The Cowboy Iliad. A legend told in the
spoken word, telling the story of an 1871 Kansas
shootout. A spoken word record. That's dedication.
That's pure, lifelong obsession with the Western
genre taken to its logical, literary extreme.
And his most recent feature film work feels like
a fitting return. Directed The Western Dead for
a dollar in 2022. got the glory to the filmmaker
award at the venice film festival for it and
professionally he was honored with the writers
guild's 2024 laurel award for screenwriting achievement
celebrating that whole career built on the haiku
style his whole career just reveals this unwavering
commitment to one core vision and now He's apparently
planning his next project, says he's going back
to film noir, which is, you know, basically the
urban western's closest cousin, confirms that
his moral universe, it just keeps operating within
those genre lines. So if we boil it all down,
synthesize his career, what we see is a filmmaker
who really defined modern action cinema, produced
one of the biggest sci -fi franchises ever, won
multiple Emmys, all while operating under this
one guiding principle. the western his whole
aesthetic defined by that spare haiku style valuing
clarity physical action moral conflict above
everything else and he survived hollywood by
being completely uncompromisingly clear about
his interests those big commercial failures like
the driver making literally zero dollars domestically
they were ultimately redeemed weren't they By
cult status, by later critical appreciation,
by award recognition in unexpected places like
TV, it proved his vision wasn't wrong, maybe
just ahead of its time, or needed the right format.
Let's end with that really pragmatic view he
has of the industry, that perspective of the
working pro who knows the score. We come to the
arena uncalled to seek our fortune and hazard
disgrace. That's the game. Those are the rules.
Such a hard -boiled, perfect philosophy for surviving
in that world. Yeah. And it raises a really interesting
question for you, the listener, to think about,
especially looking at Hollywood right now. Hill
was willing to risk absolute commercial failure.
The driver, Southern Comfort, chasing his specific
moral and aesthetic vision. Given the intense
commercial pressures today, where studios rarely
tolerate anything but immediate massive success,
what does the uncompromising longevity of someone
like Hill tell us? Someone who valued clarity
and genre purity over market trends. What does
that say about survival in the film industry?
Right. How many film majors working today would
genuinely risk making a film that could yield,
like a driver did, exactly zero dollars domestically,
just for the sake of stylistic purity? The answer
to that, well, it might be the difference between
a long, unique career like Hill's and maybe a
shorter, more conventional one.