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Walter Hill
Birth name	Walter Wesley Hill
Born	January 10, 1942 (1942-01-10) (age 65) Long Beach, California, U.S.
Occupation	Film director, producer and screenwriter
Years active	1968–Present
Spouse(s)	Hildy Gottlieb (1986-Present)
Awards Emmy Awards Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Directing for a Drama Series 2004 Deadwood Outstanding Miniseries 2006 Broken Trail

Walter Wesley Hill (born January 10, 1942 in Long Beach, California) is an American film director, screenwriter, and producer known, in particular, for his revival of the Western. He said in an interview, "Every film I've done has been a Western," and elaborated in another, "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 things."^[1]

Contents 1 Biography 1.1 Early life 1.2 Assistant director 1.3 Screenwriter 1.4 Early films 1.5 1980s 1.6 1990s 1.7 Recent Work 2 Personal life 3 References 4 Interviews 5 External links

Walter Hill was born on January 10, 1942 in Long Beach, California. Growing up, he was asthmatic as a child and, as a result, missed several years of school.^[2] He spent much of his time daydreaming, reading comic books, and listening to radio serials. Hill has stated that his father and grandfather were "smart, physical men who worked with their heads and their hands" and had "great mechanical ability."^[2] His grandfather on his father's side was a wildcat driller who became an owner and an operator. Hill worked in the oil fields as a roustabout on Signal Hill near Los Angeles during summers of the latter part of his high school years and several more years while in college. During one summer, he ran an asbestos pipe-cutting machine and also worked as a spray painter in the John Bean factory in Lansing, Michigan. He majored in history at Michigan State University.^[2]

Hill began his career in the training program of the Director's Guild of America, graduating to work as second assistant director on The Thomas Crown Affair in 1968.^[1][3] He went on to work as the uncredited second assistant director on Bullitt in the same year.^[3] In 1969, he was the second assistant director on the Woody Allen film, Take the Money and Run and remembers doing little but passing out the call sheets and filling out time cards.^[2]

Hill sold in his first screenplay, a western called Lloyd Williams and His Brother, in 1969 to Joe Wizan who optioned it for two years but it was never made.^[2] One point, Sam Peckinpah was going to make it after The Getaway, but he ended up doing Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid instead. The first screenplay Hill wrote that was produced into a film was for The Getaway in 1972. Peter Bogdanovich's ex-wife Polly Platt had read Hill's script for Hickey & Boggs and recommended him to co-write the script for The Getaway with Bogdanovich.^[2] They worked on the script together in San Francisco while Bogdanovich was making What's Up, Doc? They had completed 25 pages when they went back to L.A. and Steve McQueen fired Bogdanovich without reading any of their work. Hill started from scratch and wrote his own script in six weeks.^[2]

Hill went on to write screenplays for two 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 for the money.^[2] In addition, he and director John Huston did not agree on how closely to stick to the book on which it was based on. Producers Larry Turman and David Foster asked Hill to adapt Ross MacDonald's novel, The Drowning Pool for Richard Mulligan to direct. The producers did not like the direction Hill took with his script and he left the project to write Hard Times for Larry Gordon at Columbia Pictures.^[2]

Hill read Alex Jacob's screenplay for the Lee Marvin film, Point Blank and considered it a "revelation" in terms of style and format.^[2] He decided to write his own scripts in that direction, as he described it, "extremely spare, almost Haiku style. Both stage directions and dialogue."^[2] Hill wrote Hard Times, the first draft of Alien, The Driver, and The Warriors in this style.

Hill met producer Lawrence Gordon in 1973. He agreed to let Hill direct a film if he wrote a screenplay for him. Hill made a deal to write and direct for scale and in turn he got a shot at directing.^[2] The result was Hill's 1975 breakthrough film, Hard Times, made on location in New Orleans for just $2.7 million in 38 days.^[4] James Coburn played a fast-talking promoter of illegal street fights in 1930s New Orleans and Charles Bronson played the boxer protagonist. Hill's second film was The Driver starring Ryan O'Neal as a laconic getaway driver and Bruce Dern as the driven cop pursuing him. Hill originally had wanted to cast McQueen as the driver but he turned down the role because he did not want to do another car movie.^[4]

In 1979, Hill directed The Warriors - which arguably became his most popular film to date due to the immense cult following that has grown each passing year and had spawned a spin off television show loosely based on the film which aired in the mid 1980s on ABC called The Renegades, a video game, action figures and talk of a Tony Scott remake.

In 1982, Hill enjoyed major box office success with the Eddie Murphy and Nick Nolte film 48 Hours. Clint Eastwood was originally lined-up to play the cop role and Richard Pryor, the convict, but Eastwood wanted to play the criminal instead and dropped out of the project with Pryor following soon afterward.^[2] However the sequel, Another 48 Hours was thought by many critics to be merely a retread of the original and it fared poorly at the box office.

In addition, he was the co-producer and one of the originators of the Alien series of films and co-wrote the story for Aliens, the second film in the series.

In 1987, he directed Extreme Prejudice, a contemporary Western based on a story by John Milius and Fred Rexer, with Nick Nolte, Powers Boothe, Michael Ironside and Clancy Brown. This tale of childhood friends who are on both sides of the law includes a showdown that lovingly pays homage to Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch.

The 1990s found Hill's brand of action and narrative on the wane, and his output began to become less and less frequent. Johnny Handsome, starring Mickey Rourke and Lance Henriksen was a tale of redemption that the director saw as a re-examination of the film noir genre.^[5] In 1992, Hill directed a film originally called, The Looters, about two firemen who cross paths with criminals while searching for stolen loot in an abandoned East St. Louis tenement building. However, the L.A. Riots broke out shortly before the film's release and studio changed the title to Trespass.^[6]

At this time, Hill began to focus his energies on Western-themed stories. His film biography of Geronimo, with a screenplay written by John Milius, was well received by the critics, but fared poorly at the box office. A second biopic - this time of the titular Wild Bill - had little critical or commercial success, although Hill would return to the same themes the next decade with the TV series Deadwood. His 1996 effort - Last Man Standing with Bruce Willis - a Prohibition-era Western update of Yojimbo (and thus reminiscent of that film's inspiration, Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest, and its western incarnation, A Fistful of Dollars) saw him return to his earlier style to some extent; with a gruff antihero a heavy focus on stylized action.

Hill then directed the 2000 film Supernova. When the studio did not agree with his vision, they brought in Francis Ford Coppola to re-cut the film. This caused Hill to credit himself with the pseudonym Thomas Lee (a variation of Alan Smithee), which clearly showed he was disappointed with Coppola’s work and chose not to be associated with the finished product. Hill has said that his original version was a much darker take than the final product.^[7]

The 1990s also saw him retain a producer credit for Alien³ and Alien: Resurrection.

Recently, Hill’s directional work for the pilot episode of the TV series Deadwood has seen him return to favour in critical circles to some extent, earning him an Emmy in 2004 and a DGA award in 2005. He continued his work with westerns by directing the mini series Broken Trail, which became the highest-rated movie made by a cable network when it premiered on AMC.^[4] It also earned him yet another Emmy when it was awarded for Best Mini-Series.

Hill married Hildy Gottlieb, a talent agent at International Creative Management, in New York City at Tavern on the Green on September 7, 1986^[8]

• FilmStew.com
• Suicide Girls
• MovieMaker

• Walter Hill at the Internet Movie Database
• Walter Hill at All Movie Guide
• IGN profile