Walter Hill

Walter Hill (born January 10, 1942) is an American film director, screenwriter, and producer 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 the Alien films. 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.Despite the discomfort, it made you comfortable being alone with yourself. You weren't as surrounded by your peers as everybody else your age was... In my case it meant tremendous amount of reading at an early age... I read, listened to radio... I became utterly besotted with daytime serials... it enabled me to live in an imaginary world where one is comfortable with abstract ideas, dominated by stories, narrative, and characters. Hill became a film fan at an early age, and the first film he remembers seeing was Song of the South (1946). 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.