Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American director Walter Hill.
Last updated on November 21, 2024.
Walter Hill 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 Warriors, Hard Times, The Driver, Southern Comfort, 48 Hrs. and its sequel Another 48 Hrs., Streets of Fire, Red Heat, Last Man Standing, Undisputed, and Bullet to the Head, as well as writing the screenplay for the Jim Thompson crime drama The Getaway starring Steve McQueen and directed by Sam Peckinpah. He has also directed several episodes of television series such as Tales from the Crypt and Deadwood and produced the Alien films.
Somebody once said, you have to wait 20 years before you can tell if a movie's any good or not so that's probably true.
I did have an offer to direct one of the Alien movies but I wasn't too excited about all the effects work.
I wouldn't not want to be a director and write as I wouldn't not to want to be a writer and direct movies.
Naturally we need black men to give this movie serious credibility.
I guess I never had a better experience than working on The Long Riders, and at the same time, I never had a harder time than what I did making Southern Comfort.
I tend not to look back. It's confusing.
Well, I'm about to do another western, a pilot for HBO this fall.
Some say Hollywood movies that are made about boxing are just metaphors for other things, I think I've made one that's actually about boxing and not a metaphor.
I never do, I don't even go to the retrospectives.
It's really about, oh come on, this guy wouldn't say that or he wouldn't do that, you know, it's about the characters, about the story, about the situation.
If I could go back I might change Geronimo a bit. If I do, it will be made a longer version.
I think it's fair to say I've always been a boxing fan.
You as an audience can look at these things as films, but I remember them as social experiences.
I always say the next one is my favorite.
Well, we're in show business, and I have been making a living in this business a long time and inevitably it means taking what it is that you've done and hopefully you're showing it to a lot of people who like it.
Get Miramax to send me down to Australia. I'd like to see it.
I'll talk about these things, but it's just, you know, you only get so much time and I'm much more interested in what I'm going to be doing next year than in something I did 10 years ago.
I don't much like looking back.
I get a great high from writing.
I've always wanted to do a boxing movie.
I mean no film is beyond criticism, but I think we've made a very modest movie.
He had found the band of jackals he needed. But as Jack McCall rode through the center of town, he experienced the terrifying certainty that a man faces when he's about to make his own name famous. He lacked both a hero's calm and a coward's resolve to survive at any price.
All producers encourage you, whatever it is, to make it more-so. If you've got a joke, can it be funnier? If you've got an action sequence, can it be more exciting? That's the nature of being a producer.
I always loved comic books and I'm still a great fan of the graphic novel.
I liked Batman because he was more grounded. I never liked Superman much or Captain Marvel or Shazam.
When people are still getting pleasure from something that you did 30 years ago, it makes you feel good. I always say it makes an old man happy.
There's a tricky tone where you try to get some humor into a movie that's also a tough tale of murder and revenge. You have to ice skate rather carefully between the humor and the action tension part of the drama.
The graphic novel form really interests me and I like the freedom that format offers.
I'm always happy to talk to somebody; it's flattering that people remember your movies. Especially some movie that you did, for Christ's sake, almost 35 years ago, or what's especially pleasant is if you're talking about some movie that you did 35 years ago and they're 20 years old.
Action movies to me are dramas with recognizable human beings that are in extraordinary situations.
I think action movies on the whole have moved more and more into large spectacle, even leaving out super hero movies that seem to me to be more a fantastic science fiction than they are action movies.
Conversations about films are always funny. I would say a majority of people want to talk about what were the more obvious successes; the big box office films. Other people wanting to be more sensitive to you want to talk about the ones that maybe didn't make a lot of money, but they think you might have a special feeling about. And then other people sometimes want to help you by suggesting that you should have done this or that in the movie, that that would have helped you a great deal in whatever capacity.
I think the problem with the cinema currently is that so much of the money that goes movies that offer a certain kind of repetition.
I'm doing my best. I read in the paper that I'm an action director. They always say that, "Action director Walter Hill", if they bother writing about me at all. I think that's fine. I'm happy to do the work.
I'm not even against superheroes. It's not my cup of tea. But there's just this endless stream of them and they are so repetitious and suspend certain rules in a way that I don't find dramatically helpful. The imperviousness can be too much.
When you get into making movies, then the physical mundane reality of life must be presented. But in comics you can jack it up and work in shorthand.
It always sounds kind of trivial, but when I was a kid I was always so impressed by how serious the comic books were. I always liked how they were half way between literature and the cinema. I liked the visuals and I liked the simplicity of a certain type of moral dilemma.