Walter Hill on The Warriors and still making Westerns at 80
Interview
Walter Hill on The Warriors and still making Westerns at 80
Walter Hill on the set of The Warriors (1979)
Interview
BY
vadim rizov
An interview with the legendary writer-director Walter Hill.
The Warriors screens at Metrograph from October 14.
Since his first film as a writer-director, 1975’s Hard Times, Walter Hill has famously and repeatedly professed to only make movies that, at their core, are Westerns. Sometimes that’s explicitly the case, as in his just-released Dead for a Dollar, shot in 25 days, with New Mexico standing in for Mexico, or in Hill’s late-period experiments outside of film with 2017’s graphic novel Triggerman and 2019’s spoken word album The Cowboy Iliad. Sometimes that’s implicit, as with 1979’s The Warriors, in which one gang (read: cowboys) tries to make its way back home through a simultaneously gritty and fantastical New York City standing in for the Old West. It was a production on which Hill tangled with the studio from production to release, upon which it became a huge hit, and remains a signature work—a highlight from a 60-year career that started in the ’70s as a screenwriter for John Huston and Sam Peckinpah, and hasn’t paused since. I hopped on to Zoom with Hill, who’s still gamely doing the promotional rounds at age 80.
VADIM RIZOV: The Warriors is such a well-known film, one on which you’ve been so vindicated in many ways.
WALTER HILL: I like the idea that I’m vindicated! That sounds good. I guess I’ll say this about The Warriors. People come up to me and say, “Hey, are you Walter Hill?” I always say, “Does he owe you money?” After we get past that, they ask me about The Warriors much more than any other film. The last year or two, they’re asking a lot more about Streets of Fire (1984), but The Warriors is still ahead of all the others.
Early this summer I was in Bologna. A festival there [Il Cinema Ritrovato] invited me because they were going to show The Warriors in the Piazza Maggiore, the big public square there. They had set up a gigantic football stadium screen and something like 8,000 people showed up—had to be the biggest audience the movie ever had. I spoke a little bit, sat down and thought, “Holy God, I haven’t seen this thing in 40 years. Maybe I better figure out an exit if it doesn’t seem to be playing.” I was pleasantly surprised by how good the film looked, because you worry about films fading over time. But the picture look very crisp, with the beautiful colors that [DP Andrew] Laszlo worked out with me. It played very, very well. I was surprised—fairly young crowd, boisterous, there to have a good time.
VR: In your 2007 DGA interview, you say, “I’m a great believer that the greatest achievement in film has been when directors got their way.” Do you find that when making something with a smaller production apparatus, like Dead for a Dollar, it’s easier to get your own way?
WH: I’m going to try to say this without sounding boastful, but it’s very hard for me to remember when I didn’t get my own way. It’s not part of the process as far as I’m concerned. Good, better and indifferent, the films represent my taste in shooting and my approach to things. Sometimes the actors have very good suggestions. The cameraman, the editor can say, “Maybe we ought to watch out for this kind of thing.” Sometimes after I have done my work and signed off on the movie, there has been interference. But when I’m shooting, I just don’t allow it. I’ll go home. I’m there to direct the movie, and if something is getting in the way of directing, I will say… I won’t use the language I’m sure I would use, and that would be it.
Streets of Fire (1984)
"one of the things I can say to most of the actors I work with is, 'I’ve been directing longer than you’ve been alive, so let’s try it my way.'"
VR: You mentioned in that interview that you don’t really watch dailies. You’ve been working with editor Phil Norden for a while, including on this film. Is that still how you feel about things?
WH: Actually, Phil was on the set while we were shooting, putting together what we were shooting right there. It’s this digital age we’re in: by the end of the day, you have a rough assembly. I haven’t gone to dailies since—Lordy, I think probably Southern Comfort (1981). I was discouraged because you seem to endlessly see something over and over, and you want to stay as fresh as you can in your judgmental process. So, I don’t go to dailies unless I’m told there is a problem, then of course, I’ll go look. [Otherwise] I like to tell the editor what I thought about the day’s work, why I made a certain shot, and the way I thought it might go together. Then on the weekend, I’m looking at cut footage rather than dailies; I like that much better. It is a performance process, a photographic process, but also an editorial process. Until you marry the three, judgement is very difficult.
VR: I have to ask about Undisputed (2002), in part because it is the first of your films I saw. It went on to become a mini franchise that I don’t think you have anything to do with.
WH: I have not, and they probably owe me money. But you know, it’s a tricky business.
VR: Was the drama about Undisputed overblown? I have this memory that it had been demanded that you make one of the characters more sympathetic and Wesley Snipes refused on your behalf.
WH: To tell you the truth, I have no memory of that. But there’s been a lot of blood, whiskey and shit that’s gone under the bridge since. So, my memory is probably not perfect. Sounds like Wesley, though. I like Wesley very much, and I’m not surprised he would stand up for me. I would certainly stand up for him.
VR: You have talked about how, in the past, you liked to enact just how an actor would take a hit, or other things like that. I assume you don’t do that so much anymore.
WH: Now that I’m 80 and can’t?
VR: I was hoping to find a way to finesse it, but yeah.
WH: I don’t do that anymore. As you just said, I’m 80, and you change. I probably sit down on the set a lot more than I did 25 years ago. So many people are surprised that I’m still here, and still working. I started directing in the fall of 1974, so one of the one of the things I can say to most of the actors I work with is, “I’ve been directing longer than you’ve been alive, so let’s try it my way.” [Laughs.] It’s a privilege.
You know, I joined the circus when I was very young. I think I was 23 when I failed my army physical and was—what’s the song?—“Young, dumb and broke” and started working in Hollywood. I knew I wanted to be a writer. There were a lot of films out there that I had seen that were not Hollywood in their style, and were very compelling to me—the European cinema, the Japanese cinema—and I thought some of that could be some of the stylistic influences would actually improve the Hollywood approach. We needed a freshening, shall we say. But I always say, “Look, I’ve never had an honest job.” I’ve been working in this my whole adult life and it’s been good. There’s certainly pain and melancholy and down moments. It’s an odd business: you come together, you work very close closely with other people, form attachments. Then the film ends, you go your separate ways and, in many cases, never see each other again.
Walter Hill on the set of Bullet to the Head (2012)
BR: I wanted to ask about coming back to the Market Street Power Plant, where you shot in 1975 for Hard Times, and where you came back to for Bullet to the Head in 2012. It plays such a big role in both movies.
WH: When I was doing Bullet to the Head, I was delighted to discover it was still there. I brought it up on one of the meetings. It was a terrific location, an old power plant outside of New Orleans. So, we went out there, and it was still very much intact. I used a different part of the building for Bullet to the Head. And, of course, it did put me in a nostalgic mood on several occasions, mainly for the actors I had worked with on my first picture. They’re no longer with us—gone on to the next world, I guess is what they say. But Charlie [Bronson], and Jim [James Coburn], and Strother [Martin], no longer with us. Which brings one intimations of one’s own mortality. We’re all just here for a while.
VR: With this new film, are there drone shots?
WH: Yes, I think there’s about five.
VR: Is that fun for you, to have the new tool?
WH: Well, we got to do that because we didn’t have much equipment, but there was a local guy that had a drone and we got it for a couple of days. The very first shot in the movie, going across the desert with the titles, that is a drone shot. I didn’t have time to do it myself, but I would talk through the second unit director Alan Graf, and sometimes do a sketch of the shot I wanted.
VR: Is it true, as Graf has said, that you’ve shot blanks onset, on the floor, to create an atmosphere and raise some dust?
WH: Oh, yeah, we’ve done that a lot.
VR: Just for the Westerns, or just anytime you need some—
WH: Oh, almost any gunfight. We also use paper wadding up above, if the set’s appropriate. Gunfire disturbs the air, so it’s nice to have something falling off the rafters or the crossbeams. It adds texture that is pleasing. It’s not so clean and false that way.
VR: DP Lloyd Ahern II is, I think, exactly your age, and I assume he’s not operating the camera himself. Do you find that now that you have trouble finding camera operators who do what you tell them to do?
WH: No, not at all. In the first place, Lloyd finds them, then I get to know their names and work with them. And you’re right: if you add Lloyd together with me, I think you get well over 150 years [of filmmaking experience]—he’s been working since he was 21, and I’ve been on the set since I was 23. Lloyd really did yeoman work on this. He has health problems, it would be more accurate to say mobility problems—very bad knees and bad hips—and they’re being rebuilt. Lloyd doesn’t put it this way, but I think he’s basically retired. But he went out big—if he is retired, he quit with a good one.
Dead for a Dollar (2022)
VR: It’s probably related to your interest in comic books, but you often have these aggressive dissolves, wipes and transitions.
WH: Most of my films, they’re not reality-based in the normal sense. They suggest the real world, but they’re in their own little dream world, too. I’ve grown to feel that wipes and dissolves help keep that sense alive. Now, when you do a Western, the first thing we all know, it is a form unto itself. It is not the way the West was. There is no Western that I’ve ever seen that is remotely the way life in the West really was. It’s already built inside its own dreamlike mythology and poetry, that’s been there since The Great Train Robbery (1903). You’re in a kind of dream world to start with, then you build from there.
VR: With the new film, you’ve talked a little bit about removing shrubs and digitally altering the landscape to make it more sparse. In the past when computer effects were becoming more common, you said you were only comfortable with floor stunts, you didn’t really want to deal with the world of post-production. Have you grown out of that out of necessity?
WH: Well, that, but it’s just so much easier now. The process in the old days was so much slower, much more complicated. Now, they paint things in and out so easily: “Give me a shadow here. I think we over-lit it a bit. I want a shadow that slashes left to right back there, not too sharp-edged.” Two minutes later, you’ve got it. That’s not hard—you’re just directing. The digital revolution has enabled all kinds of things to become possible and not terribly difficult. We’re most aware of it in the phony-looking giant crowd scenes. Obviously, if you’re aware of it, it’s not working very well.
VR: Do you like the color scheme with digital, the way it just naturally looks?
WH: I kept beating everybody up about the idea that most of this story takes place in northern Mexico, in Chihuahua. It’s very dry country. And when you live there—I’ve never lived there but I’ve been through many times—the thing that’s always with you is the bright sun. You are dealing with washed-out sepia colors and bright sun almost all the time. So, I wanted very much to give that feeling, because we didn’t shoot a day in Mexico. I wanted people to think we were in Mexico. I like that de-saturated look, anyway, just usually by nature. If I had my druthers—I don’t know if this is true—a lot of the films I made would have been black and white.
VR: These kinds of cameras often look like that, but it matches these graded sepias that you seem to like, where things are just a little bit muted.
WH: Lloyd uses graded filters when we shoot, so we don’t have to depend on post totally.
VR: Over the last five years, you’ve had an explosion of side activity between Triggerman and The Cowboy Iliad.
WH: As far as I know, you’re one of the few people who is even aware of that. But I’m happy that somebody out there knows. I quite liked it myself, but I’m not supposed to write my own reviews.
VR: Would you think about writing a novel? Or would you strictly stick to the graphic novel?
WH: I’ve got Heat 2, here—Michael [Mann]’s an old friend of mine, I would have bought it anyway, but he sent over a copy. I’m getting ready to read it. I’m very curious about this, because Michael is a very fine screenwriter. I suspect I wouldn’t be particularly good at moving into the novel. John Huston told me that he thought it was much harder to write a screenplay than a novel. I don’t know how the hell he would have known that since he, far as I know, never wrote a novel.
I tend to think in screenplay form. I start with characters, then try to build narrative around the characters that I’m interested in. You hope that some place along the line, you come up with a theme. That’s really my process, which is so cinematic. I can do that with the graphic novels. We’re doing a new one for Dark Horse, called Kane. We’re just starting the artwork section. But I’d be the first to tell you we’re operating at a fairly simplistic shorthand delivery system, which I don’t think would work very well in the novel.
"Terry Malick and I used the same editor, [Billy Weber]... We used to give Billy the same message back and forth when you heard that he was going to go out on another movie: less takes, more angles. And it’s the goddamn truth."
VR: One of the things that’s best known about you as a screenwriter is that your screenplays were living in a place that was a little more—I don’t know if literary is the right word, but they were they were aggressively written to be less boring to read, because I think many people hate reading screenplays. I wasn’t sure if, for you, they live between literature and just making sure to keep somebody’s attention by any means necessary.
WH: My old buddy and writing companion on so much, David Giler—who sadly passed away about a year and a half ago—used to say it was the was the only form of literature where the only people who read it were purposely going out to destroy it. He was talking about, of course, directors and studios. [Laughs.] Sadly, there’s occasionally some truth to that.
I’m a selfish person, I do almost everything for myself, and then I hope somebody else will be interested. I did think that screenplays were needlessly boring. The traditional screenplay form was so anti-literary, and I thought pointlessly so. God, it was so hard to even stay awake. Of my generation of early ’70s screenwriters that broke through, I thought John Milius wrote the most readable scripts. They were fun to read. I thought that the deepest and most intellectual guy from my early time was Paul Schrader. Paul was a much deeper fellow than the rest of us, a real intellectual. I admire Paul very much. I thought I did the best tough guys stuff. But what the hell, you do what you do!
VR: I’ve seen directors as they get older say, “I don’t know how to make a movie for the kind of budget that I would have when I was younger, so I’m going to stop.” You shot this in 25 days. Do you find it hard stepping down to this production level? At your peak you had these really huge productions that you were managing.
WH: I did have some big productions. They weren’t huge. I certainly had movies that shot over 60 days. I don’t know if I ever had one in the 70s, I can’t remember. But I certainly had 60 days—Geronimo [1993] was a big shoot, 62 days or something like that.
I will say this: I’m probably peculiarly able to fit stepping down into smaller budget, independently financed filmmaking, because I’ve never really wanted to do a lot of takes. I’m a “two takes and move on” guy. I do like a lot of angles. Terry Malick and I used the same editor, [Billy Weber]. He would go back and forth between some of Terry’s movies and mine. I knew Terry slightly from the old writers program back at Warner’s in the late ’60s, very early ’70s—he was a great star out there, deservedly so. We used to give Billy the same message back and forth when you heard that he was going to go out on another movie: less takes, more angles. And it’s the goddamn truth. In post, you’re always saying, “Jesus Christ. I don’t want take five here. I’d like to go to something that’s a lot more interesting.”
Look, when do you make a movie? Do you make it at your desk when you write it? Do you make it on the set? Do you make it in post? Well, it really is the kind of director you are. Hitchcock made them at his desk and then faithfully stuck to what his script said. Howard Hawks made them on the set. He wasn’t interested in post much, and you couldn’t get him to go to the dub. Kurosawa famously said, “I only shoot to get something to edit.” I would say I’m equally divided among the three, but I probably lean a little more on post. The actors sometimes say to me, “I wasn’t sure that was the movie we were making—what we’ve ended up with here.” But that’s the ballgame.
Vadim Rizov is Director of Editorial Operations at Filmmaker Magazine.
The Driver (1978)