Walter Hill

Early life

Walter Hill was born in Long Beach, California, the younger of two sons. His paternal grandfather was a wildcat oil driller, and his father worked as a supervisor on the assembly line at Douglas Aircraft. Hill described both as smart, physical men with great mechanical ability. His family originally came from Tennessee and Mississippi, part of what he called a fallen Southern family.

Growing up in Southern California, Hill was asthmatic as a child and missed several years of school. He became a film fan early, with Song of the South (1946) being the first film he remembered seeing. His taste he later described as juvenile, favoring adventure and westerns but not kid movies. His asthma receded when he was 15, and he began considering a career as a writer.

During high school and college, he worked in the oil fields as a roustabout on Signal Hill, California, and also ran an asbestos pipe-cutting machine and worked as a spray painter. As a teenager, he contemplated being a comic book illustrator and studied art at the Universidad de las Américas, Mexico City. He then transferred to Michigan State University, where he majored in history. He was a fan of Ernest Hemingway's writing and came to believe that writing clearly and simply was the hardest thing to do.

Upon graduation in 1964, Hill was called up for the United States Army but was ruled ineligible due to childhood asthma. Through a friend, he got a job in Los Angeles researching historical documentaries for a company associated with Encyclopædia Britannica, which led him to see more scripts and develop the urge to direct.

Career

After his contract for historical documentaries ended, Hill worked in the mail room at Universal, then entered the Directors Guild of America training program, which allowed him to work in television as an apprentice. He observed and worked on shows such as Gunsmoke, The Wild Wild West, Bonanza, and Warning Shot. Hill became second assistant director on The Thomas Crown Affair in 1968, then uncredited second assistant director on Bullitt, where his job included setting up background and organizing shots to prevent accidents.

In 1969, he was second assistant director on Woody Allen's Take the Money and Run, though he recalled doing little beyond passing out call sheets. He also worked as a first assistant director on a television advertisement, but said he had no desire to continue in assistant directing. During this time, Hill wrote screenplays at night and on weekends, after reading screenplays being made and thinking he could do that. It took him four to five years to write his first screenplay while working another job.

He described an early personal work as terrible, but when he began writing in a more structured narrative environment, he found his voice and started finishing scripts. Once he finished scripts, he quickly made a living and got them made. Hill later said he identified with the New Hollywood but wanted to make genre films, which he considered retro.