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'In my films,' says writer-director Walter Hill, 'when somebody puts a gun in your face, character is how many times you blink.'
Walter Hill interviewed by Mike Greco
My heroes have always been cowboys
They still are, it seems
Sadly in search of, and one step in
back of
Themselves and their slow moving
dreams. - Sharon Vaughn
There's more to Walter Hill's admiration for John Ford than an autographed picture of the master in his office and an addiction to cigars. The Long Riders, Hill's epic about the legendary James- Younger Gang, may very well establish him as a worthy successor to Ford - and make the traditional Western popular again. United Artists executives are already claiming that The Long Riders is Hill's Wild Bunch. They are shooting at the right target but have missed the mark. As much as Hill admires San Peckinpah, The Long Riders is more than The Wild Bunch. And Walter Hill, who shares Peckinpah's view of human nature and sense of moral indignation, has an excellent chance of fulfilling the potential that Peckinpah never realized.
"My work is in a beginning stage." the 38-year-old director says. "I would very much like to make twenty-five to thirty more movies." Such modesty is unsettling. After all, he has written twelve screenplays (including The Getaway for Peckinpah), produced the enormously successful Alien, and won critical acclaim as the director of Hard Times, The Driver, and The Warriors.
Walter Hill is an anachronism. He is, to use Reinhold Niebuhr's phrase, a moral man in an immoral society. He longs for a moral order that has not existed during his lifetime - and may never have existed. "I don't carry a load of modern alienation around with me," Hill explained, "and I'm alienated by characters who do. The screen character with his suitcase packed with psychoanalytic motivation bores me." Hill is contemptuous of depth psychology, and he steadfastly refused to engage in psychological speculation about his characters or himself during our several interviews. "Psychoanalytic theory is unsupported by any evidence," Hill argued. "It's the religion of the intellectuals. It makes them feel good."
Hill's films are populated by characters who are clearly responsible for their actions, and audiences are manipulated to understand that success...