“Impossible to emulate”: the directors Walter Hill called inimitable geniuses
For a while, Walter Hill was one of the leading lights in action cinema, with his style of hard-hitting and no-frills genre flicks winning him a captive audience and plenty of offers to helm Hollywood’s next action-packed extravaganza.
It’s been a long time since he made something truly great, though, not that it slowed down his appetite. Hill rang in his 80th year with the old-fashioned western Dead for a Dollar starring Christoph Waltz, Willem Dafoe, and Rachel Brosnahan, which was his first trip to the American West for a straightforward oater in three decades.
However, Hill would be the first to admit that he’s always looked to those wide-open plains for inspiration, confessing how “every film I’ve done has been a western” in one way or another, even if he’s regularly put his own spin on the proceedings to refit them into something completely different.
Action has been his bread and butter since he debuted with the bare-knuckle brawling sports flick Hard Times in 1976, but one of his biggest influences was the polar opposite. Hill has never and will never dabble in surrealism or existentialism, but nonetheless, he informed the British Film Institute that he’d always harboured an admiration for two of its most iconic purveyors.
“When you talk about significant careers, there are two kinds of director,” he said. “There are certain directors whose genius is inimitable. [Luis] Buñuel, one of my favourites, is kind of impossible to emulate. Jean Vigo is another one; special talents who are in a world of their own.”
That pair might have come out of left field, but given the obvious fingerprints of the western over his entire filmography, the next three inimitable geniuses make a lot more sense. “Then there are those, like [Akira] Kurosawa and [John] Ford, who bring something to movies that is immediately influential on filmmakers all around the world. Sergio Leone’s influence is greater than any other Italian filmmaker.”
Kurosawa may not have made any westerns, but his pioneering style influenced many who did, while Ford and Leone are responsible for several of the genre’s greatest-ever efforts. Street-level crime, high-stakes heists, and bullet-riddled set pieces were prevalent in many Hill films, including The Warriors, The Getaway, Red Heat, 48 Hrs, Last Man Standing, and more, which had him viewing William Friedkin and Michael Mann as two halves of a whole.
Since The French Connection was “a breakthrough movie, stylistically, for so much that followed after,” Mann was “consciously or unconsciously very much influenced by Friedkin”. Mann may have arrived on the scene when Hill was already well-established, but the DNA of Kurosawa, Ford, Leone, and, to a lesser extent, Friedkin has been apparent in the director’s work from day one, even if Buñuel and Vigo are clearly the odd ones out.
