With his lean but bold and visually powerful approach, filmmaker Walter Hill's career proved that action films can be smart, stylish, and distinctive, and his movies put a fresh spin on the traditional themes of Westerns, crime dramas, and even buddy films

The son of a riveter who worked in shipbuilding, Hill was born in Long Beach, CA, on January 10, 1942. He briefly followed in his father's blue-collar footsteps, earning his living in oil drilling and construction, before focusing his career on the arts. Hill studied drawing for a spell in Mexico, and later enrolled at Michigan State University, where he received a degree in Journalism. In time, he developed a passion for filmmaking and moved back to California, where he earned his first movie credits as an assistant director on such pictures as The Thomas Crown Affair and Take the Money and Run. Hill next worked as a screenwriter; two films were based on his scripts in 1972: the dark crime drama Hickey and Boggs and Sam Peckinpah's adaptation of Jim Thompson's novel The Getaway. Hill's taut, muscular screenplays, sometimes written in blank verse, earned him a potent reputation in the industry, and, in 1975, he landed his first assignment as a director when he brought his own script, Hard Times…  » Read more