Walter Hill

Walter Hill makes westerns. Some of them have cars in them, some have subway trains, and one has a Soviet policeman in Chicago, but the shape underneath rarely changes: a small group of competent men, a hostile stretch of country, a code that gets tested, and violence that arrives as ritual rather than chaos.

He wrote before he directed, including the screenplay for the crime drama The Getaway, and his first films establish the method immediately. Hard Times is a bare knuckle picture with almost no dialogue to spare. The Driver strips its characters down to their functions and refuses to name them. The Warriors turns one night in New York into a mythic journey and has outlasted every serious film released alongside it. The Long Riders and Southern Comfort follow, the second of them the most frightening thing he has made, a swamp picture where the threat stays mostly offscreen.

Nothing in a Hill film is explained twice. That economy made him extremely commercial for about a decade: 48 Hrs. in 1982 and Another 48 Hrs. in 1990, Streets of Fire, which failed on release and then found the audience it was actually made for, Brewster's Millions, Crossroads, Extreme Prejudice, Red Heat and Johnny Handsome.

The later run is uneven and he never stopped working: Trespass, Geronimo: An American Legend, Wild Bill, Last Man Standing, Supernova, Undisputed, Bullet to the Head, The Assignment and Dead for a Dollar. He directed television too, including episodes of Tales from the Crypt and Deadwood, and holds Primetime Emmy Awards for a limited miniseries and for drama directing, plus a Hugo Award for best dramatic presentation. With David Giler and Gordon Carroll he founded Brandywine Productions, which produced the Alien films.