Background and career
Walter Hill (born January 10, 1942) is an American filmmaker, known for his action films and revival of the Western genre. He has directed such films as The Driver, The Warriors, Southern Comfort, 48 Hrs. and its sequel Another 48 Hrs., Streets of Fire and Red Heat, and wrote the screenplay for the crime drama The Getaway. He has also directed several episodes of television series such as Tales from the Crypt and Deadwood and produced films in the Alien franchise. He founded Brandywine Productions with David Giler and Gordon Carroll. Hill said in an interview that "every film I've done has been a Western", and elaborated in another that "the Western is ultimately a stripped down moral universe that is, whatever the dramatic problems are, beyond the normal avenues of social control and social alleviation of the problem, and I like to do that even within contemporary stories".
Hill was born in Long Beach, California, the younger of two sons. His paternal grandfather was a wildcat oil driller; his father worked at Douglas Aircraft as a supervisor on the assembly line. Hill has said that his father and grandfather were "smart, physical men who worked with their heads and their hands" and had "great mechanical ability". Hill's family had originally come from Tennessee and Mississippi, "one of those fallen Southern families, shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations". "I got along with both my parents very well," Hill said. "I admired them enormously." Growing up in Southern California, Hill was asthmatic as a child and, as a result, missed several years of school.
Despite the discomfort, it made you comfortable being alone with yourself. You weren't as surrounded by your peers as everybody else your age was... In my case it meant tremendous amount of reading at an early age... I read, listened to radio... I became utterly besotted with daytime serials... it enabled me to live in an imaginary world where one is comfortable with abstract ideas, dominated by stories, narrative, and characters.
Hill became a film fan at an early age, and the first film he remembers seeing was Song of the South (1946). He later described his taste as "juvenile", stating: "I liked adventure, westerns, but I liked everything. Musicals. But the general, I remember not liking kid movies... still don't, I think that's hung on." His asthma receded when he was 15 and he began to think about becoming a writer. He worked in the oil fields as a roustabout on Signal Hill, California, during high school and several more years while in college. One summer, he ran an asbestos pipe-cutting machine and worked as a spray painter. As a teenager, Hill contemplated being a comic book illustrator and studied art at the Universidad de las Américas, Mexico City. "Mexico was as far away as I could get without any money," he says. He then transferred and majored in history at Michigan State University. He said that, during this period, he was a particular fan of Ernest Hemingway's writing and came to believe that "the hardest thing to do is write clearly and simply, and make your point in an elegant way". Upon graduation, Hill was called up for the United States Army in 1964, but childhood asthma saw him ruled ineligible. This forced him to think about what he wanted to do for a career. "When you are that age, you think you are going to be in the army two years, it's a huge amount of time. You don't bother worrying about what you are doing. Suddenly, this whole thing was upon me." Through a friend Hill got a job in Los Angeles researching historical documentaries made by a company that was associated with Encyclopædia Britannica. He began seeing more and more scripts, writing scripts and developed the urge to direct.
Seeing so many of the European films, Japanese films, I was part of this isolated community in east Hollywood. I remembered thinking just a little further west they are making the films I want to see. I'm going to do this. Sink or swim... I wanted to be a writer on my way to being a director. Directors were already my heroes. Kurosawa, number of Italian directors... Movies from England, France, Sweden, Italy. Poland... One wanted a chance to tell stories in an open, loose, not constricted Hollywood kind of way. At the same time you wanted to work in Hollywood... I was tremendously interested in genre films. Wanted to work within genre films.
After this contract to make historical documentaries finished, Hill worked for a time in the mail room at Universal ("Somebody told me that was a good way to meet people"). He then got into the training program of the Directors Guild of America, which enabled him to work in television as an apprentice. He observed and worked for over a year on such shows as Gunsmoke, The Wild Wild West, Bonanza and Warning Shot. "I did a lot of shows for a couple of weeks, they would rotate you through," he says. Hill wound up as second assistant director on The Thomas Crown Affair in 1968. He then went on to work as the uncredited second assistant director on Bullitt — "It was my job to set background and also to set it up with the police. We had to organise every shot so people wouldn't wander out into the middle of the street and be hit... Every time we did a shot I was scared to death." In 1969, he was the second assistant director on Woody Allen's mockumentary film, Take the Money and Run, but said he remembers doing very little except passing out the call sheets and filling out time cards. He also worked as a first assistant director on a television advertisement. "I didn't have a shred of desire in those areas," says Hill of assistant directing. "I wanted to work and be around films. I certainly took my duties fairly seriously and all that. I didn't see it as a long term kind of commitment."
Sources
Net-worth figure: Celebrity Net Worth (October 2026), in USD. Biography and career facts: the person's Wikipedia article and linked reporting. Snapshot date for all StarWorth figures: 28 October 2026.
