Walter Hill (born California 1942) is an American film director and a member of the movie brat generation. Hill broke into the film industry after working on The Getaway for Sam Peckinpah. Hill's main passion has been the Western through the work of John Ford but the majority of his successes have been with slick urban thrillers. Hill scored a couple of cult hits in the late seventies with The Driver , The Warriors and Southern Comfort and had a lucrative production role in the Alien series of films. Hill's The Long Riders released in 1980 was a modern western epic in the style of Peckinpah that failed to find an audience but he enjoyed a major box office hit with the Eddie Murphy vehicle 48 Hrs . Following on from this Hill managed a solid gold box office bomb with Streets of Fire, a retro noir musical relying on a cast of unkown actors, that made back less than a third of its budget. This flop derailed the rest of Hill's career and his following films have mostly been impersonal projects as a director-for-hire such as the Richard Pryor vehicle Brewster's Millions and another odd couple cop thriller Red Heat and a cash-in sequel Another 48 Hrs . Hill was able to return to the Western in the 1990s with and Wild Bill but neither had good box office. Hill also had a disappointment with the sci-fi epic Super Nova resulting in him removing his name from the production credits.

Hill along with John Milius, John Carpenter and Philip Kaufman can be regarded as part of a generation of American Film Directors that due to the changes in the Film Industry in the early 1980s never got the opportunity to fully realise their potential.