WALTER HILL TO RECEIVE MIFF MOOSE

By Joel Johnson

One of the most unique things about film festivals is how they allow filmgoers to make contact with the real people that make the films that we see. Most of us see films either in theatres or at home in an environment without anyone from the cast and crew being present. This disconnect between the creative process and the audience is one of the reasons why so many actors continue to seek opportunities to perform onstage before a live audience. That connection and the reinforcement it provides are just so immediate. Film festivals provide a venue for directors, actors, writers, producers, cinematographers, etc., to see an audience respond to what they have made. The audience has the opportunity to meet the people who have created the films and to learn how they work.

This will be especially true this year as the Maine International Film Festival presents its Lifetime Achievement Award to Walter Hill. The coveted Moose has been presented under various guises of Mid-Life Achievement and even Pre-Mid-Life Achievement, depending on the relative youth of the recipient and the likelihood that he or she will have several decades of productivity ahead. Since Robert Altman is still going strong at eighty-one, and he trails far behind Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira, who, at ninety-seven, is still cranking out at least a film a year, there’s no particular reason to think that the sixty-year-old Walter Hill doesn’t have many years of creativity ahead of him. The reason Lifetime Achievement is the correct designation is that his filmography shows such a length and breadth of contributions made over a period of about forty years. He is best known as a film director, but he has worked as a screenwriter, a producer, and he even took a turn in front of the camera as an actor. He began his career in the late sixties as a second assistant director on The Thomas Crown Affair and Bullitt, two of Steve McQueen’s biggest films. He worked in the same capacity on Take the Money and Run, an early Woody Allen comedy. He then took up the pen and began writing screenplays. He wrote the script for Hickey & Boggs, Robert Culp’s directorial effort to bring to the big screen the chemistry that he and Bill Cosby had in their TV show I Spy. Another early effort was his adaptation of Jim Thompson’s novel for the film The Getaway. The film was another star vehicle for Steve McQueen and was directed by Sam Peckinpah, but the film is probably best known because costar Ali McGraw left her studio executive husband Robert Evans for McQueen. Hill spent the early 1970s adapting novels into star vehicles for Ryan O’Neal and Jacqueline Bisset (The Thief Who Came to Dinner), Paul Newman (John Huston’s Mackintosh Man), and Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward (The Drowning Pool). His first outing as a film director was Hard Times. In addition to directing stars Charles Bronson and James Coburn, Hill collaborated on the screenplay for this film about a depression-era street boxer. Hill has continued to be involved in writing the pages from which a full-blooded film eventually emerges. Although he has directed most of the scripts he has worked on, that hasn’t always been the case. Most notably he provided the story for the film Aliens and then worked on the screenplay for Alien³. He is closely identified with the Alien franchise, since he has served as a producer for all four Alien films starring Sigourney Weaver, as well as the spin-off Alien vs. Predator. Alien was the first film for which he was a producer. His fingerprints have been all over several films since he has worked on them in the capacity of a writer, a producer, and a director.

The movies by Walter Hill featured in the festival are The Driver, The Warriors, and The Long Riders from his early period as a director and then a much more recent film Undisputed. Like so many of Hill’s films, the cast lists read like a Who’s Who list of Hollywood stars: Ryan O’Neal, Isabelle Adjani, Bruce Dern, and Ronee Blakley; James Remar, Lynne Thigpen, and Mercedes Ruehl; the brothers Carradine, Keach, Quaid, and Guest; Ving Rhames, Wesley Snipes, Peter Falk, and Wes Studi. These films demonstrate his ongoing interest in crime dramas, quests against long odds, the Western, and violent one-on-one confrontations. Although he broadened his focus, including more comedic and musical components in films such as the buddy picture 48 Hrs., with Nick Nolte and Eddie Murphy, the youth-oriented Streets of Fire, with Diane Lane and Willem Dafoe, Brewster’s Millions, with Richard Pryor and John Candy, Crossroads about the emergence of a music legend, and the Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle Red Heat, Hill has consistently returned to the genres and themes outlined in the four films showing at MIFF. He is rare among contemporary directors to make a significant number of western films. In addition to his James gang saga The Long Riders, Hill has made Geronimo: An American Legend and Wild Bill. He won both an Emmy and a Director’s Guild of America award for his work on the HBO series Deadwood, and directed the upcoming Broken Trail with Robert Duvall, Thomas Haden Church, and Greta Scacchi. Broken Trail is a two-night event premiering June 25–26, 2006 on the cable movie station AMC. Other work Mr. Hill has been involved with include the HBO series Tales From The Crypt, the Bruce Willis vehicle Last Man Standing, and one of my personal favorites Southern Comfort, with Powers Boothe, Keith Carradine, Fred Ward, and Peter Coyote.

It will be a treat to meet this man who has worked in so many creative capacities with so many greats in the film business and to hear him talk about his work. His work, which has received several honors over the years, truly deserves Lifetime recognition.

Memo to the MIFF organizers: Wouldn’t it be good to settle on a name for the annual award so it doesn’t have to be renamed every year? I would recommend that it be called the The Maine International Film Festival Moose Award for Significant Contributions to Film. 

 

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