"I get a great high from writing"
About this Quote
“I get a great high from writing” lands like a small confession from a filmmaker best known for tough, laconic worlds. Walter Hill’s cinema is famous for velocity: men on the move, dialogue stripped to the bone, stories that behave like machines. So it’s telling that his pleasure isn’t framed as pride, craft, or even “love” of storytelling, but as a “high” - a word borrowed from intoxication, compulsion, and private escape. Hill isn’t romanticizing the muse; he’s admitting to a bodily payoff.
The intent is practical and a little defiant: writing isn’t the grim penance people often assign to directors, the broccoli you eat to get to the “real” fun of production. For Hill, the page is where control lives. Directing is famously collaborative and endlessly interrupted by budget, weather, actors, and compromise. Writing offers a cleaner adrenaline: the immediate sensation of making decisions, sharpening conflict, hearing rhythm, cutting fat. That’s especially apt for a director whose signature is economy; the “high” comes from subtraction as much as invention.
There’s subtext, too, about identity. Hill is part of that generation of American genre craftsmen who were often treated as “just” action guys. Calling writing a high elevates the invisible labor behind those movies - the architecture of suspense, the mythic simplicity, the dialogue that feels inevitable because it’s been engineered.
Contextually, it’s also a quiet rebuttal to the auteur myth that worships the camera. Hill points upstream: the thrill begins before the set, in the solitary room where the movie first becomes possible.
The intent is practical and a little defiant: writing isn’t the grim penance people often assign to directors, the broccoli you eat to get to the “real” fun of production. For Hill, the page is where control lives. Directing is famously collaborative and endlessly interrupted by budget, weather, actors, and compromise. Writing offers a cleaner adrenaline: the immediate sensation of making decisions, sharpening conflict, hearing rhythm, cutting fat. That’s especially apt for a director whose signature is economy; the “high” comes from subtraction as much as invention.
There’s subtext, too, about identity. Hill is part of that generation of American genre craftsmen who were often treated as “just” action guys. Calling writing a high elevates the invisible labor behind those movies - the architecture of suspense, the mythic simplicity, the dialogue that feels inevitable because it’s been engineered.
Contextually, it’s also a quiet rebuttal to the auteur myth that worships the camera. Hill points upstream: the thrill begins before the set, in the solitary room where the movie first becomes possible.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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