Time & Perspective Quote by Walter Hill

Hill is doing something more interesting than ranking two gigs; he is sketching the director’s job as a constant negotiation between pleasure and punishment. The clean symmetry of the line - “never had a better experience” paired with “never had a harder time” - lets him hold two truths at once without romanticizing either. It reads like a veteran refusing the easy myth that great films are either blissful collaborations or heroic suffering. Sometimes the set that feels like summer camp produces the movie that’s hardest to shepherd into existence, and sometimes the grind yields the work you’re proudest of.

The subtext is authorship under constraint. The Long Riders was famously a kind of kinship experiment: real-life brothers playing outlaw brothers, a built-in camaraderie that likely made the day-to-day process feel unusually humane. Hill is signaling that environment matters - tone on set, trust among collaborators, the sense that everyone is pulling in the same direction. “Better experience” is about culture, not just outcome.

Southern Comfort, by contrast, carries the aura of a production that fought back: location problems, logistical chaos, the slow bleed of time and money. Hill’s phrasing suggests a director measuring difficulty not as a badge but as a cost. Coming from a filmmaker associated with lean, muscular genre storytelling, it’s also a reminder that “tough” isn’t always glamorous; it can be attritional, full of compromises no one sees on screen.

Contextually, the quote lands as industry candor: the same director can make a beloved, smoothly run movie and then get dragged through the mud on the next one - and both experiences shape the work.